How to Work From Home With Kids Home All Summer (Without Dropping the Ball on Your Clients)

If you're staring at your calendar in June thinking, "Oh my gosh, what am I about to do with the kids home all stinking summer," this episode was created exactly for you.

You do not have to white-knuckle your way through the next eight weeks. You don't have to ghost your clients. You don't have to skip the beach. And you definitely don't have to work from a hotel bathroom at 11pm while your kids are asleep.

There is a way to actually do this. I've coached hundreds of women through it, and I pretty much live on a summer schedule 365 days out of the year. So let's get into it, friend.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

• The mindset shift you HAVE to make about summer (this is non-negotiable, and it's the reason most service providers melt down in June)
• The 4 client conversations you need to have this week (with the exact energy to bring to them)
• Why "I need to hire someone to cover for me" is the wrong instinct, and what to do instead
• The Summer Work Bucket List framework: full work weeks, modified weeks, and vacation weeks (and how to map every week of your summer into one of the three)
• The "power days and pockets" rhythm my Strategist Society members use to run profitable businesses while traveling
• A real student example: how one of our members handled a Disney cruise with four retainer clients and ads running
• What to do RIGHT NOW if you didn't pre-plan and your summer is already on fire

Mentioned in This Episode:

• Strategist Society: thestrategistsociety.com
• Conversions For Clients: conversionsforclients.com
• DM me on Instagram: @brandimowles (send the word SUMMER)

Ready to Scale Past $10K Months?

If you're sitting at $3K to $10K months as a service provider and you're tired of trading hours for dollars (especially when summer or any time off destroys your income), Strategist Society is exactly where you need to be. We help you repackage your offers, get in front of champagne clients, raise your prices, and build a business that runs without you babysitting it every time you want a week off. No agency required. Apply at thestrategistsociety.com.

Loved This Episode?

Share it with one friend who's already drowning in summer chaos, and tag me @brandimowles so I can see it. I read every single message and DM.

Now go do the dang thing.

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Transcript

How to Work From Home With Kids Home All Summer (Without Dropping the Ball on Your Clients)

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Brandi: [00:00:00] If you're listening to this episode and you're staring at your calendar and it's June, and you're like, "Oh my gosh, what am I about to do with the kids being home all stinkin' summer? I still have to keep my clients happy, and we're supposed to go on a family vacation." This episode was created exactly for you.

Because I'm gonna tell you right now, you do not have to white-knuckle your way through the next eight weeks of summer. You don't have to ghost your clients. Your business doesn't have to suffer. You don't have to skip your beach trips or pool days, and you definitely don't have to work from a hotel bathroom at 11:00 PM while your kids are asleep.

There is a way to do this, and I've coached hundreds of women through it. And not only that, but I pretty much live on a summer schedule 365 days out of the year. So I got you, my friend. I want this to be the most wonderful summer that you've ever experienced and most peaceful summer. So let's jump on in to this week's episode.

Welcome. [00:01:00] Welcome back to the Serve Scale Serve podcast. My name is Brandi Mowles and if this is your first time hanging out with me, hello my friend. I am so stinking glad you are here. This podcast is for women service providers and freelancers who want to build a real sustainable business

While living a life they could have never dreamed of. No hustle culture, no cozy business fantasies, just the real truth somewhere beautifully in the middle. And today we're getting into something that comes up every single year in my community's conversions for clients and with my mentorship students inside of Strategist Society.

And it's always that stressful dynamic of how am I gonna survive summer with my kids and still run my business?

And today we're gonna get into specifically, how in the world do you survive summer when your kids are at home, when you have family vacations coming up, when camps cost approximately $17 million, And you still have [00:02:00] clients paying you good money expecting you to deliver?

So in today's episode, I'm gonna cover, one, the mindset shift that you have to make about summer, because the way most service providers approach the season is actually what's causing the most stress, the anxiety, and the meltdowns. Second, the specific systems and conversations you need to have with your clients right now if you already haven't.

