The Expecting Entrepreneur®: An Interview with Book Author Arianna Taboada, MSW, MSPH
Today I’m thrilled to welcome Arianna Taboada, MSW, MSPH to the blog. She is the founder of The Expecting Entrepreneur®, a consulting firm that helps entrepreneurs design parental leave plans that meet their business model and personal needs.
This fall, Arianna will be releasing a new book called The Expecting Entrepreneur®. The book translates the scientific evidence around parental leave and postpartum health into tangible best practices and processes that service-based business owners can use to design a parental leave plan that meets their needs.
I hope you enjoy our interview!
(1) I have interviewed many public health consultants on the blog, but I’ve never connected with someone who specializes in parental leave services. It’s a unique and fascinating niche! Can you please share the story behind becoming a maternal health consultant and launching parental leave planning services for entrepreneurs?
As you can imagine, it’s not necessarily a niche that I realized existed until I found myself doing the work! To provide a bit of background, I’m a public health social worker by training, and spent my early career doing a mix of direct clinical services, as well as intervention design and evaluation, primarily in safety net settings. I worked on a variety of issues across populations (intimate partner violence, HIV prevention, culturally specific intervention design for Spanish speaking immigrants in the US and indigenous communities in Mexico) that gave me strong roots in community-based and equitable care, particularly in women’s health and maternity care.
In 2013 I started working for myself, with a mix of 1:1 private practice clients and as an “evaluator for hire” for research institutions and NGOs. What I started noticing about my 1:1 work, which was focused on postpartum services, was that virtually everyone I worked with was self-employed and was talking about how in addition to accessing quality postpartum care, a major pain point was actually around the stress of not having a great parental leave experience. As an experiment of sorts, in 2015, I decided to begin to offer a service working with folks during pregnancy to both plan for parental leave and provide continuous support implementing their plan, which, given my background, also included postpartum support.
Since then, I’ve continued to tweak and improve the service, and it's both exciting and challenging to partner with business owners to think about how to design a parental leave plan that meets both the realities of their business model, as well as their unique personal needs.
(2) I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing an advanced copy of the book. One thing that jumped out right away was the inclusive language and terminology used in the book (e.g., saying “parental leave” vs. “maternity leave”). Can you explain why these intentional language choices are so important?
I love this question, and I’ll start by saying it’s something I grapple with all the time! As you read in the book, as someone with a deep commitment to liberation and the dismantling of oppressive systems, I am taking the stance that the language we use, matters. Words and phrases can cause or uphold harm, and we can use language to resist. For example, my degree literally says “maternal health” on it, and I spent a lot of years really identifying as working squarely with women, in women’s health, maternal health, maternal mental health, and maternity leave. But the reality is that I am serving parents with various gender identities and expressions, and using more expansive language is a way to let people know that I see them for who they are, and their needs and identities are centered when we work together. Using language like “parental leave,” “perinatal health,” “birthing people” will include people who identify as women or mothers, and it will also include people who do not.
(3) In the book you emphasize that parental leave “isn’t simply a nice-to-have”. Instead, parental leave should be viewed through the lens of social justice and economic equity. For readers who want to take action: what can we do as individuals and at the policy level to move towards equity on this issue?
The digital tools we have on hand make it amazingly easy to engage in change!
My go-to advocacy group in the space is Paid Leave for the United States (PL+US), which has a variety of campaigns you can participate in through letter writing, emailing, or social media. Right now, for example, they have a simple way you can email your representative in Congress to encourage them to advocate for a federal paid leave policy.
For small business owners (including consultants and freelancers) Main Street Alliance is another great advocacy resource.
(4) One of the themes that you weave through the chapters is a focus on identifying community and support people during your pregnancy and postpartum periods. I found this so important because many entrepreneurs are lonely working alone. And many new parents (especially during COVID) feel lonely and isolated as well. How can expecting entrepreneurs start to build support and community if they don’t currently have that support in place?
I’m happy to hear this part of the book resonated with you, it’s my favorite chapter! Mapping out support networks is one of my favorite ways to work with people as they transition to parenthood, because of the positive effects it has on mental and emotional health, in the short and long term.
As a starting point, I often have clients use an eco-map, which is a visual tool that helps us assess our connections with family, community and social networks, paying special attention to the quality of these relationships.
I have a free workbook that people can use to create their own eco-map and have some guidance as they:
explore their current support network
identify what connections could play a particular role in the transition to parenthood
discover what additional support they may need to seek out to have the kind of postpartum experience they desire
(5) I’m sure I’m not the first person to tell you: “I wish this book existed when I was planning my parental leave!” The planning timelines, reflection questions, and checklists give readers an incredible blueprint for planning a more profitable and less stressful leave. Can you please share your top 3 tips for babyproofing your business while you are newly pregnant or planning on having children in the near future?
Sure!
1- Build your parental leave plan with a spirit of curiosity and experimentation
Many business owners have “Type A Planner” tendencies that will be challenged by the inherent uncertainties of pregnancy, postpartum, and parenting. It’s impossible to know ahead of time what your birth will be like, what your baby will be like, or how becoming a parent will feel. Adopting an experimentation mindset gives you the freedom of making plans with the information you have available right now, knowing that as you learn more, these plans may need to adapt to your new reality.
2- Integrate transition time into your plan
While you become a parent from seemingly one minute to the next, allowing yourself the space to adapt to that new identity and role, including all the logistics that come with it, is crucial. You do not have to go from being 100% in business owner mode, to 100% parental leave, back to 100% business owner. Your leave can (and should) start before the day your baby is born, considering that full-term babies come anywhere between 37 and 42 weeks. I recommend wrapping up your full-time work at 35 weeks and making sure your team or other systems can begin to handle certain things from there. I have seen business owners scale down to 20, 10, or even just 5 hours a week in the final few weeks before giving birth, gradually transitioning into leave. On the flip side, transitioning from being in full-time parenting mode back to your role in your business can be jarring. I recommend a 2-6 week buffer as you get back into work mode to help you figure out the right mix of childcare, work hours, and types of tasks that make up the new rhythm of postpartum work and life. Your energy and capacity will expand and contract, be kind to yourself.
3- Get your operations manual in order
Updating your operations manual, or Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) has both short- and long-term benefits. For example, they can increase the capacity of business owners to temporarily hand off or outsource tasks and can help streamline your core business functions, increasing efficiency over time. For your leave, the goal is to have up-to-date SOPs that capture all of the elements of your business operations. You might already have bits and pieces of this master document, and dedicating time to create a comprehensive resource that includes all of your current systems has been one of the most effective ways I’ve seen business owners prepare for leave.
(6) Please share all the book details:
The book will be published October 21, 2021, and available everywhere books are sold. You can sign up here to be notified when it’s released and receive an invite to the launch events!
The book is for service-based business owners who are either expecting or thinking about growing their family soon, and want a step-by-step guide to designing a parental leave plan that will work for their business model and personal needs.
(7) How can readers connect with you? Please share links to relevant websites and social media accounts.
The book website, www.theexpectingentrepreneur.com is the best place to go for the book and related resources. I’d also love to connect with folks on Instagram or LinkedIn.