When my husband and I first decided to try for a baby, I thought it would be useful to research what other small business owners in the wedding industry did when they wanted to take parental leave. I’d been a wedding planner for seven years and my small business had been my full-time source of income since 2018. I had questions.
Unfortunately, I didn’t find many answers. There were plenty of threads from people who were upset that their wedding vendor had gotten pregnant (a.k.a. more fodder for my nightmares) but there was very little practical advice from people who do what I do for a living. All told, I found one relevant article.
It was from October 2015 and the theme seemed to be: “Have your baby and then suck it up and go back to work.” The interviewed wedding planner said she’d be doing her first wedding 20 days after her baby’s due date and “have my phone for quick emails while nursing and a Mei Tai wrap while sitting at my computer.”
I understood where she was coming from. My business is me. When I stop, the business stops and when the business stops, my paycheck stops.
And also? The leave this planner described wasn’t the leave I imagined for myself and my family. I wanted dedicated time away from work to bond and heal. I didn’t want to deal with floor plans while figuring out breastfeeding or update rental orders when I was on three hours sleep.
Importantly, I didn’t want to do those things because I hate doing those things (I love working on floor plans and rental orders; it’s part of the reason I’m a wedding planner). Rather, I didn’t want to do those things right after the baby arrived because my job is to serve other people. How in the world was I supposed to serve others if I could barely serve myself?
So, if the “have your baby and then suck it up and go back to work” approach wasn’t right for me, what was? Was there any hope for a wedding small business owner and mom-to-be?
Here’s what I learned during the course of my pregnancy — because yes, I did get pregnant! — and what I recommend to other wedding vendors planning the same.
First, here’s what my parental leave as a self-employed wedding vendor looks like:
My “90 to 95 percent work is wrapped up but technically I’m still monitoring email” day is four weeks before my due date (i.e. I’ll be 36 weeks along).
My last day of work is two weeks before my due date (i.e. 38 weeks along).
My return date is 14 weeks after the first day my paid leave begins. This is because of how my paid leave works (more on that below) and because this date allows me to return to work in mid-April, a time of the year when, theoretically, there will still be people booking a coordinator for their summer, fall, and winter 2024 weddings — clients I seriously need to book if I’m going to make payroll for the back half of 2024.
Once I return in April, I plan to slowly ramp up how many hours I work. This is the major advantage to my being self-employed. Unlike folks who work more traditional 9-to-5s, I have a lot of control over when I work during the course of a day. Before baby, this meant I usually worked from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. with an hour for lunch. After baby, who knows?
Things I WOULD do again when planning parental leave as a small business owner in the wedding industry:
I would save as much as I could to weather booking shortfalls.
Financially, there are three main reasons that I’m able to take parental leave:
My state (Oregon) has a paid leave program called Paid Leave Oregon (PLO).
My husband receives 20 weeks paid leave through his work.
In October 2022, I received a grant to help cover losses incurred during the height of the COVID pandemic.
All of these things are inherently steeped in privilege and luck. I have chosen to share them because it’s a value to me to be honest about money, particularly in relation to my business.
Without PLO, my leave plan would look vastly different than it does. Most likely, I would have taken a much shorter period of time (four weeks? six?) so I could get back to booking new clients.
Many of you will live in states that don’t offer paid leave programs, particularly ones like PLO that are open to self-employed people like myself. That sucks. I also encourage you to spend a few minutes googling options or asking fellow small business owners if/how they took paid time off. While the answers may be dire, the sense of not being alone did wonders for my mental health.
Without my husband’s leave — which also allows us continued access to his health care — I would be facing a much different situation for post-pregnancy care. Again, this probably would have meant that I took fewer weeks off and/or that he and I didn’t take our leave simultaneously, as we’re currently planning to do.
Without the grant, I would likely have taken less time off and/or had to tap into my husband and I’s personal savings to cover payroll when I returned to work in the spring (vs. my current plan of using the grant to buy me time upon my return post-baby as I try to ramp business back up).