And third, the rhythm that works for my students and what I do during heavy travel seasons, including the framework I want you to use to map out your summer. And fourth, what to do when you've already hit summer and everything is on fire. You feel like you're failing at both motherhood and your business.

I've been there, so I know, and I've coached so many women who feel like that in the summer when they're also running a business. I love when we talk about summer because I want you, by the end of this episode, to feel confident that you can have the best summer with your kids and [00:03:00] still have a successful business.

It does not have to be an either/or situation. It can be a both. So let's jump on in to this week's episode. Before we get into the tactical stuff, though, we have to start here, because if you skip this, none of the strategies I'm gonna share with you today are gonna work. Most service providers approach the summer like it's an interruption.

I hear it all the time in conversions for clients and strategy society. They treat it like it's an interruption. "Ugh, summer's here. This means I have to figure out how to keep working around my kids. I don't know if I can do this. What about vacations? It's gonna be so chaotic. I should just stop marketing my businesses, my services.

I'm not gonna be able to take on any new clients. I just wanna be super present with my kids, and I can't do that and have a business." I hear this every single June. The framing is the problem, not the new season in your business. Summer is not an interruption to your business. Summer is a part of your year.

It's twenty-five percent of the calendar, y'all. [00:04:00] Three full months, and you've known about it since the day you sent little Jimmy off to kindergarten or the day that you started your business. Either way, whichever came first, you knew that summer was gonna come and your schedule would be interrupted.

It's not a surprise. It happens every year. So we're gonna stop pretending like you just found out about it last week. We're gonna stop pretending we can run our business in summer the exact same way we run it February, when the kids are in school and you have eight hours a day and wide open afternoons.

That's not real. That's a fantasy, and you're running your business on a fantasy is why you're so stinking stressed.

So I want you to make a shift. It's a mindset shift that when you make this shift, it will open up the rest of this episode for you. So say this with me. Summer is a different season of my business, and it gets a different plan. Summer is a different season of my business, and it [00:05:00] gets a different plan.

That's it. That's the whole thing. That's the mindset we need to come into summer with. Different hours, different deliverables, different boundaries, and different rhythm, and the great thing is your income does not have to drop because of it Because after running a business with kids for eight years and coaching women through this, the women who scale or maintain through summer are not the women who work the hardest.

They're the women who plan the smartest. So listen, I'm not gonna say that it's gonna be easy. I'm saying this is what's real. This is your actual situation that is coming up. And I have two kids. We homeschool, we travel, we do Disney, the house is loud, the schedule's full, and I still run a multi seven-figure business with under twenty-five hours a week.

So I'm not coming from this at theory. My house is literally summer three hundred and sixty-five days out of the year. I'm coming at [00:06:00] this as a working mom who has figured out how to make this work and who has helped hundreds of other women get through summer as well. Okay, so now that we know that we're shifting our mindset around summer and our new saying is, "Summer is a different season of my business and it gets a different plan," let's get into the tactical things that you can do to make this a really magical summer, okay?

So this is the part that no one wants to do, but everyone needs to do, and this is the client conversations. If you haven't had this conversation, we are not waiting another week. We're doing it this week, today if possible. While you're listening to this, we need to have this conversation with our clients.

Because if you wait until three days out from your vacation to tell your clients you're gonna be out of the office, you've already lost them. You've put them in a reactive spot. You look unprofessional, and you're gonna spend the whole vacation refreshing your emails and ad manager instead of being present with your family.

So [00:07:00] here's what we're gonna do. These four things with every single retainer client, okay? Number one, you're gonna send them a summer schedule email. I want you to map it out week by week, June through August, what your availability looks like, when you're at your full capacity, when you're on vacation, when you're working modified hours, all of it in writing.

Now, here's the deal. You don't need to send all that, but I need you to write it out because you are gonna send out your summer hours schedule. And in order to do that, you need to go by week by week to see what that looks like. So what weeks are you gonna be on vacation? What weeks are there days that you won't be working?

