The Expecting Entrepreneur: A Guide to Parental Leave Planning for Self Employed Business Owners

Your life is baby-ready—but did you babyproof your business?

When you’re the boss, planning for much-needed parental leave, making money, and the survival of your business can feel overwhelming. You deserve to recover from childbirth and transition into this new chapter without the stress of work.

How do you design a parental leave that works for you, your family, and your business—without sacrificing entrepreneurship success?

In The Expecting Entrepreneur, parental leave consultant Arianna Taboada provides a step-by-step blueprint for expecting business owners to plan parental leave while ensuring that their small business runs smoothly and successfully in their absence. Full of easy-to-implement strategies and diverse case studies of women entrepreneurs during pregnancy and motherhood, this is your guide to confidently prioritizing your health and your baby with a leave that fits your business model.

You’ll discover:

• A foundation of five principles for planning your ideal leave.
• Scientific evidence on the importance of parental leave for you, your baby, and your business.
• How to update operations and client communications to keep day-to-day tasks moving forward.
• Financial options to fund your time off when paid family leave isn’t possible.
• Strategies to ease the transition of returning to your business postpartum.

In the absence of a company policy, you have the power to design your parental leave, your way! Get The Expecting Entrepreneur to prepare yourself and your business for your promotion to parenthood.

Arianna Taboada, MSW, MSPH, is the founder of The Expecting Entrepreneur(TM), a consulting firm that helps entrepreneurs design parental leave plans that meet their business model and personal needs. Her highly personalized services for entrepreneurs incorporate both her expertise as a maternal health professional and her own experience as a business owner and mother. Prior to her consulting practice, Arianna worked on maternal health issues for over a decade as a health educator, a social work trainee, a reproductive health researcher, and a yoga therapist.Arianna speaks and writes about parental leave and respectful maternity care as an issue of social justice, human rights, and economic equity. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as the International Journal of Health Equity, Advances in Social Work, and Ethnicity & Health. She is a coauthor of Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School, published by The University of Illinois Press in 2020.Arianna completed two traineeships with the Maternal and Child Health Bureau of the US federal government's Health Services and Resources Administration-one at the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families, and Communities and another at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she earned her Master of Social Work and a Master of Science in Maternal and Child Health. She is also an in-house senior researcher at Hopelab, a social innovation lab focused on developing health and emotional well-being interventions for adolescents and young adults, including those who are pregnant or parenting.Arianna is bilingual, binational, and bicultural, and has spent much of her life working across the US and Mexico. She currently lives, works, and plays with her family in Berkeley, CA. Learn more at www.theexpectingentrepreneur.com.