What I Did to My Business Before I Went on Maternity Leave

I have already left my business. Not officially. My maternity leave does not start for a few more weeks. But the decisions, the day to day, the things that used to run through me: that handoff already happened. On purpose.

Here is why. I did not want to spend months building a beautiful maternity leave plan, hand it over, go have a baby, and then find out it was not working while I was holding a newborn. I wanted to know what would break while I was still here to fix it. So I quietly pulled myself out. And things broke. That was the whole point.

You do not plan for your absence. You rehearse it, and then you make sure the business can solve for it.

And listen, I know some of you are thinking, Jackie, I am not having a baby, so this is not for me. Stay with me anyway. Almost every studio owner eventually gets a date she cannot negotiate with. A surgery. A sick parent. A second location. Or just being tired of owning a business that needs you every waking hour. You have a version of that too, even if nobody has written it on a calendar yet.

Do you have a time problem or a dependency problem?

When your business needs too much of you, the story you tell yourself is that it is a time problem. If you were more efficient. If you woke up earlier. If you had a better system, you could get more done in the same hours. That never fixes the feeling, because it is not a time problem.

It is a dependency problem. Those two sound similar and have completely different solutions. If the problem is time, the project is getting more done. If the problem is dependency, the project is building a business that genuinely needs you less. One makes you faster inside the trap. The other one gets you out of it.

Most of you already know which one you have, because you have tested it by accident. The week you got sick and taught anyway. The vacation where you answered a sub text from a pool chair. The Sunday you could not find a sub, so you drove in and covered it yourself.

Why hire people who build the system, not just do the job?

Back in April I realized I had made some hires that were not the right fit. I want to be careful here, because these people were amazing. Responsible, efficient, good at the work itself. But nobody was building the system the work happens inside of.

Someone doing the job answers the emails this week and follows up with the lead this week. Someone building the thing writes the SOPs: how client services emails get answered, what our refund policy is, so the next hire can walk in and do the job without asking anyone what is happening.

One of those is labor. The other one is an asset.

So I had a team executing tasks with nothing written down. All the knowledge of how two businesses really work lived inside a couple of heads, and one of those heads was mine. It was not that my team wanted hand holding. There was nothing to point them to. That is a fine way to run a business if you plan on being available. I was planning on being in the hospital.

So the question changed from "how do I prep everything before September" to "how do I make myself less necessary by September." I stopped hiring people who execute and started hiring people who build the system while they execute. That person costs more and is harder to find. She is also the one who makes the business less dependent on any single person.

What does it mean to hand off decisions instead of tasks?

The second thing I did was stop handing off tasks and start teaching people how to make decisions.

You know this feeling. You record a Loom walking through the process, you document the SOP, and you are still getting asked, well what about this? What about that? You did not do anything wrong. You handed off the task and kept the judgment.

With clients we build a decision ladder: a one page document that says these are the decisions you make on your own, these are the ones you bring to me, and these are the ones only I make. Any purchase over $500 comes to you. Toilet paper for the studio does not. Here is how we handle refunds, here is what you can approve on your own.

When the decision tree is written down and handed over, the questions stop. One day you will notice someone made the exact call you would have made, and you were not part of it. That is what freedom feels like.

Can your students get results when you are not the one delivering?

A lot of founders quietly believe they are the product. That people need them specifically to get the result. Your voice matters, and there will still be moments where you do not have to be the one delivering.

So instead of building coverage, I built a bench of people who are better than I am at specific things. A meta ads expert. A Google Ads expert. A copywriting specialist. Retail specialists who have sold millions in retail. The standard I gave my team was not keep things running and keep people happy. The standard was keep clients growing.

So ask this about your studio: does the transformation your students get happen because of the business you built, or because you personally walked into the room? That is not a mindset question. It is an operational one, and it shows up fastest in teacher training. If your lead trainer left tomorrow, do you have someone just as good, studying and ready to step in? Build the pipeline.

What happens to your marketing when you stop?

Marketing was fourth on my list, and that order was intentional. Most of us assume the first move before three months away is batching content. Team trumps that. If you do not have the right people, and a way for them to make decisions, no marketing plan matters, because nobody can put it to use.

We live by a rule in the Studio CEO Program: what you do today shows up in 90 days. So if I go dead quiet for 90 days, I come back pushing a bigger boulder up a steeper hill. Instead we built a plan that keeps awareness marketing running to find new people and nurture marketing running to serve the people already in our world. If your marketing stops when you stop, you do not have a marketing system. You have a task you perform. Listen to our paid ads series:
 

1. Should Your Studio Run Ads Yet? The Cost of Waiting and the 5 Green Lights
2. Ads Find Her, Your Content Convinces Her: The System That Fills Studios
3. What Ads Really Cost: The Payroll-Savvy Way to Get New Students Every Month
4. 4 Beliefs That Are Keeping Your Ads From Growing

How do you fund a paid maternity leave?

Here is the piece nobody talks about. Your business has to be able to afford to double your team and pay you while you are gone. My goal for 2026 was a fully funded, fully paid three month leave. So we looked at the money for the year and worked backward to one number: my pay, my team's pay, the ad spend, and a reserve in case the business needed it.

That is a different goal than doubling revenue. You can triple your revenue and lower your profit. You can triple your revenue and still not afford to double payroll. Sometimes a bigger top line is not the goal. Sometimes the goal is a paid leave, a replaced owner, and money in the bank. Name the number, then work toward it month after month.

What does this require from you as the leader?

Taking yourself out of your business is not an overnight thing. This has been my entire year. As a Certified Coach and ERYT 500 with more than 12 years inside this industry, these are the exact moves I teach inside the Studio CEO Program and the Grow Mastermind. The only difference this time was that I was my own client, taking my own medicine on a deadline.

The strategy was not the hard part. Funnels, ads, documentation: doable. The hard part was leadership. Letting go of people I love developing. Moving faster than my instincts wanted. Deciding who I needed to be to fully remove myself from operations.

So work it backward. If you were gone for three months starting today, what kind of leader would you need to be? Then go build the business that makes that possible.

The Studio CEO Program is not going on maternity leave. Neither is the Grow Mastermind, or the ads agency. You could spend the next three months building a business that runs without you instead of wishing you had started sooner. Inside the Studio CEO Program, we cover this in detail. Learn more: https://www.jackiegmurphy.com/studioceo-new

And come follow along on Instagram @studioceoofficial.