Are there days that they can expect a longer time for communication? What does that look like? This is not asking for permission. This is informing them with confidence. You are a growth partner, not an order taker. You are not a VA. You are not begging for time off. You are not an employee. The energy is, "Here's my summer schedule.

Here's [00:08:00] how I'm going to keep things moving for your business. Let me know if you have any questions." That's it, period. Okay, so we need to get that email out. Two, we're gonna identify what has to get done during the time away and what can wait. Most of our clients' work, y'all, can wait a few days.

It really can. We're not doing brain surgery, heart surgery, nothing is an emergency. The world will not end if you don't respond to a Slack message in four hours. But there are some things that genuinely have to keep moving, like an active ad campaign, a launch, a client paying you specifically for a response time.

You wanna look at your client roster, look at the de- deliverables, and identify those, and put a plan around them. Number three, this is a big one, we wanna pre-batch everything we can before we leave for any vacations. And I want you to pause here, because this is where most service providers go off the rails.

The first instinct when you have a vacation coming up is, "I need to hire someone to cover for me. Ugh, I'm just gonna [00:09:00] have to work through my vacation." Friends, no. That is not the model I teach. We are not building agencies. We are not hiring contractors every time we want a week off. That is a hamster wheel disguised as a solution.

What we're doing instead is building a business that runs on systems, pre-batched work, and clear client expectations and boundaries. So for the work that can't pause, you can batch ahead. You can record any Looms, you can schedule the content, you can go in and schedule campaigns, you can write emails in advance, you can set up ads in advance, you can have creative ready to go.

Let's get all the work scheduled. Most of you do not need to work on day-to-day activity, and this is where the first email of telling your clients, "This is the week I'm gonna be off. Here's when I need stuff by. I won't be able to set up new campaigns during this week, but I can manage the ones that are currently running."

That's boundaries. That's why we send the first email, [00:10:00] okay? So we're gonna ha- make sure all those campaigns are scheduled and ready to go before we leave

We're not doing launches while we're on vacation. This is communication that you just need to have y- with your client that "I'm sorry, I'm on vacation. I won't be able to do that." And if you already knew about the launch, then you probably shouldn't have planned your vacation when you did.

Just, that's the thing. But if a client decides "Oh, we're gonna launch this week," "No, I'm sorry, I won't be able to be there for that because I've already sent you my summer schedule," right? You can communicate the day that works for your business and your family, and you hold that boundary.

Champagne clients respect that. Bargain bin clients do not, and that's a different conversation that we've had on this podcast about who you should be working with in the first place. Okay, so then the fourth thing that we gotta do is communicate one time, clearly, and then trust that you handled it. You don't need to send six apologetic follow-up emails.

Stop saying, "I'm sorry, I'm away for this week." You're not sorry. You are a business [00:11:00] owner taking a vacation that you earned, period

So here's what I did last year with one of our Strategist Society members. She had four retainer clients and a Disney cruise planned. She's actually the one that gave me an idea to go on a cruise in the first place. She was so stressed because she had clients who had a bunch of ads running, and when you're on a Disney cruise, unless you buy the Wi-Fi package you are out of communication, right?

So this is what we did. In May, we sent her summer schedule email. We mapped out her exact days away, what the... letting them know I would not be available for communication or anything like that. The ads were running. She didn't turn off the ads. They continued to run. There are proven campaigns that run.

She didn't need to... five days, it's gonna be okay. Then what happened is one of her clients asked, "Hey, I wanna get these new campaigns going for the week." What she did is she said, "Hey, I sent the summer schedule, so I do have my vacation coming up this week. [00:12:00] I, I can go in and set up the campaign for you, but I won't be able to monitor it while I'm gone.

However, what we can do is, one, if you really want this campaign up, I'll go in and have it, schedule it, everything, and then you can check in, and here's the numbers that you can look for. And then when I get back, I can look over it and edit, change anything that needs to be changed. Or we can wait till I get back, and then I can have it scheduled, so then I can review it.