Even with these options, I have faced payroll shortages for fall and winter 2023. This is because I’ve seen a drop-off in leads (roughly, 50 percent year-over-year) and new bookings (roughly, 20 percent year-over-year).
I’ll never know how much those drop-offs happened because I’m pregnant but being pregnant hasn’t helped (see my reflections below on leads cooling as soon as I disclose my pregnancy).
I would be more careful about who I talked to about my leave.
One of the most frustrating parts of my pregnancy was talking to people who weren’t fully self-employed about their leaves. Granted, they weren’t trying to be annoying.
Often, the disconnect happened because we struggle to recognize our own privilege. Many of my friends who are employees had no frame of reference for the fact that at my job, there was no HR to email when I learned I was pregnant or a legal department to call if a client decided they didn’t like my life choice and wanted their money back.
Folks with “traditional” jobs also rarely understood that I don’t have a team in the typical sense of the word. Taking time off from any job is challenging but nearly always, my friends had coworkers who would fill in while they were gone. I don’t.
To help bridge that gap, I seriously considered hiring a team of planners before I got pregnant. I ultimately decided not to do this because I couldn’t afford to hire those people at a rate I considered equitable. Hiring a team is also, at least right now, not where I want my business to go long-term so for leave, I opted to do a hybrid coverage option that I discuss more below.
Folks with employers outside the wedding industry also had a nasty tendency to talk at me about the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). That’s an important program that also had, from what I could tell, nothing to do with me as a self-employed person. It’s also unpaid time so not useful when trying to figure out how in the world I was going to make payroll when not at work.
I would be better prepared for the folks who wanted to hire me until they found out I was pregnant.
Rationally, I knew that people would learn I was pregnant and decide to not hire me. Emotionally, I didn’t know how hard that would be.
How many people didn’t hire me because I told them I was having a baby? I don’t know. As you can imagine, most people didn’t tell me that was the reason — though, at last count, at least three coordinating clients and one consulting client did tell me that they weren’t booking me because of my pregnancy.
I’ve also lost track of how many calls I did where the person went from saying “We are totally hiring you!” to “You know, we’ll have to get back to you” and the only difference was that I’d told them I was taking parental leave. I don’t offer this experience as a censure on those folks; this is a complicated issue and sometimes, a client really wanted me despite my pregnancy and I declined because of my anticipated availability next year.
Anecdotally, I believe I would have booked at least four additional 2024 clients and exceeded my 2023 revenue goal if I hadn’t shared that I was pregnant. That’s a known revenue loss of at least $14,000 and likely closer to $20,000. After business expenses and taxes, that’s between $9,000 and $13,000 in pay I didn’t make because I’m taking parental leave.
If I hadn’t been able to drastically reduce operating expenses in 2023 by not hiring assistants and limiting how many out-of-town weddings I took, I wouldn’t have been able to meet payroll for most of the year. As it was, I came in about $500 short on my December paycheck. I also have some very big questions to answer re: 2024 revenue upon my return to work next spring.
I would be less concerned about getting the timing just right.
I’m a Virgo wedding planner, which means that I have a tendency to over-communicate. This serves me well at work but when it came to my pregnancy, I realized there was a thing as telling people too early.
Some of this was medical. I didn’t want to tell a bunch of people that I was pregnant and then have to also share a pregnancy loss if one happened but mainly, I just didn’t want to invite a bunch of strangers into my uterus.
This meant a couple different things in terms of timing. Specifically:
I waited until I was 16 weeks along to tell my booked clients. I opted to wait and do this until I was firmly in my second trimester and thus felt more confident that this pregnancy wasn’t going anywhere.
I do monthly check-ins with my clients so I used that as an opportunity to tell them about my pregnancy and how it would impact their wedding. In certain situations (like with the one March 2024 client I eventually transitioned to another planner), I offered a phone call, too.
