This week’s solo episode lands on the first day of the summer holidays for most children across England and it feels like exactly the right moment to talk honestly about what this season actually looks like when you are a mother with a business to run.
No perfectly scheduled content calendars. No fully cleared to-do lists. No skirting boards that have been cleaned in preparation. Just the reality of sliding into six or seven weeks of summer with work still very much on the agenda, a van packed for France and a promise made to a five year old that this summer will count.
In this episode I share what I will and won’t be doing over the summer, why I have already broken the one boundary I set myself and what I am promising myself and my daughter for the month of August. If you are heading into the summer holidays feeling anything less than prepared, this one is for you.
Key Reflections:
- Why the build-up to the summer holidays can feel as pressured and frantic as Christmas, and how the stories we tell ourselves about having to be ready can make it worse
- An honest breakdown of what I will still be doing over the summer, from publishing episodes and nurturing my email list to checking in on Meta ads, doing my day job and re-recording the entire Print Over Pixels course for a September launch
- Why I have already broken my one summer boundary of no podcast recordings and what that reveals about the ongoing work of actually holding the limits we set for ourselves
- The Meta ads lesson learned last month about what happens when you stop paying attention to something you are spending money on and why checking in weekly is now non-negotiable
- Why I am pressing pause on the photography business for the whole of August and why choosing what not to do is just as important as deciding what to do
- The thing I will not be doing this summer, giving myself a hard time, and why that is the most important promise on the list
- The Instagram versus reality piece and why the golden hour summer holiday content you are scrolling through is not the full picture for most of us
- My slightly embarrassing but genuinely effective tool for shifting comparison energy involving a silent disco and Celine Dion
- The one promise I am making to my daughter for August and why four full days just the two of us feels like the win worth working towards
Listen If You’re:
- Heading into the summer holidays feeling underprepared and wondering if everyone else has got it more together than you
- A working mum who knows she will still be opening her laptop during the school holidays and feels guilty about it
- Trying to figure out what to keep going and what to let go of when your usual routine disappears for six weeks
- Someone who wishes they could press pause on the business entirely but for whatever reason just cannot do that right now
- Ready to give yourself a bit more grace this summer and stop measuring yourself against someone else’s highlight reel
Favourite Takeaway for Mums in Business:
If you’re working more than you’d like this summer, you’re not alone. If you wish you could press pause and be entirely present with your kids but can’t quite get there yet, you’re not alone. We are all at different stages of this game and that is okay.
About the Host:
I’m Victoria Phipps – a Mum of two, analogue family photographer, charity co-founder, photography business educator, marketer and now podcaster! My career has wandered all over the place and is becoming a bit of a complex tapestry as I head into this middle phase of life, but I can honestly say I’ve loved every minute of it so far.
I was raised by a nurturing Mother and an entrepreneurial Father and have inherited traits from both, so the tension between ambition and motherhood is one I grapple with on a daily basis! I’m fascinated to hear the stories of other women on a similar path, who are striving to build thriving businesses whilst being present for their children. It’s a tough juggle, but I hope the conversations shared on this podcast help Mums in business feel less alone and inspired to keep going in pursuit of their dreams!
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Episode Transcript:
NOTE: This is the transcript from the original recording, rather than the edited episode so timings may vary.
Victoria (00:02)
Hello and welcome to this solo episode of the Mum Means Business podcast. And today I want to talk about the summer holidays because when this episode goes out, will be Friday the 17th.
which is when most kids across England are gonna be breaking up for six or seven weeks. And it will be my first summer holiday since 2003. So I just think like Christmas or going on holiday, we have this sense that we have to have absolutely everything we ever wanted to do done beforehand. Do you ever feel like that?
Like we have to have all the skirting boards clean before the kids break up for summer. It’s just, it’s ridiculous. I don’t know if it’s just me, but these are the stories that I tell myself and it can feel quite frantic building up to these milestones that we set after which point we feel like we’re either not going to want to do anything or we shouldn’t do anything. And I remember June and early July last year, everyone seemed to be talking about getting ahead for the summer.
scheduling all their social media content, setting up the out of office replies, communicating their summer working hours with clients, and to be honest, it just put the fear of God into me for this version of me sitting here talking to you now about to go into this first summer holiday.