Which option works best for you?" And the client decided that she would wait a week for it to get published. That's setting boundaries, right? So all the copy and the creative were ready to go. It was scheduled, so the day that she came back, it was scheduled to launch, and it did launch. So she had done all the pre-work, and she communicated really well with the client.

Now, she didn't know what to say, so she Voxed me. That is one of the perks about being in Strategy Society, is she was able to Vox me, and we were able to go through, like, how do we actually have this conversation with the client [00:13:00] so there's no fires, there's no drama, there's no bad blood. Both clients are happy.

You're happy. The communication's there. That's how we handle those situations. You are so in your head about what clients are gonna think if you leave the office for a week. It's gonna be okay

Okay, so now that we know that we need to batch, we need to let clients know we're gonna have clear boundaries on when and what we can't do. Now let's get into, like, how do we actually have the summer schedule that works? So I wanna show you what that actually looks like in real life, because I think sometimes when coaches talk about this stuff, it sounds great in theory and you're like, "Okay, but what does Tuesday at 10:00 AM actually look like?"

And I am not someone who blocks schedule, but if you've heard my podcast episodes about theme days, you know I'm big on creating themes around our days, not necessarily time blocks. So what I'm-- And how we do summer or heavy travel schedules or things like that is the same way [00:14:00] that I would do this if I had kids that were gonna be at home in summer, and usually they're off.

And this is what I help my students inside of Strategy Society do as well, is set up these buckets

The Strategist Society members who have really great summers, they work on what I call power days. Two or three really, really concentrated focus days that are work days per week. They are batch heavy lifting, calls, content strategy, setting up campaigns, anything that requires real brainpower. The other days are light, so that's like inbox, check-ins, maybe running some reports through AI with our ad reporting on autopilot, maybe a couple hours while the kids are at a friend's house or swim lessons.

When my students travel, they work in pockets. So we have power days and pockets. So during the summer, we have two to three power days, which is heavy brain lifting. Then when you're in travel, we work in pockets. Not eight-hour days on [00:15:00] vacation. That's insane. But maybe 30 minutes in the morning before everyone else is awake with a cup of coffee, hotel balcony, or at the kitchen table of your rental, and then you're done.

Your phone's away. You're present. My check-in time is usually when Bodhi naps. He still naps. I like to j- chill out. Riley and Austin usually go do something. So while he's napping, that's when I'll do a 30-minute to one-hour check-in, and that works because I don't wanna sit there not doing anything.

And as much as I love reading, I don't wanna sit there for two and a half hours and read either. So I usually split it up between an hour reading and an hour of work during his nap. Yours may be 30 minutes before everyone wakes up or during lunch or however you wanna make that work. But it's a tiny pocket of time where you can just check in.

And then what happens is my family time is really protected because it's just these tiny pockets that I'm working on vacation, not long pockets. And there have been times where that pocket doesn't look like that. When we go on a [00:16:00] cruise, I'm completely out, except there's usually one day that when we are on the Disney island that I have service.

And so while the kids are at breakfast and I'm getting ready, I'll do a check-in and answer Voxer messages and stuff like that. It's no more than 30 minutes out of a five-day trip. And so you can work in these tiny pockets where we're just checking in, making sure everything's running, but we don't have to be plugged in.

When we went to Europe for 14 days, I didn't even have my laptop with me, and each day I checked in for 30 minutes while Bodhi was napping, and there were some days I didn't check in at all. So it's the same thing with summer, is we... when we're traveling, we have a pocket, and during the week we have two to three power days.

We're really doing most of our work during that time

Now, here's the framework I want you to use to map out your summer. I call this the summer work bucket list, and it's not like your typical buckel- bucket list, but I love bucket lists and so we always have them for the [00:17:00] season. So this is your summer work bucket list, and it's because there's three buckets that your f- the framework falls into for you to have a super successful summer that's peaceful, present, and still profitable.

Okay, so bucket one is your full work weeks. These are the weeks where the kids have camp, your partner is at home taking care of them. You've got a stretch of normal-ish childcare. You can work close to your normal hours that you would when the kids are at school. You knock out the heavier projects in these weeks.