Telling people at 16 weeks worked well for my particular clientele and the timings of their weddings. In hindsight, I probably could have waited even later as I ended up not really showing (particularly in my very loose-fitting work uniform) until the beginning of my third trimester.I never announced my pregnancy on social media (beyond sharing this article). This is a choice I’ve maintained throughout my career when it comes to my personal life and work, and it’s no comment on folks who pick otherwise.
This choice meant that, for a long time, I never publicly talked about my leave and when I did, I always opted to refer to it as “leave” vs. “parental leave.” I did this because I didn’t want people to see “parental leave” and jump to the conclusion that so many people seemed to (i.e. “She’s pregnant so she’s not available”).
I am available and I want (need!) people to hire me. I also have a very developed leave plan that I could explain if people gave me a chance. Social media rarely leaves room for all the context I like to offer so I decided not to use it in relation to my pregnancy in the way I’ve seen many of my coworkers and friends use it.
Things I WOULDN’T do again when planning parental leave as a small business owner in the wedding industry:
I wouldn’t disclose my pregnancy before I was officially pregnant.
I knew 2023 was the year I wanted to try to get pregnant. I also knew that my clients often booked me between six to 12 months before their wedding. How then should I reconcile booking a client when I knew I could be eight months pregnant for their wedding?
In the beginning, I opted to share my family planning with potential clients, i.e. people who were interested in hiring me but who hadn’t officially signed a contract or paid a deposit. I would do this at the end of our consultation call. Every time, it felt like stripping down naked in front of a stranger.
Eventually, I stopped telling potential clients that I was trying to have a baby because I realized that “trying to have a baby” was very different from “actually having a baby.” Depending on my and my husband’s fertility, I could potentially be telling people about my sex life for an unknown number of years. That felt unnecessarily invasive for me with minimal gain to the potential client.
I wouldn’t worry (quite so much) about telling my clients.
I was deeply afraid of sharing my pregnancy with my clients because I had a client threaten to sue me in 2020 when I refused to work their wedding because it violated local health and safety regulations. That situation almost forced me to permanently close.
So what a relief that my clients treated me like a fellow human being when it came to the pregnancy.
Granted, for all but one of my clients, my pregnancy didn’t negatively impact their wedding. This was largely because of lucky timing.
I found out I was pregnant two weeks before my first 2023 wedding on May 26 and I hit my third trimester the day after my last wedding on October 27. For all of the clients between those two dates, I either didn’t tell them I was pregnant or, when I started to show, I wasn’t so pregnant that I was having to greatly change how I did my job.
The one exception was a client I booked in March 2023 for their March 2024 wedding. I hadn’t told them that I was trying to get pregnant and I was concerned that they would feel sucker-punched by my news, which I shared with them in August when I was 16 weeks along.
Were they surprised? A little. I told them in a (very long) email. That email included an (extremely robust) transition plan to another planner once I went on leave in January and incurred no change in total cost to the client (I absorbed the $50 to $100 I anticipated it would cost to onboard the new planner, who will also receive the third and final payment from the client, a loss of $950 in booked revenue for my 2024).
That said, this client, like many of my clients, had hired me because they wanted to work with ME so the fact that I wasn’t physically going to be at their wedding was disappointing.
And yet, they did the most amazing thing: After acknowledging their feelings, the client centered me — the pregnant person — and not themselves. This meant the absolute world to me. The fact that they could recognize that I hadn’t gotten pregnant to hurt them made me feel less alone and afraid. It also inspired me to do even better work for them in the time we had left together.
I wouldn’t be as concerned about letting certain projects go.
One of the toughest choices I made as a pregnant wedding vendor was to hibernate or end my plans with work I do as the co-founder of a wedding vendor organization called Altared.
In this volunteer role, I run monthly in-person meet-ups for vendors in Portland, Oregon; edit a monthly newsletter for a list of 500+ vendors in the U.S. and Canada; organize and moderate an annual season of classes about diversity and equity in the wedding industry; and host a “big Altared” every December.
