There was a good month or so where I told my husband he was going to have to start his business back up. Because I didn’t want one anymore. I’d just had my twin boys in January of 2024. And the woman who’d spent seven-plus years building a coaching business, who took pride in being […]
Rebuilding a Business After Motherhood: What Twins Taught Me About Identity, Schedule, and What Actually Matters
There was a good month or so where I told my husband he was going to have to start his business back up. Because I didn’t want one anymore.
I’d just had my twin boys in January of 2024. And the woman who’d spent seven-plus years building a coaching business, who took pride in being known for that business, who had “successful entrepreneur” as her number one identity, she just wasn’t there anymore.
I was so in love with them. I literally get emotional thinking about that time because it was so special. And the business I’d built (the one that had generated $4M+ in sales since 2017) suddenly felt like something that belonged to a stranger.
A few weeks later I figured it out. I didn’t want to throw the business out.
I was in the thick of postpartum and I didn’t want that business. The one I had before my boys.
I needed to rip the whole thing apart and rebuild it as someone who’s a mom first now, and a coach second. And what I’ve learned in the two and a half years since has changed everything about how I run this thing, how I show up for my clients, and how I think about money, time, and what’s actually worth being away from my kids for.
This is the version of the story I don’t tell often enough. But you’re here because you need it, so here it is.
The Moment My Old Business Died
Before my twin boys, I would have told you that being a successful business owner was the most important thing in the world to me.
I’d built my business from a beachbody distributor in 2011 to a health coaching pivot in 2017 to the business coaching work I do now. My husband and I separated for six months during COVID and got back together with a totally different model for our life.
I thought I’d already done the big identity work.
Then the boys came home and the whole structure I’d built collapsed. Not the offers. Not the revenue. The identity. The version of me that designed all of it.
And that’s the part nobody warns you about. You can prepare for maternity leave (I did, I was very prepared—I’m a planner). You can prep your team and pre-record your content and set up your auto-responders.
But you cannot prepare for the fact that your brain chemistry actually changes. There’s a real term for it called matrescence. You are fundamentally not the same person.
And so the business that previous-me built? She’s not here to run it anymore. The new version of you has to decide what stays and what gets ripped out.
The hardest part wasn’t the postpartum fog. It was being humble enough to admit that the business I’d spent years building wasn’t the one I wanted to come back to.
The One Question I Now Run Every Decision Through
When I rebuilt, I gave myself a guiding question. And almost two and a half years in, it’s still the filter I run everything through.
→ If I’m going to be away from my boys, I either better love what I’m doing or be making great, great, great money. (Ideally both.)
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
It sounds simple, but it’s brutal in practice. It killed offers I used to be known for. It killed content topics that performed well but bored me. It killed client containers that paid well but drained me.
It also gave me permission to lean way harder into the things I’m actually passionate about and to charge for them at the level they’re worth.
Because here’s what I’d say to anyone reading this who’s running a coaching business and trying to figure out if it’s still the right one for you in this season: you can have a business that makes money. You can have a business you love. You absolutely cannot have a business you tolerate while you’re missing your kids’ afternoons.
That math will break you.
Why You Can’t Actually Prepare for Motherhood the Way You Think You Can
I have a very good friend who’s pregnant right now. She was asking me all the prep questions and I had to be honest with her. I said, “you’re going to feel a little lost. You’re going to feel like, wait, is this plan right?”
She thanked me, told me it was so helpful. Then weeks later she came back and said, “oh my gosh you were so right, but you were being kind about it.” I knew. I said the same thing she said when other moms told me. Everyone says the same thing.
But the truer version of “preparing for maternity leave” that nobody tells you…
Plan ahead for what you think you’ll want. And then be radically open to the plan changing the second your baby is home. Because what I planned for and what I actually wanted ended up being two entirely different businesses.
The clients who came to me for postpartum strategy in those first few months would ask, “How did you prepare?” And I’d tell them, I prepared so much. I had it locked in. And once they were here, I looked at every single piece of that plan and went, oh, I don’t want that anymore.
So plan, yes. For the version of you you currently know. And leave room to grieve and redesign the parts of it that the new version of you doesn’t want to keep.
Quick note before I keep going:
If this is hitting and you’re nodding while reading, it’s probably time to take a real honest look at the story you’re telling about your business right now. The “before” version and the “now” version. Most coaches I work with try to keep selling the old version because that’s what their content is built around. And it falls flat because they’re not that person anymore.
Want to actually use your real story to build your business?
It walks you through how to take the messy, real, in-progress version of your story and turn it into the exact thing that makes your dream clients say “this is me, this is who I need.” This is the same framework I rebuilt my own messaging around after the twins.
The Schedule That Built My Business Back
Once I figured out what I wanted the business to be, I had to figure out how to actually run it on a fraction of the hours I used to work. Right now I work about 25 hours a week, sometimes 30. Here’s exactly what that looks like.