So these are gonna be one where you keep a pretty similar schedule. So I want you to look at your calendar and pick a color and go ahead and mark these weeks. This is bucket one, your full work weeks. And maybe your full work week's Monday through Thursday, maybe it's Monday through Friday. Whatever your normal week would look like, these are gonna be the ones that are very close to that.

So let's mark those in one color. Then we have bucket two, the modified work [00:18:00] weeks. These are the weeks where the kids are home, but you're not traveling. You're working in those power days, so two to three power days, maybe five to 10 hours that week. You're doing the essentials, but not much else. You set the expectations with clients in advance.

But not much else. Maybe you're just focusing on your standards of excellence and nothing really more than that. Then bucket three is your vacation weeks. These are fully off or close to it. This is where we're working in our pocket of time. There's 30-minute check-ins only. You're not dealing with fires.

You're not d- setting up new campaigns. It's just check-in. We're not even communicating with clients. We're just saying "Hey, is everything running?" That is a big thing. When you are on vacation, there is no communication with clients. It's not a time for you to communicate with clients. It's a time for you to check in just to make sure everything's working right, and there are no fires.

But we're not communicating with clients. That, I need you to be super clear because as soon as you do that, [00:19:00] they think that you're no longer on vacation. So no client communication during those weeks. You've prepped ahead, you batched your work, you're present with your family. So go through your calendar, have three different color highlighters or however you wanna mark it, and mark bucket one your full work weeks, bucket two your modified work weeks, and bucket three your vacation weeks.

When we have a visual of this, we already know what is gonna happen and what we can prepare for instead of being like, "Ugh, my to-do list is a mile long. I didn't get anything done." No duh, Because that week, you acted like you were in bucket one, a full work week, but really, you should've been in bucket two, a modified.

So it's setting expectations for yourself.

And this is gonna look different for everyone. People, some of you may take four weeks of vacation, some of you may take four days of vacation. This is totally customized to you. Some of you may have no full work weeks and mostly modified, and that's why it's so customizable to how you're gonna work. But the big thing is [00:20:00] you're setting the expectation ahead of time

And when we just focus on smaller to-do lists, standards of excellence in serving our clients, and really clear communication, we can have such an amazing peaceful summer and still be super profitable

And here's the deal. If you're on hourly, this is where this breaks because you are paid by the hour. So if you decide to take a week, week off, you don't get paid. The person who's charging packages with retainer clients is who pays a premium for outcomes, not hours, she can absolutely take real vacations because her clients aren't paying her hours.

They're paying her for results. And champagne clients are happy to work around a modified summer schedule because they trust the strategy underneath it. If you're currently in the hours for dollar model, Summer is gonna be stressful every single year. You are not gonna be able to take off vacations because you don't get [00:21:00] paid.

It's that simple. So I just want you to hear me. If you are on hourly and you didn't already know, you need to get off the hourly packages. You need to get on retainer packages. You need to fix this so you can stop trading hours for dollars, so you can take a vacation, so you can actually live a life full of freedom instead of being hung up on how many hours a week you're working

So here's what you can do right now to have a profitable, peaceful, productive summer. Pre-batch your client week two weeks ahead of every vacation week. Not the night before, two weeks ahead, so you get everything approved, clients are happy. Move your sales calls into your full work week schedule. Don't take new client calls during a modified week if you can help it.

Block your calendar, like actually block it out. Don't leave Tuesday wide open thinking, "I'll get it to it, block it out. If you're gonna be at the pool and you're not working, put pool time on your calendar. Put the library [00:22:00] trip on the calendar. Treat your family like a paying client.

Don't focus on doing all the things. Focus on your standards of excellence this summer. Have a summer office hours policy. Maybe you only respond from 9:00 to 1:00 instead of 9:00 to 4:00. Maybe you only respond from 11:00 to 1:00. That's it. That's your window. Tell your clients they will adjust. They are adults.