When I realized that I would be decidedly in my third trimester in December and have a newborn when I typically host the classes from January through April, I faced a series of choices:
Should I “push through” and host the December event?
Should I shorten my leave so I could still do the classes in January through April?
Should I raise money to hire an interim editor to manage the monthly newsletter while I was on leave?
Should I raise money to hire a host for the monthly meet-ups?
I took a few weeks of soul-searching, several conversations with my husband, and a lengthy therapy session but ultimately I decided the following:
I wouldn’t host a December 2023 event or the 2024 class season. Instead, I would prioritize my own rest even though I really wanted to do the cool work things, too.
I would focus on raising money to hire an interim editor because the newsletter had the best ability to help the most people.
I would host the meet-ups as long as I felt capable during my pregnancy (this ended up being until I was nearly 35 weeks along). I would then hibernate the meet-ups until my return from leave as I didn’t think I could raise enough money to also hire someone to manage this program.
These decisions remain bittersweet. That’s particularly true as Altared has never had more momentum. Will it still have the same momentum when I return from leave? I don’t know but the alternative was to sacrifice something I knew I wanted more: restorative time with my baby and husband.
I wouldn’t be as anxious about doing the physical aspects of my job.
Mileage will vary here because, again, the timing of my pregnancy aligned well with my 2023 wedding season and because every pregnancy is vastly different in terms of physical changes on a person’s body.
That said, I entered pregnancy with a misconception that as a pregnant person, I wouldn’t be able to do anything physical. I thought I’d be done lifting boxes, climbing stairs, or walking the average 10 to 12 miles I clock at a wedding.
Thankfully, for me, it wasn’t that way. (And medically, my doctor never had a problem with my job.)
Was I more tired? Yes.
Was I better about making sure I stayed hydrated and ate complete meals on a wedding day? Yes.
Was I more assertive about asking for help, particularly when it came to lifting items or climbing ladders? Yes.
But I felt stronger, healthier, and more with it throughout my pregnancy — and particularly my second trimester, when most of my 2023 weddings happened — than I ever anticipated. I blame my surprise here on a misconception I had in my head that pregnant women are frail and incapable. Hardly.
Things I’m still not sure about when it comes to my parental leave plan
Should I have found a way to monitor my intake pipeline?
With T-minus two weeks to go until my leave starts and T-minus really anytime in the next month before the baby arrives, I still don’t know if I made the right choice when it comes to how I’m handling new leads while I’m on leave.
“Leads” means people who fill out my intake form because they want to work with me in some capacity, usually consulting and/or coordinating. The normal workflow is that whenever someone fills out my intake form, I reply within 24 hours (and usually more like within an hour because I highly prioritize those emails).
Based on what the person shared in the intake form, I typically direct them toward a call, either a free 10- to 15-minute consultation or a 60-minute paid consulting call. Each type of service has its own series of next steps, which can take anywhere from another hour (if I’m writing up the notes from a consulting call) to another year (if they’re hiring me as their in-person wedding coordinator).
My current leave plan has me adding a required question to my intake form that says something along the lines of, “You acknowledge that Beth is on parental leave and will not be in touch until she’s back in mid-April.”
There’s a very good chance that by adding that question, people will bounce before they ever fill out the form or that by the time I get to them in April, they will have moved on.
All would be what I consider “dead leads,” or leads that aren’t going to bring me profit in any capacity, be it financial profit (they hire me), social profit (I can refer them to one of my coworkers), or amplification profit (they subscribe to my newsletter).
“Dead leads” are very scary to me because leads are the lifeblood of my business, which makes 80 percent of its revenue from wedding consulting or coordinating. I also couldn’t come up with a way to monitor new leads while on leave that wouldn’t take me out of the headspace I want to be in when I’m on leave.
