[00:01:05] – Frankie
Hello, you’re listening to the Doing It For The Kids podcast, where we swear a bit too much and talk a bit too fast about freelance life with kids in the mix. I’m Frankie and this is Steve.

[00:01:14] – Steve
Hello. Yes. So, each week we take a question from the Doing It For The Kids community, do our best to answer it, and then we take your comments and feed them into the next episode. So, basically your answers — which are usually far more helpful than ours.

So, with that in mind, let’s go back to last week’s question, which was-,

[00:01:32] – Frankie
From Stephanie, who had no childcare currently and was trying to be a full-time mum and do her job, and was asking, is she trying to have it all?

[00:01:39] – Steve
Such great comments came in.

Jude Jagger said,

“Get a day a week childcare. Seven months is a hard age as they need so much attention. You will be so productive during that one day, I promise you, that it will pay for itself. And grandparents, they can be busy. Better to just pay for it. Then they are less likely to cancel. A flexible childminder might be most useful for your situation, but that one day to actually work will make you feel loads better.”

[00:02:05] – Frankie
Agreed. Well said, Jude.

Next one is from Rebecca Lisma. She’s amazing, by the way. This is just part of a much longer comment, but this is the really good stuff.

Rebecca says,

“I run a handmade business, so I physically have to make every single damn thing I sell. I’m a glutton for punishment and I’ve kept my business running alongside two kids by splitting my work into super-easy chunks and tasks.

I split my days into ‘awake tasks’ and ‘asleep tasks’. Awake tasks are things I can get done when there is a small human under my supervision. Asleep tasks are the more complicated bits.

I stand and work at shelves in our kitchen or our diner for awake tasks so I can ditch them at a second’s notice, and I find planning my day with a small timer-led to do list — so, five minutes on this, ten minutes on that — works for the daytime to ensure I don’t get bogged down; and then I tackle the big stuff when they finally crash. I use night feeds to order materials, edit photos, update my Etsy shop.

Thank a deity for smartphones.

Just remember, you are human. You can let some of the less important shit slide and you are doing a good job at being a mother. Don’t let any sleep progression, wander week, teething issues let you think otherwise. The fact your daughter will grow up seeing you working around her is no bad thing. You got this!”

[00:03:08] – Steve
You got this.

Wow, what an answer. Check out Rebecca’s stuff, by the way.

[00:03:13] – Frankie
She’s got these amazing rainbow baubles that she’s crocheted for Christmas. Go buy one.

[00:03:17] – Steve
One thing I think I might take from that — I mean, I love the ‘awake tasks’, ‘sleep tasks’. Obviously that works better for her business than it might for some, but what would work for all of us is that small timer-led to do-list thing. So, rather than, like — I just have a to-do list of things I need to do, but the thought of separating that out into, short, medium or long tasks or whatever, that’s-, yeah, I like that.

[00:03:42] – Steve
Catherine’s been in touch.

Catherine says,

“I think it really depends if you’re the kind of person who can work in small, separate chunks or not. I really can’t. I’m an editor, so I really have to focus on the words in front of me and I can’t do that with a child around. If you can, great. But if not, also great. Just don’t feel like you’re a bad parent if you do need childcare. You can’t possibly do everything and eventually something will suffer.

[00:04:08] – Frankie
Amen.

[00:07:07] – Frankie
This week’s question comes from Emma Victoria Stokes, who is a social media manager and copywriter.

Emma says,

“As a freelancer, how do you take maternity leave with retainer clients still on board? And how long do the majority of freelancers have for maternity leave? I’m thinking about only maybe taking three or four months off. I’m not sure how I’ll cope financially, but also organisationally with retainer clients in the mix.”

[00:07:29] – Steve
Oh, good question, Emma.

Well, you meet a lot of freelance mums. How long do the majority of freelancers tend to take?

[00:07:39] – Frankie
It varies so much, honestly. Some of them don’t take any at all. Literally, none. I mean, you have to take two weeks legally.

[00:07:47] – Steve
Do you?

[00:07:47] – Frankie
Yeah, yeah.

[00:07:48] – Steve
Genuinely didn’t know that.

[00:07:49] – Frankie
You have to take two weeks off work, yeah.

[00:07:53] – Steve
I knew, like, physically it makes sense, but I didn’t know legally you had to.

[00:07:58] – Frankie
I mean, I don’t know how that works in practical terms, because they’re not going to come round and check whether you’re working or not, are they? But-,

[00:08:04] – Steve
“Step away from the laptop!”

[00:08:06] – Frankie
The government deems that you should take two weeks off work when you’ve just given birth to a child, which is fair enough. Yeah, so some people literally do that and get back into it.

