The Expecting Entrepreneur by Arianna Taboada — Lionesses of Africa

Book Review

In her book, The Expecting Entrepreneur, parental leave consultant Arianna Taboada asks women entrepreneurs a key question – your life is baby-ready, but did you babyproof your business? She knows that 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. The Expecting Entrepreneur shows you how to design a parental leave that works for you, your family, and your business, without having to sacrifice your entrepreneurial 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! The Expecting Entrepreneur to prepare yourself and your business for your promotion to parenthood.

Author Quotes

Whether you call yourself an entrepreneur, freelancer, contractor, solopreneur, or biz owner, we are all facing a major problem: planning your maternity leave (and a smooth transition back to work) can be messy and confusing when YOU are the boss.

We both know what it takes to be the boss in moving your business forward. Making strides towards your goals requires shifts, pivots, expert consultation, and delegation galore. And while a newborn is not *exactly* like launching a new service of product, you can apply many of the lessons learned from business to preparing for motherhood.

Consider this your official welcome to the world where business and babies collide.

Your transition into motherhood deserves the type of strategy and customized support you would build into any business transition.

About the author

Arianna Taboada, MSW, MSPH, is the founder of The Expecting Entrepreneur™, 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.

www.theexpectingentrepreneur.com.