Other small business owners most often advised that I hire a virtual assistant (VA) who would monitor my leads and, potentially, onboard new clients. I passed on this idea for two reasons:
I didn’t want to spend the money on a VA (if I had the money at all and I wasn’t confident I did without drawing on the money I had saved for leave).
A lot of how I book is based on if I actually like the people who are interviewing me.
I couldn’t figure out how to train a VA to make that call on my behalf without tapping me in, and if there’s one thing I know about my first 14 weeks of parental leave, I don’t want to be tapped in for anything work-related.
This means that I’m effectively shutting down my lead pipeline for more than three months — a terrifying proposition that could royally bite me in the ass next year.
I’m choosing to take this risk because of the grant. I was able to save enough of that to guarantee payroll for three months when I return from leave in mid-April. That money is buying me time to turn the “open” sign back on and hope that people show up. If they don’t? I’m going to be in a tough way in terms of payroll by the end of July because I booked fewer 2024 clients before leave than I planned on.
Did I time the start of my paid leave right?
I continue to debate if I’m starting my parental leave at the right time. This is because, as soon as I begin receiving checks from Paid Leave Oregon, the clock starts on my total allotment of 14 weeks (if I choose to take it all at the same time, which I am choosing to do). I’m also not allowed to work during the time I’m on PLO because that’s what the program is for.
This means that there’s a good chance that I will have two to four weeks of time when I’m still pregnant but not working (it’s two weeks if the baby is right on time, four weeks if not).
My efficiency brain continues to throw itself against this problem because I’m worried I’m not “optimizing” the time appropriately. Am I burning days that I could have taken as paid when there’s actually a baby around (vs. when it’s just me being really, really pregnant)? Could I have booked new clients/taken more calls/made the money I need to hit payroll in 2024 if I’d kept working for one or two more weeks?
I don’t know but my bigger fear is to have a bunch of outstanding work when I go into labor and then have to deal with that mess postpartum with the added stressor of a new baby. Hence, I picked the choice that might mean I go on a weird little pre-baby “vacation.”
The resources I found the most useful as I planned my parental leave
I used a number of different resources when developing my leave plan as a wedding small business owner. My favorites:
The Expecting Entrepreneur by Arianna Taboada. This is the only book I could find that specifically addressed people who run very small businesses and want to take parental leave.
The author also offers resources for free and is the co-host of virtual cohorts about returning to work as someone who runs their own business (I haven’t signed up for one but am considering it post-baby).Paid Leave Oregon Bulletin. This is a monthly newsletter sent by PLO about what’s new with the program. Here are the archives. Subscribe here. I also nearly always spoke to a real person within 20 minutes when I called the helpline IF I called in the morning (I found afternoon hold times to be 30 or more minutes). I had less immediate success with email responses (typically, response time was two or three weeks).
Talking to people who do what you do. A few questions I found the most fruitful:
What’s one thing you would do again when creating your leave plan?
What’s one thing you wouldn’t do again?
If you don’t mind me asking, how did you pay for your leave plan?
Talking to any partner(s). If you are having a baby with a specific person and/or have a person who will be joining you through your pregnancy, I highly recommend you talk to them about your leave plan as a small business owner.
The process of creating such a plan is isolating so while you run the risk of the other person or people not totally getting it, they also likely know you better than most people and can advise on what will and won’t work for you. I can’t tell you how invaluable my husband has been as we work through every combination of my leave plan. I literally could not have done it without him.
Why I wrote such a freakin’ long article
Did I do this whole leave thing right? I don’t know.
Instead, I offer this (extremely long) article to you as one way one person did it so that you can figure out what serves you best as you make your own plan. What I wrote isn’t a comment on who’s the smartest when it comes to cobbling together leave plans in a society that doesn’t prioritize families no matter how much it says it does.
May what I did be useful to you! And hey, if you read this after April 2024, please feel free to contact me directly with your questions. Those details here.