the bossbabe podcast - 487: I’m Back: The Real Reason I Took 7 Months Off

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

Seven months off the podcast. Three of them completely offline. $2.2M in revenue while she wasn't there. Natalie is back and this is the most honest breakdown she's given of what the gap actually taught her. In this episode, she breaks down exactly what happened, why this maternity leave performed when her last one didn't, and the foundational sales engine, team culture, and AI systems that ran the business in her absence. You'll learn what she's pruning from the business going forward, the new direction she's taking the show, and the one question every founder should sit with this week. If you've ever worried that your business runs on you, that if you stepped away, it would all stop, this episode is the operating system you need to start unwinding from being the bottleneck. TIMESTAMPS 00:00 - The package that made me ugly cry 02:30 - $2.2M offline in three months — no calls, no coaching, no emails 04:20 - Romy's birth + the no-childcare decision 06:10 - The real reason I didn't bring back the podcast in 3 months 08:00 - Where the $2.2M actually came from (sales engine, team, AI) 12:15 - What I'm pruning from the business going forward 14:00 - Going all in on The Boardroom mastermind + a new direction for the show 16:45 - The 30-day question every founder should sit with this week 18:30 - Pre-order The Freedom-Based Business Book — what's inside the bonuses RESOURCES + LINKS Pre-Order The Freedom-Based Business Method: https://www.bossbabe.com/buythebook-podcast Apply For The Boardroom Mastermind Sign Up For Our Free Weekly Newsletter & Get Insights From Natalie Every Single Week On All Things Strategy, Motherhood, Business Growth + More. Drop Us A Review On The Podcast + Send Us A Screenshot & We’ll Send You Natalie’s 7-Figure Operating System Completely FREE (value $1,997).

Welcome back to the Boss Babe podcast. It's been a while. My goodness, actually right before I just sat down to record this episode with you, I just received the most special package. So interesting, because I was sitting down to record and my assistant texted me saying, I know you're recording a podcast, but you really need to come out here. There's a package here for you, which she never does. She would never just interrupt me in a podcast and say, like, come and grab a package. And I genuinely had no idea what it could be. And I just ran through and she was like, I'm going to film you. I think you need to open this. And I thought, what could this possibly be? I genuinely had no idea. And I opened it. And it was multiple, multiple, multiple copies of my brand new book. And I burst into tears, like full ugly cried. And it arrived on one of these days where I have just been questioning, my goodness, can I do it all? There's a lot on my plate with these babies and businesses and all the things. And it was one of those days where I just felt like, oh, my goodness, my plate is really full. And it's, I'm starting to question, is this all possible?

And seeing that book come through was just such a big reminder that I'm in the arena. I'm doing the thing. And yes, it might feel hard some days, but I'm freaking doing the thing. I'm launching a book. I'm bringing a book out. The book is coming into the world. June 9th, I can't even believe it. Also, maybe I should say book, for those of you that don't understand my accent, because someone was telling me the day I recorded a podcast episode about

Instagram hooks, and they were like, what's a hook? It's a hook, an Instagram hook at the beginning of your video. So maybe I should say book. I'm launching a book. It's crazy. Anyway, let's dive in. Welcome back to the podcast. I know it's been a while. So let's just start off with, My goodness, I didn't expect to take seven months. So before I left, I had said to you all, you know, it doesn't feel right for me to be releasing episodes during my mat leave, pretending that I'm recording when I'm not. It also felt like a lot of work to batch record a ton of episodes. I just wanted space. I didn't know what this next maternity leave was going to look like.

You can never predict what birth is going to look like. And so I just kind of wanted to go with it. So here's how it went. my business made $2.2 million while I was completely offline in the three months I took for maternity leave. No podcast. You know, I was not doing any calls. I was not coaching my team. I was just offline. I had my baby. I went quiet. And the business really performed. And I remember on my last episode, I was saying, I'm not going to sit here and tell you all how I've prepped for my maternity leave because I don't know if it's going to work. You know, last time it didn't. It wasn't great. And so this time, you know, in different episodes, I will share what really worked and what that looked like. But yeah, the business really worked and really seeing how well it performed has rearranged a lot about how I think this business is supposed to run. And it's the reason that I'm coming back to this podcast very different to how I left it.