I mean, I haven’t done a survey on this, so I couldn’t tell you. I’d say, what she’s talking about, three or four months, sounds about right. I took six both times, and that was on the longer end in comparison to most people I spoke to.

[00:08:27] – Steve
I guess — is it just to do what feels right for you?

[00:08:31] – Frankie
Yeah, definitely. A lot of people ask me whether they should bother signing up for Maternity Allowance, for example. But I always say, sign up anyway. Get yourself in the system and get that money coming into your account and you can always cancel it. You can literally ring them up at any time and say you don’t need it anymore, but it’s better to have it that way around than to have your baby and suddenly go, “Oh! I really can’t work because this child doesn’t sleep”, or whatever the situation is particular to that child. Better to have it as an option than to opt out before you have your baby.

[00:09:00] – Steve
This particular question is looking at retainer clients. So not just how long should I take for maternity leave, but how on earth is my business going to keep going? Maybe we should start with the fact that you are allowed to do a certain amount of work, aren’t you?

[00:09:13] – Frankie
Assuming you have opted to claim Maternity Allowance, you’re entitled to ten Keeping In Touch days while you still receive that money. The issue with that is, technically, even sending one email is classed as a day’s work. So, my first piece of advice to anyone that wants to use KIT days is to group as many tasks together as possible. I know that’s not necessarily realistic all the time, but if you’re going to work, do some proper work. Don’t just send a couple of emails. Do like, at least a few hours, if not a whole day’s worth of stuff, if you can group it together.

Yes, you can get those ten days that she could use to either directly work with those retainer clients herself and maintain that relationship, or she could use those keeping in touch days to manage people she’s outsourced those clients to.

On the KIT days thing, though, there is a couple of bits of gold knowledge that I didn’t actually have when I had my babies which, while researching this episode, I read on the Maternity Action website last night. Well, I kind of knew about the first one…

The first one is that it’s all relative to how many days you were working before you had your baby. So say you worked full-time before you had your baby, five days a week, and then you have your baby, and then you want to work one day a week after they’re born. You can ring up DWP and say, “I want to go back one day a week”. And they’ll then take one seventh of your maternity allowance money off because it’s one day out of the seven days in the week. So they’ll just decrease your payments slightly relative to how many days you’re actually doing. But that all depends on what you were doing before.

[00:10:39] – Steve
Which, again, is confusing in terms of self-employment.

[00:10:42] – Frankie
Yeah, massively. But there is an option to maybe do one day a week during your maternity leave as opposed to just having all or nothing. You could just reduce your payment slightly. That’s one option.

The other option is you can actually pause your Maternity Allowance and come back to it. So, not pause, that’s the wrong word. So, Maternity Action say:

“Once you activate your Maternity Allowance, it continues to run in the background for 39 weeks. So you can claim up to 39 weeks. So, that means you could not be working for a period and then do a gig for two weeks full-time, for example, not have your Maternity Allowance during that period, but then come back to it.”

So that’s like a massive game-changer, which I didn’t know about. Again, it’s actually much more… not much more… it’s still a poor system. It needs to change, but it’s a bit more flexible than it might initially seem. And a lot of that stuff they don’t tell you on the Gov website. Go to this article that I read. I will link to it in the show notes.

[00:11:39] – Frankie
Hello, this is Frankie from the future. I’m here to tell you that this second point about potentially being able to opt in and out of maternity allowance during your 39 weeks is a grey area after all. Quelle surprise! So, please don’t go planning your maternity leave off the back of that information alone. Instead, go and listen to Episode 19 for more information. Okay, thanks, bye.

[00:12:06] – Steve
So, it just feels, as with most stuff, one of the best things you can do is arm yourself with the knowledge-,

[00:12:12] – Frankie
Definitely,

[00:12:12] – Steve
— about what you’re allowed to do.

Don’t think, “Oh, this all just looks like a big old mess of poo”. Yeah, it might well be a big old mess of poo, but as a new mum, you’re going to have a lot of that to deal with anyway, so you might as well get stuck in and figure it out because the knowledge will give you power.

[00:12:29] – Frankie
Yeah, I think lot of people go to the government website and their brain just shuts down. They’re just like, I can’t even begin to understand this and therefore they don’t apply for it or use it. But actually there is support out there. Obviously, there’s a Doing It For The Kids community where a lot of people have gone through that process already, but Maternity Action are brilliant. They’ve got loads of amazing articles, they give out free advice to do with your maternity rights, et cetera, and actually ring the DWP as well. They’re increasingly useful.

[00:12:56] – Steve
So, at the heart of the retainer thing is the fact that you’ve agreed to do a certain amount of work each week or each month for a certain client, but you have maternity leave so you want to take time off, but you don’t want to lose that client. You don’t want to say, “Oh, I’m out of here. Bye.” The most obvious thing you could do is hire someone else to do that work for you.