How my week is set up
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are client-facing days. Those are my call days. Those are the days I’m in Slack and Voxer with clients. Those are the days I do material reviews. My clients know to expect me on those days. There are no other expectations on me during those windows. I am serving them and that’s it.
Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday are my business days. Content, podcast, emails, launch planning, marketing, sales conversations, systems, admin, team meetings. Friday through Monday is when I build the thing that pays everything else.
The reason this matters so much: the more clients you take on, the easier it is to let client work eat your entire business. Because client work is fun. It’s the easy part! The actual marketing, sales, content, and CEO work is where the leverage is, and it’s the first thing to fall off when you don’t protect it. So I am ruthless about Friday-Monday being mine.
How my day is set up
I get up between 4:30 and 5 on Monday through Thursday. And I know, some people are going to read that and want to fight me. But I’m in bed by 9pm, lights out, eyes closed, dead asleep. I get great sleep. Sleep is the only reason I can get up that early.
That first window from 5am to 7:45am (when my boys wake up) is the most productive part of my entire day. Hands down. I do about 30 minutes of personal stuff first. Reading, tapping, journaling, something for me. Then I do a one to one and a half hour work block. If it’s a workout day, I work first, then work out, then shower. The shower is the transition into mom mode. We’ll come back to that in a sec.
I have a babysitter Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday mornings for four hours. So those days I get the boys up with her, then go work from about 8:30 to 1pm. That’s another solid block. Then I’m with them from 3:30 until bedtime.
Monday and Friday my husband and I tag team, so I’m with them in the morning and work in the afternoon, or the reverse. Saturday I usually get a four hour block during their nap and his hand-off time. Saturday is the single most productive day of my week. No clients are anywhere near me. Just me and my own business.
The Ritual That Saves Me From Working Frantically
Here’s the piece that took me almost two years to learn, and it’s the one I want every business owner reading this to actually try.
For a long time I would close my laptop, run downstairs, and feel completely frantic for the next 30 minutes. Like I was still tying up loose ends in my head while trying to be present with my kids. I’d be scattered, half-checked-out, half-resentful.
Then Ash McDonald (giving her full credit) said something on a podcast that landed. She said: “you’re not going to get anything meaningful done in the last 15 minutes of a work block anyway. So stop trying. Use those 15 minutes as a transition ritual instead.”
Now I do this almost every day!
- The shower is one ritual.
- A short walk is another option.
- Sometimes it’s deep breathing or shaking out.
…anything physical that tells my body: we’re switching modes now.
Because you can talk yourself into being present all day long. You can intellectually decide you’re done working. But if you don’t give your nervous system a physical signal, it’s still in work mode when you walk into the kitchen.
→ And then your kids feel it.
→ And then you feel guilty.
→ And the whole rest of the day is off.
15 minutes. Or 10. Or 5. Whatever you can commit to. Any version of this is better than ripping yourself out of work and shoving yourself into mom mode with no transition. Save yourself the 30 minutes of franticness on the other side.
The Help You Actually Need (And Why It’s Not Lavish)
One more thing I want to be honest about, because I see people look at my schedule online and assume there’s some kind of magic happening behind the scenes.
I have help. About 12 to 16 hours of babysitting help each week. My husband is an entrepreneur too, so we tag in and tag out for each other. We sometimes have grocery delivery. We sometimes have cleaners.
None of this is lavish. None of it is private chefs or live-in nannies or weekly massages. It’s the absolute baseline of “I cannot do this job and be the mom I want to be without backup.”
And I want every coach reading this to hear me. If you’re trying to be with your kids all the time AND run your business at the level you want to run it, I’m going to tell you what I tell my clients: You can’t.
Not unless you’re selling a fully digital product on cold ads and have zero client containers. (That model is way harder than it sounds, by the way.) But for the rest of us, you need help. Not because you can’t handle it. Because the math doesn’t math without it.
The fact that you need a babysitter to grow your business does not make you less of a mom. It makes you a working parent.
Ready to Rebuild Your Business So It Actually Fits This Season?
If you’re sitting in the version of business that worked for past-you and trying to figure out what now-you actually wants, the first thing to rebuild is your story.
❌ Not your offers. Not your funnel. Not your schedule.
✅ Your story.
Because the story you’re telling about who you are, what you do, and who you do it for is the thing every other piece of your business gets built on top of. If that’s still the old version, nothing else you change will land.
It’s the exact framework I rebuilt my own messaging around after the twins, and it’s what I walk my clients through inside The Distinctive Edge. It will help you take the real, current, in-progress version of your story and turn it into the thing that makes your dream clients say “oh, this is me.”
You don’t need to start over. You need to tell the truer version of where you actually are. The rest gets way easier from there.
Want to hear the full conversation? This blog was pulled from my interview on the Busy Vibrant Mom Podcast with Michelle Byrd.