So before we get into the welcome back of it all, I want to tell you what actually happened during these last seven months, what I learned, what I'm cutting, what's coming. And one thing that I really want you to take from this episode and actually use this week. So if you're new here, hi, I'm so glad you found your way into this little corner of the internet. This is where we have very honest conversations about building businesses that actually create freedom, not the kind that look good on Instagram and quietly run you into the ground. And if you've been here a while, first, thank you from the bottom of my heart for waiting for me and coming back. I know seven months is a really long time, especially in the content world.

I told you I was taking a three-month maternity leave. That was the plan. I had every intention of coming back on time, polished, on schedule, the way that my Capricorn self always has. And then I didn't. And I want to talk about why. So here's the real version, not the polished one. When Romy was born, I made the decision that I actually didn't want childcare during the day. And that was my personal choice. I did have with Noemi. I really didn't have the option. My business, wasn't the kind of business that I have now. And when I had Romy, I really had the opportunity to decide. And my choice was, I want to be home with her and I don't want to get childcare. And that's still the decision that I'm running with right now. She is seven months old. She is called Romy Grace. And if you remember before, I went off on Matt leave, you know, I was quite nervous. I was saying I had a C-section with Noemi. I didn't have a choice. And I was really hoping that I would go into Labor naturally ahead of my. c-section date with Romi, the doctor scheduled me in for one and told me that would be the safest

route to go, but I was kind of hoping that I'd get the option to do it differently. That didn't happen. I still had a C-section, but it actually was a really beautiful, redemptive birth. I'll do a fuller episode on that another time, but it was a really healing experience for me. And I had just a really beautiful birth experience with Romy. And so, yeah, when she arrived, I just didn't feel like I wanted to get childcare and I really wanted to stay with her. So I had three months completely offline and then I came back to work January of this year. Still without childcare. And then, you know, over the last few months, we've just had some ups and downs in terms of childcare. My nanny took a month off. She had her own personal issues she was dealing with and she took a month off. We made the decision

not to bring in a temporary nanny because Naomi just takes a while to get warmed up to anyone. she absolutely adores her nanny we all do and so we wanted to give her that space to take and we just decided okay let's ask family to help us over this month and let's tag team and figure it out ourselves but having the two girls so noemi's almost four romey seven months like i said all day is a lot with no child care it's a lot of work anyone who's done that knows there is no focused work happening at all that just isn't. When you get that minute to yourself, the last thing you want to do is sit and record a podcast. It's like, I need to just take a quick shower and reset or, you know, Romi hasn't been sleeping. And so it really has been there have been no pockets of time. So yeah, I've just been over the

last few months asking myself weekly, am I bringing the podcast back? And the answer's always been, no, you know, I don't want to be coordinating guests. I don't want to be inviting people into the studio. I don't want to be editing, promoting all of that. I very much just want to prioritize this time doing needle-moving things in the business. We executed a freaking phenomenal retreat called the boardroom. And I'm breastfeeding full-time, like exclusively, I mean. She is not taking a bottle. So I just didn't want to be doing more stuff.

That would be very committal on my time on being able to hit certain windows of time throughout the day. It's just very challenging right now. So yeah, the answer was so clear. I just wasn't going to bring back the podcast until I could really be all in with it. And so I just wanted to be really honest about that. Like I'm not going to tell you I had this beautifully orchestrated maternity leave with the batched content and the pre-scheduled drops and this perfect re-entry plan. I didn't. I had a real one. The kind where you say you'll be back in three months and then you realize it's seven months and I'm now recording this during her nap time, right? I'm still figuring out what it looks like to. have two little ones and adjusting to that and really trying to give myself grace to not race back. So anyway, let me dive into what making that money during my mat leave taught me. And let me say this number again because I really wanted to land $2.2 million while I was offline. Like not on calls, not doing the thing that for years I was told the business depended on me doing. Now, I want to be careful here because I'm not telling you to flex and I'm not

