Building a Business in Motherhood: Real Schedules, Honest Tools, and the Advice That’s Complete BS
Building a business in motherhood is one of those things that looks completely different depending on which season of life you’re in. The toddler years look nothing like the tween and teen years. The newborn haze looks nothing like the school-drop-off shuffle. And yet somehow, moms at every stage are figuring out how to make it work.
On a recent episode of the In the EllaMents podcast, I sat down with Alysha Sanford, photographer, brand strategist, and mom to a four-year-old, for one of the most honest conversations I’ve had about what this actually looks like behind the scenes. Between the two of us, we cover the full spectrum — she’s deep in the toddler years, and I’m navigating teens and tweens — and our days look completely different. But the core challenges? Those feel pretty universal.
If you’ve ever wondered how other moms are actually pulling this off, this post is for you. And if you’d rather hear the full conversation, scroll to the bottom for the podcast link.
Building a Business in Motherhood Looks Different in Every Season
One of the first things Alysha and I agreed on is that every season of motherhood brings a completely different set of constraints, and what works in one season won’t necessarily work in the next.
Alysha has a four-year-old who is, by her own loving description, a Velcro child. Her daughter is with her almost around the clock. She gets one day a week of childcare — about six or seven hours — and three days a week tied up with play school. Every client session, recording, and focused work block has to fit around that. She’s not working around nap time anymore either, because the nap battle was costing her more energy than the time was worth.
My situation is different. My kids are 13 and 11, and they’re in school during the day, which theoretically gives me work hours. But school hours also mean school drop-offs, pickups, activities, appointments, errands, and all the mental load that doesn’t pause just because you sat down at your desk. Building a business in motherhood at this stage comes with a different kind of juggle — less physical, more logistical.
“Every season of motherhood comes with new challenges, but there are always pockets of time you can use. You can build something meaningful without sacrificing being present for your family.”
What both of us have learned is that the schedule you build has to fit your actual life, not someone else’s morning routine or productivity system, which brings us to what actually works.
What Actually Works: Schedules, Batching, and Theme Days
Batch everything you possibly can
Alysha is a firm believer in batching and not just for work. She batches her grocery orders, her meal prep, her client sessions, and her content creation. For photography, she consolidates family mini sessions into specific windows before the holidays rather than spreading them throughout the year. That way, the client communication, editing, and order fulfillment all happen in one concentrated flow instead of trickling in unpredictably.
She also introduced me to batch cooking in a way that genuinely changed how I think about weeknight dinners. A four-week meal rotation where dishes are planned in sequence so one night’s cooking becomes the next night’s leftovers. Cook a large batch of rice or meat once, and use it across multiple meals. It sounds simple, but when you’re building a business in motherhood and decision fatigue is real, eliminating even one daily choice matters.
Use theme days instead of strict time blocks
Neither of us are time blocking people, and we’re both okay with that. Strict time blocking requires a predictability that motherhood just doesn’t offer. Instead, we both gravitate toward theme days, anchoring certain types of work to certain days of the week so the mental switching cost goes down.
For Alysha, Tuesdays are her primary day for client sessions and focused work. For me, Mondays and Tuesdays tend to be for recording, client meetings, and my own content. I also try to protect what Alysha introduced me to as CEO, dedicated time for admin, finances, and marketing for my own business, so that work doesn’t keep getting bumped in favor of client work.
Work in the pockets, not against them
Alysha gets her best creative work done in the mornings, right when her daughter wakes up and is happily settled with a snack and a show. She sits beside her with a laptop and gets more done in that quiet window than she would fighting for focus later in the day. On school holidays and breaks, I do something similar, getting up early to work before my kids are awake, then putting the laptop away when the day starts.
The common thread is working with the natural rhythm of your household instead of trying to force productivity into windows that don’t actually exist.
The Tools That Are Actually Worth It
We both use Metricool for social media scheduling and reporting, and we’re both fans for the same reason — it runs in the background, so content is publishing while you’re doing everything else. It functions almost like a built-in assistant for the parts of marketing that don’t need to be done in real time.
Alysha uses Squarespace and Acuity for her website, booking, and automated client follow-up emails. She made an important point about automation: even without a full CRM, Acuity lets her automate confirmation emails, prep emails, and reminders, which removes the mental load of tracking where each client is in the process. If you’re building a business in motherhood with limited focus time, automating the repetitive client communication steps is one of the highest-value things you can do.
On the email marketing side, I use Flodesk, which handles my newsletter and follow-up sequences. Everything else — calendar, documents, email — lives in Microsoft 365. Alysha is a Google Suite person. The specific tools matter less than having a system that runs reliably without requiring your constant attention.