So do I feel prepared? No. I had really hoped to, but…
Life, life, we’ve had loads of things going on here. We’ve had heat wave after heat wave after heat wave. We’ve had curve balls, just all the usual stuff that happens in family life. So have I done anything sensible in readiness? Yes, I’ve done one thing and I haven’t done it very well. I have said no to podcast recordings during the summer holidays and these are interview recordings. And this is
is something that I wanted to do partly to give myself the break, but also because I have so many podcast recordings in the bank. However,
I have actually said yes to three podcast recordings. So I haven’t even held that boundary. And these podcast recordings are, one is me guesting on somebody else’s podcast. Another is somebody I’ve wanted to speak to for a while and it’s just the only time they could reasonably do. And the other one is just me not holding the boundary. So.
There are things that I will still be doing during the summer holidays. I am not in the position where I’m going to switch off on the 17th of July and log back on on the 1st of September. That’s not my reality. So what will I still be doing? I will still be publishing the interview episodes because I have lots to share and I will be recording and sharing solo episodes. They might be shorter and sweeter than usual, but I think that’s fine. This will just be
my reflections on what’s going on that week navigating the summer holidays and anything else that comes up in my business that I think might be of interest. I will be checking in with my POP ladies so POP stands for print over pixels and that’s a happy accident because I actually think POP is quite cute and I have week not weekly
and we have monthly check-ins, coaching calls if you like.
And we have monthly check-ins, coaching calls, if you like, where we touch base on each other’s businesses and see how we’re getting on in that transition from leading with digital files to leading with print in our photography businesses. I will also be re-recording all the modules of my Print Over Pixels course on video to launch it as a self-paced program with the community support in September, which is actually quite a big job.
And it’s just the only time that I’m going to be able to do it. I had hoped to be able to do it in June or July, but again, it just didn’t happen. I will be nurturing my email list weekly ahead of that launch. And I will be keeping an eye on my meta ads. I had a bit of a wobble with meta ads last month because I realized I hadn’t been paying any attention to it for a few weeks and my signups and opt-ins had dropped off.
and I’d sort of noticed it but I hadn’t gone in to do anything about it and it was an out of sight, out of mind situation which is so silly when you are spending money on it. So I went in and I realised that some of my conversions had gone up to like £4 something per conversion and that was ridiculous so I switched those off. I created a new video and some new assets and new still photographs and ads and now it’s flying again.
And so that was a bit of a lesson learned and I will be checking in on my meta ads at least once a week and just making sure that I’m not throwing money down the toilet. I will still be showing up on social media.
I will still be showing up on social media, although as I talked about in episode 55, I’m really gonna try and use this summer to tune into my energy more and to try and post.
when I moved to post and not hold myself to this relentless daily post come what may mentality and I will be doing my day job. I can’t not work and I am in that transition phase where I’m still building these
this portfolio cluster of businesses having recalibrated everything in motherhood. And so it is not financially sustaining me and I need to do my day job and I also want to. So my day job is leading marketing for the company that my dad established over 20 years ago.
And I kind of enjoy it and it’s really interesting. get to have conversations that are really high level about this kind of global picture because that business is heavy industry and it’s a very different world to the kind of female founder space that I’m doing the podcast in and the people that I’m serving through my photography business. So I love the diversity and I will still be doing that because I have a big July tax bill to pay and needs must.
I will probably still be working in the evenings to keep on top of all this stuff. So happily, my partner and I can both work from home and that has made things so much easier as we navigate this reception year with my daughter because we are able to share the school-run responsibility and we haven’t had to put her in any after-school clubs which I’ve been so grateful for because I feel like that time will come
but
she’s been really tired in this first year of school and it is a big shift. And I know from what I’ve heard that the leap to year one is going to be ramping things up again. And so it’s been really nice to just give her the opportunity to just come home and crash after school at half past three. And we will be able to navigate the summer holidays tag teaming a little bit, but for both of us, we still don’t have enough holiday to just take these six weeks off.
and so work has to continue and it will likely bleed into the evenings and I think that is normal that is reality for a lot of working parents so actually I’m doing quite a lot and on Friday we will be picking my daughter up from school in the van that my partner has renovated and we will be heading off to France for two weeks which I’m so excited about it’s gonna be our first big long adventure
in the van and there’s been quite a lot of stress trying to get everything ready this week but when this episode comes out I hope we will be cruising south and ready to start this big holiday and so July is kind of taken care of with this holiday and all of this stuff will shift into August and I feel actually compartmentalizing it has helped me to get my head around it I feel like we’re only going to be
in inverted commas juggling for four weeks and we get to have this big holiday and bank some really great memories before that. So it is a lot, but the thing that I have come to accept about myself is I like to work. It makes me feel like there’s a me in the midst of the mum.