telling you any of this happened without effort because it didn't, right? I'm telling you this because for most of my career, I believed a story. And the story was the business needs me to be driving revenue, my voice, my face, my energy, my output. If I stop, it stops. And truth be told, during my last maternity leave, that story turned out to be pretty true. And when I came back, I burned the entire business to the ground and started all over again. And it turns out the second time round, it actually can perform without me, which is really great. And it's because of all the foundational work that I've done long, long, long before maternity leave. You know, it wasn't just a couple months before I went off maternity leave. It's the foundational work that I put into the

business. It's the entire thesis that I wrote the book on. And I was kind of hoping that it would work. But again, until you're fully, fully offline, how do you know? So the mechanism, what actually drove the revenue. I'm going to get into because it's very specific. I want to be specific on these podcasts because I don't think vague is helpful. The revenue came from a few things really working together. We had a team running different launches and promotions that I built and rebuilt over the years. We had funnels that didn't need me to write every email. We had offers that were being sold by someone other than me, right? That part's really important. It's a sales engine. It came from the sales engine that had been compounding while I was busy being the content part of my business.

I had been continually pouring into and compounding the sales engine. And so it all happened probably at least the year before my mat leave, the hires, the decisions about what we were selling into who, the moments that I let go of things I'd been holding on to because I thought only I could do them, the team that I trusted enough to actually trust the culture that I built where people actually show up and do their jobs and really care for the business as if it's their own, right? None of that is necessarily glamorous. It's not content, but that is the work. That is the foundation that went into making all of that possible. I really genuinely do have a team that care for this business as if it's their own. They care

for our clients as if they're friends. We have a culture in the business that's so supportive and kind and you know most of the women on the team are moms so they get it they take their roadmap leaves and the ones who aren't they just really freaking care about doing a good job and none of that can be understated because I could have went off and my team could have thought great this is a ticket to being able to slack off they didn't slack off they were holding each other accountable they were showing up to every meeting they were showing up for every single client not a single one of them phoned it in. And I just think that's really, really important to say

because yes, I've built the sales system. Yes, I've got the sales engine. Yes, we've got all the AI systems working for us. And my business is built with a few really awesome humans that have made this possible. And so the sales engine is what they've executed on. That's the playbook in which they've executed, but they actually really care.

And so that's really cool to see. and I will say, listen, some things ran better without me, not the same, better. Because when I'm in it, I tinker a lot, I rewrite the email, I add the thing, I say yes to the guest spot, I jump on the call I didn't need to be on, right? Stepping out of the way, let things move at the speed they were actually built to move. So coming back to this podcast, I felt like I had to ask a different question than I've ever asked before, not how do I get back to where I was? but what actually do I want to invest my time into now?

And the answer to that took me to pruning a lot of my entire business, right? And as I was sitting with what I was bringing back, including this podcast, I thought about what I might not be bringing back in the business. Anything I was doing on a cadence just because the cadence existed is probably not going to be something I'm keeping. So I'll say that again, because it's really, the through line of every decision I've made for the last seven months. I was doing things on a cadence because the cadence existed, not because the output was potent, not because it moved anything,

just because at some point I decided that's how often we did the thing and we kept doing the thing. So I email my list when I have something worth saying. I podcast when I have a point of view. I post when I want to. And what I noticed, this is the part that's hard, I think, to hear is the launchers still went really, really well. And it really should. showed me that volume isn't the same as impact. And I think a lot of us in this industry have confused the two. And so coming back, first and foremost, I decided I want to go all in on the boardroom, which is our mastermind. Because here's what came obvious to me during this whole experience. The thing I've built, the thing I really know how to teach is how to free a founder

from being the bottleneck of their own business. That's not a tagline. That's the seven months I've just lived. That's the 2.2 million that came in the three months I was offline. That's the choice to be home with my baby and have the business not just survive but grow. And that's the thing I think we need to understand, right? I see so many amazing women that have a business that pays well but runs on them. They are the product. They are the engine. They are the email writer, the closer, the strategist, the operator. And they cannot step away because if they do, it all stops. I know how to fix that. And so that's what I really want to do with my time, with my energy. With this podcast, I really want to help build those systems and put those systems in place.