The physical tool we both swear by is the Capture the Chaos Planner. There’s something about writing down your top three priorities for the day on paper — not in an app, not in a digital calendar — that actually makes them happen. Or at least makes it easier to be okay when they don’t, and just move them to the next day.
The Productivity Advice That’s Complete BS
We spent some time on this one, because there is no shortage of productivity advice aimed at moms that sounds great in theory and falls apart immediately in real life.
Wake up before your kids. Alysha is not doing this, and she’s not apologizing for it. When your child has sleep challenges and you’re already running on less than you need, sacrificing more sleep to sit at a computer is not a sustainable strategy. On school days I do get up early, but that’s a choice that fits my season, not a universal rule.
Work after bedtime. Alysha burnt herself out on this before she even had her daughter, working late nights as a photographer. Now her evenings are protected for herself and her husband. She’s more creative and focused in the morning anyway, so protecting her evenings isn’t laziness, it’s self-awareness.
Time blocking. We both tried it. Neither of us can make it work because motherhood is not a predictable environment. The alarm system required to actually execute strict time blocking adds more friction than it removes. Theme days give us structure without the rigidity.
What Building a Business in Motherhood Actually Requires
Alysha’s path to where she is now wasn’t linear. She’s been in business since around 2009, shifted from wedding photography to baby and family photography, navigated a full rebrand, and has been doing all of it while processing significant personal loss, including losing her dad after a year of anticipatory grief following a terminal cancer diagnosis, and three grandparents in the years since.
She talked about this openly, and it’s worth including here because it’s the part most productivity content leaves out entirely. Real life happens while you’re building a business. Grief happens. Health happens. Seasons of survival happen. And those seasons change what you’re capable of, what you want, and what your business needs to look like.
“It’s important because real life is happening as we’re building businesses and raising babies. You can’t plan for so much of it, and it will absolutely blindside you and shake you to your core.”
That kind of perspective has a way of clarifying what actually matters. For Alysha, it deepened her commitment to small business and helped her make decisions about where to spend her limited time and energy. For anyone building a business in motherhood, that clarity, however it comes, tends to be more useful than any productivity system.
If you’ve been navigating burnout alongside all of this, this post goes deeper on what that actually looks like and how to give yourself permission to rest.
Burnout for Small Business Owners: What It Really Looks Like When You Love What You Do ->
Three Things to Try If You’re Building a Business in Motherhood Right Now
Alysha’s advice for any mom who wants to build something but feels like the timing isn’t right:
Lean on your community
You don’t have to have perfect childcare to make progress. Figure out what you can accomplish with your kids present, and let people in enough to help. Alysha’s first local economic development meeting happened with her two-year-old sitting quietly beside her. If she had waited for a dedicated childcare slot, she might never have gone.
Use pockets of time intentionally
Podcasts, short work sprints during independent play, early mornings, scheduled pickups instead of grocery store trips, none of it is glamorous, but all of it adds up. The goal isn’t a perfect schedule. It’s finding the pockets that actually exist in your life and using them consistently.
Let go of the idea that the conditions have to be perfect
There is no perfect setup. No ideal amount of childcare. No magic tool combination. Alysha has been building her business for over fifteen years across multiple pivots, seasons of grief, a pandemic, and a Velcro toddler. The business has evolved to fit her life at every stage, and it will keep evolving. Yours will too.
Feeling Like You Need a Marketing Strategy That Fits Your Real Life?
If you’re building a business in motherhood and you’ve gotten to the point where your marketing feels like one more thing on an already impossible list, that’s exactly the kind of problem I help solve.
Whether you need someone to take ads management off your plate entirely, think through a marketing strategy that actually fits your capacity, or step in as a Fractional CMO so you have senior-level marketing support without a full-time hire, Social EllaMents is built for business owners who are doing real work in real life.
Learn more about working together →
Want to Hear the Full Conversation?
This post draws from my interview with Alysha Sanford on the In the EllaMents podcast. We go deeper on the grief piece, the tools we both use and don’t use, the marketing course Alysha is building for small business owners, and a lot more that didn’t make it into this post.
You can find Alysha and her work, including her brand photography and an upcoming marketing course, through the link below. And as always, you can listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts.
Alysha Sanford Photo & Marketing
@heyalyshasanford on Instagram
About the Author
Written by Alishia Egenhoff, Founder of Social EllaMents Marketing — helping small business owners grow through clarity, strategy, and authentic digital advertising.