The thinking behind me taking six months off was around how long my business partner and I thought the business could handle not having me around. Jo was running the whole thing in my absence, so we needed to take that into consideration, and she did such a great job it made me feel better about taking that extra month before coming back.
Did you access any paid parental leave entitlements?
I got the full 14-week payment for those three months I was completely off.
What preparations did you do in the business before you went on leave?
We started putting things in place about three or four months beforehand. At that time I was looking after clients myself and 'doing the doing', so we had to pass my clients on to others who could do that work. We advised our clients I was taking leave through our e-newsletter, and I told key clients in person and introduced them to my business partner or a senior team member who could manage those relationships while I wasn't around.
My business partner and I also worked on reviewing the company structure. Because we could see we were going to grow quite quickly — there were five of us when I left and now there's 15 — we needed to put in place a second tier of management to help take that strain off Jo. We promoted some of our team to be senior virtual assistants, who would each manage a pod of team members and report to Jo.
Another thing we did beforehand was spend time with our business mentor and our business coach to work out what needed to be done. We had to review our processes and put more stringent ones in place. I ended up with a list of about 14 different processes I needed to document before I left to cover every possibility, and how staff should handle things without either Jo or I there.
What advantages did you experience as a business owner while taking parental leave?
An advantage I had as a business owner, and just by virtue of being a virtual company, was being able to access everything at home in the cloud. That made it a lot easier to work from home and to keep in touch with what was going on.
It's been good for me to have time out of the business too, because now it means I can come back and just focus on the business instead of doing the doing. As a business owner I think it can be quite hard to make that transition; it's hard to get the opportunity to step away from doing the doing to actually grow a business.
How about some of the challenges?
One of the challenges was associated with growing the team so quickly. Although I was involved in the interviewing process during the 10 hours I worked a week, I wasn't working with our new staff so I didn't actually get to know them. I had to make an effort to pop into the office quite frequently just to spend time with them, and now I've come back I've been taking the team out for coffee and trying to find out more about them. Things are always changing, especially in our industry, so I've had to also keep up with things like the new apps that are out there.
There were things I also needed to do at home to enable me to return to work. For example, I had to get a sleep consultant in about a month before I came back because my baby was not a sleeper, and that saved my life.
What advice do you have for other business owners looking to take a period of parental leave?
I'd encourage them to look at the structure of their business. Who in their business can take on other responsibilities and fill the gaps they're going to leave? I'd also encourage people to outsource, because there are lot of different functions other professionals can take on for you when you're not there — from virtual assistants, to bookkeepers, to marketing consultants.