[00:13:15] – Frankie
Are you talking about sub-contracting, so the client doesn’t necessarily know you’ve given it to someone else?

[00:13:22] – Steve
Well, I would say that depending on what the work is, it’s probably worth them knowing that it is someone else doing it. So you’ll say, “Hey, I’m going on maternity leave, but don’t worry about it, I’ve got blah blah helping me. She has blah experience. She’s going to be taking care of this for you while I’m off.”

So get yourself one or two trusted, decent, other freelancers to work with. I’d probably have more than one up your sleeve, depending on how many retainer clients there are, so that if something happens to one of them, the other one can step in and take over. Then, you might also want to consider hiring somebody to project manage them, depending on how much that needs.

So, basically, think about what you would have to do if you had sub-contracted freelancers. You would have to liaise with a client, liaise with them, you’d have to deal with the invoicing, make sure everything is happening the way it should be happening. So you’ve got to decide whether or not you can do that while being on maternity leave, back to the whole KIT day type stuff, or you hire somebody else.

[00:14:29] – Steve
Either way, I would think that one of the best ways you can think about it is in terms of pricing, is to think — right, I’m going to have somebody else do the social media work and then I’m going to hire a project manager to cover all of that, whether or not you do it. And then on top of that, there’s a little bit of money which is going to go into your business to keep your business healthy.

So, any rate that you charge should cover the actual work, covers somebody managing the work, and then has a little percentage on top of that for your business, so that even if you weren’t doing any of those jobs, your business was still making money.

[00:15:03] – Frankie
One of my tips I wrote down was — put your rates up!

[00:15:06] – Steve
And so you will probably find that in order to make that work, once you’ve assessed what other people are charging rates-wise, what they’ll charge to you, that you probably need to put your rates up. But obviously that needs to be done sensitively. But, what helps is — you’re going to hopefully think about this in advance of when it happens

[00:15:25] – Frankie
Give them a heads up, you’re not going to be like, “I’m going on maternity leave, these people are doing my job and it’s going to cost you this much money. Bye bye!”

Also worth saying on that point that, again, I don’t work for the government, I’m not a lawyer… but my understanding of the Maternity Allowance, KIT days, et cetera, stuff, is that it’s not actually earning money that’s the problem. It’s doing the work that they don’t want you to do. So, you can earn money passively, for example, while you’re still claiming Maternity Allowance.

Like, you could have a product that you’re selling, people just buying it, whatever. You could outsource stuff to other people and take the income from that, but it’s doing the work that’s the problem. So, something like that, having a team of people and you take a cut of whatever they’re doing is, as far as I understand, totally cool.

[00:16:09] – Steve
So, let’s say you’re going to do that, Emma. You’re going to hire some other social media people and you’re going to hire somebody to manage the process, whether or not you do. So, the first thing is to start planning it ASAP. So start thinking about who those people are and how it’s going to work and how much they’re going to cost. Figure out your pricing and start those sort of conversations.

Also, set expectations with your client. Like we said, so they know what’s happening. It’s a nice thing. You’re going off to have a baby, but you care about them, so you’re making sure that they’re taken care of. You might even want to say, “Hey, while I’m off, is there anything that we should know? Like, have you got anything big coming up that we can work on? Maybe we can get some stuff done in advance?” So it shows how much you care about their business, so that even though they might end up working while you’re off with a different freelancer, actually talking to a different freelancer, they still know that it’s Emma who really cares, and gives a damn about their business.

Don’t leave it until that baby’s about to pop out, because for start, babies can show up early.

[00:17:16] – Frankie
You make it sound so easy. ‘Just pop out!’

[00:17:20] – Steve
You might want to put this into practice, maybe a month ahead of your due date.

[00:17:27] – Frankie
Oh, you mean like a trial month kind of thing?

[00:17:29] – Steve
Yeah, a trial week, a trial fortnight. I would definitely think it’s worth doing some sort of a test run, if possible. That’s good for your freelancers, it’s good for your client, it’s good for you because you will still be able to see that it’s all working. And then that means that when it does come to actually having maternity leave, you’re going to be a lot less stressed and worrying about whether or not this thing is going to work. And you’re not going to waste KIT days on fixing things because you’ll have already done it when you were still working.

[00:17:59] – Steve
Well, good luck, Emma. Let us know how it goes. Or, get one of your minions that you’ve just hired to let us know how it goes.

If you’ve got a suggestion, maybe this has happened to you. Maybe you’ve taken maternity leave or paternity leave and you have retainer clients and you’ve got genuine “Yes! This is what happened. This is what went wrong. This is what was good!” advice to give. In which case #diftkpodcast on Instagram and Twitter. Or of course, leave a comment on the thread in the community. If you’re not in that community, what? Come and join us.