They have a business. They should be setting boundaries too Okay, so now that we went over those, what happens when you do all this and then summer ends up feeling like a dumpster fire? Or maybe it already is. If you're listening to this episode and it's already midsummer and you didn't pre-plan, your kids are climbing up the walls, your clients just asked you for something by Friday, and you're supposed to leave for the beach on Saturday.

I see you. I hear you. I've been there. We've all been there. Here's what you need to do right now, today. Not next week, today. First, we're gonna do what I call triage. [00:23:00] Open your laptop, write down every single thing that has to get done in the next two weeks. Then circle the ones that actually have to be done by a deadline, like they have a hard deadline, and cross out the ones that don't.

I promise you, half of what you think is urgent isn't actually urgent. There are so many things on your to-do list that don't actually need to be on your to-do list right now. They're a later thing, and we have a whole episode about your parking lot system. I just helped one of our Strategist Society members.

She said, "I am doing so many things. I'm so exhausted, and nothing's actually getting done." And I told her, "What are you trying to get done?" She was working on 10 projects at the same time. I said, "No, no, no. Which one's gonna move the needle the most? What needs to happen?" She told me. Guess what? She has knocked out half of her list because she started focusing on one thing at a time.

So the first step is triage. What actually has a hard deadline, and X out everything else. Communicate. That's the step two. Send a short, professional, non-apologetic [00:24:00] email to your client. Something like, "Hey, just a heads-up, I'll be out of office from Saturday through the following Sunday. Here's what I've already taken care of.

I'll be back in the inbox in the morning." That's it. Then three, we're gonna batch what you can right now. You probably have more runway than you actually think. Sit down for one focused power day this week and pre-build what needs to go out while you're gone.

Schedule it, Loom it, get it off your plate, whatever you need to do. Then map the rest of your summer into those three buckets. It's not too late. Today is a great day to do it. Tomorrow is a great day to do it. Don't let, "I should have done this in April," stop you from doing it in June or July. And listen, you're not failing.

You're learning. Next year, you'll do it earlier. You'll come back to this episode. You'll re-listen. You'll have a plan earlier. And then the year after that, even earlier. This stuff compounds. It becomes part of your yearly routine. The women who are running [00:25:00] sustainable businesses are not the ones who got it right the first summer.

They're the ones who learned and adjusted every year. So give yourself some grace, do the dang thing today, and let's get the rest of your summer back on track All right, my friends, if you're sitting here thinking, "Brandi, this all sounds great, but I'm still in the hours for dollar model. I'm still exhausted.

I don't know how to get my schedule in order. My clients are a nightmare. I have no boundaries, and I need to get out of this model." This is exactly what we do in Strategist Society. Strategist Society is my coaching program and m- mentorship for women service providers who are already doing three to $10,000 a month, and they're ready to scale and break through the 10,000/15,000/ $20,000 a month as a strategist.

We help you repackage your offers, get in front of those champagne clients, definitely get out of hourly charging if you're there, raise your prices without losing clients. We help you build the kind of business [00:26:00] where you can take a 10-day vacation and your income does not drop. No agency required. The reason I built this program is because I lived in the hamster wheel, and I know how to get women off of it

So if that's where you're at, head to thestrategistsociety.com and apply. If you're early in your journey and you're just getting started out and you're thinking about starting a freelance business, especially with ad management, then head to conversionsforclients.com instead. That's the right starting place.

But if you're already having success landing clients, you're at that $3,000 plus mark, and you want more direction, you want to work less and make more, then head to thestrategistsociety.com, apply to, for a call, and we'll see where you're at and how I can help you in your business. And then if I think I can support you, I'll share with you what it looks like to work with us inside.

So that's thestrategistsociety.com

So friends, summer does not have to break your business. It can actually be one of the best seasons of [00:27:00] your year. When you have the right plan and the right structure in place, it can be profitable and peaceful. So go map out your summer this week, have those client conversations, build your buck- build your buckets, trust the plan.

You've got this, my friend. Go do the dang thing, and this week, go out, serve your clients, scale your business, and soar into the success you deserve