And I think if you feel like that, again, that’s okay. It’s all right to want to work. And I think there can sometimes be guilt around even acknowledging that you feel that way sometimes. But I’m here to normalize all this stuff.
I want to work. This might change over time. Likely as my kids get older, I can feel those 18 summers slipping away and I will want to seize every second with them. And isn’t that just the cruelty of motherhood? But there are things that I won’t be doing.
So I won’t be doing any shoots of any kind. I am pressing pause on the photography business itself for the whole of August because I just don’t have the bandwidth and I think that’s all right. We have to pick and choose. So I’m not gonna give.
I just don’t have the bandwidth. Another thing I’m not gonna do is I’m not going to give myself a hard time at any point. This is my pledge to myself. I’m gonna try really hard to give myself grace when I fall short of my own expectations. And I think the social media stuff really, it just…
can make you feel like everybody else is having this calm, joyful, deep and meaningful memory making summer holiday of perfection at golden hour. And the reality for most of us is not like that. We will have moments like that. I hope you all have moments like that.
But the reality is that there are also moments of chaos. There are also moments when we need to hop on our laptop for a little bit and we are all on our own path. So I will not be comparing myself to anyone else. Actually, I probably will be comparing myself to other people, but when I do it, I hope to catch it.
and it’s the Instagram versus reality piece, the calm versus the chaos. And I actually, I’m gonna share with you a really embarrassing tool in my toolbox. That’s the thing to say, isn’t it? When I start to feel like I am getting caught up in external validation, external expectations, comparisonitis, I’m feeling less than.
or that I’m underperforming in some way and I start to judge myself by other people’s definition of success I’ve started putting my headphones on and having a little silent disco to Celine Dion and I can’t remember the favourite song what’s it called
I do. That’s the way it is. So I have a silent disco on my own and I don’t even tell my partner that I do this. I’ll just like fight in a quiet spot in the house and I will just like let rip and move the energy out of my body. And I just find that it’s a really like fun, empowering, uplifting song that makes you believe that you can do anything. And so if you want a little hack, maybe give that a whirl because it’s just…
terribly cringe-worthy but also really good fun. So, my promise that I am making to myself and to my girl is to take one day off a week in August and do something one-on-one with her. This is going to be summer five of those 18 summers. And I know that I’m not gonna nail it.
But I think if my partner and I are saying we’re gonna take her for one day each for the month of August.
are saying that we’re going to take her for one day a week each for the month of August, then I want those days to count. It would be so easy to just hang around the house, multitask, do a bit in the garden, do a bit of work and take her for an ice cream in the afternoon. And actually that will be fine and we do plenty of that and it’s lovely and I kind of like those days where you’re partying around the house. But I also want to…
disrupt that a little bit and to let her lead as well and ask her what she would like to do and then see if I can make it happen for her and it might be a tiny thing or it might be like a full-blown day out I don’t know and I’m kind of excited to see what she comes up with but that is my one promise so if I can have banked four full days just me and my girl in the month of August then I think they’ll consider that a big win
And what I want you to take away from this is if you’re working more than you’d like this summer holiday, then you’re not alone. If you’re working more than you would like for less than you’d like, you’re not alone.
If you know you have it in you to do big things, but you’re still figuring it all out and you feel like you’re behind because there’s actually no time to figure it out because you’re also a mother and it’s the summer holidays, then you’re not alone. If you wish you could press pause on it all and just take a few weeks off to be entirely present with your kids, but for whatever reason, you just don’t feel able to, then you’re not alone.
So whether you’re going into the summer holidays feeling prepped and ready to take your attention away from your business and towards your family, or you’re sliding into it feeling like you’re no way near being able to do that.
We are all at different stages of the game and that is okay. I know I’m gonna learn so much from this summer, from all the mistakes that I make. Hopefully I’ll feel like I’m fine tuning my approach with every passing year and I’ll be absolutely nailing the summer holidays by the time my youngest leaves school. But whatever it looks like for you, I am wishing you a wonderful opening week and I will speak to you soon.