And I've really been able to use AI for a lot of that. Listen, I have been speaking into whisper flow into Claude and it's been executing for me when I've got a baby on my hip. That's amazing. I have thrown myself into every AI tutorial you can imagine when I was on Mat Leave. And coming back, we implemented AI across every area of our business. and so we're teaching a lot of that inside our mastermind. And so I've been really excited to go all in there. And then with the podcast, I thought about, you know, what's my point of view here?

How do I want to do it differently? And so what I have decided, and it's not going to happen just yet, quite frankly, because I haven't pulled the assets together because, listen, time's limited over here. But it is coming. And I just wanted to kind of share that to say, listen, my book ducks aren't always in a row. I'm going to rebrand the podcast, which I'm. Am I insane for rebranding the BossBaid podcast? Maybe. Maybe it's a mistake. Maybe taking seven months was a mistake and no one's going to listen to this. Who knows? But guess what? I'm willing to try.

Like I said, there's a rebrand coming. You're going to see it soon. I'm not going to spoil the visuals here, but I will tell you what is underneath them. This show is about getting more tactical, more practical, less inspiration, more. Here is the actual mechanic. Here is what you do with it on Monday. I am bringing on guests who can really teach specific things, not just tell their story. I want them to teach the thing they're doing right now that actually works. And I'm going to do my own solo episodes when I have a point of view worth taking up your time with, not when the calendar tells me to. Yes, you'll see an episode released every single week. But if I have something to say, I'll do a solo versus just putting a guest in that place, I want to make sure that

every week this podcast is really bringing you what is cutting edge in the space, what is really working so that you can be executing what you're listening to. And so if you're here for the produced version of online business, the beautifully edited, perfectly cadence, lots of, you know, lots of motion, lots of fluff, this might not be the show, right? I really want to get in the nitty gritty. I want to get tactical. So if you're someone building something real who's tired of being the entire reason

and your business runs, who wants the kind of business that compounds, whether or not you're sitting in front of your laptop, you're in the right place. I'm not going to wrap this up with a tidy ball, but I do want to give you something really usable today because that's what this show is going to be on here on out. So here's the question that I really want you to sit with this week. If you stepped away from your business for 30 days, not seven months, just 30 days, what would actually break?

Not what feels like it would break, not the panic version, but the real version, sit down with a piece of paper and write it out. What revenue would stop? What relationships would stall? What decisions would go unmade? That list is your map. Everything on it is something the business depends on you for. Everything not on it is something you've already built that runs without you

and you might not have given yourself enough credit for. And then look at the list and ask, which of these is on here because it genuinely requires me, my taste, my judgment, my voice. and which of these is on here because I've never let anyone else do it. The first list is your real job. The second list is the work. I'll tell you the version of this question that I think is even more honest and it's the one that I had to ask myself.

It's not just whether the machine exists. It's whether you're willing to get off it. Because some of you listening don't have the systems yet. That's a build problem. That's solvable. We can teach that. But some of you do have the systems. You have the team.

You have the funnel. You have the offer. But you're still in there every day hands on because maybe. being in there is your identity. That's not necessarily a build problem. That's a problem that's harder to solve. Both are worth exploring and both are why I'm doing the work that I'm doing. So that's the welcome back. I am truly so excited to be back. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly. They're going to be a mix of guest episodes and solo episodes. You can rely on me to bring you really practical and tactical business support every single week to help you build a freedom-based

business. And speaking of freedom-based business, one, we got the trademark when I was out on maternity leave, which is incredible. And secondly, the freedom-based business book is available for pre-order. And if you wanted to pre-order it, one, I would freaking love that support. And two, I have put together the most incredible bonuses for you, including the most amazing AI course that will blow your mind. So if you want to grab that, head to bossbabe.com forward slash by the book. Or should I say buy the book? Okay. So if you have made it all the way to the end, firstly, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming back and being willing to listen to the podcast again. I took a long break and I know that. Please leave me a comment and let me

know what you want to say, you know, what maybe has been missing from your podcast rotation lately? what kind of episodes do you want me to do? I really want to hear from you. It means the will to me when you take that time to comment. So let me know. I would really, really love that. Thank you so much for being here. I'll see you next week.