Going on paternity leave

I'll be honest with you: This post (and a few others) is written and scheduled in advance.

Because last week, my wife and I had our first child - a baby girl ????

Which means I'm going on paternity leave for a couple of weeks. And I want to share some thoughts about how we're gonna make that work in Herodesk.

Usually, it's not a big deal for an employer when an employee goes on paternity leave. Especially the father, who (in Denmark, at least, and up until recently) only had like two weeks or so.

But when you're running an early-stage start-up, you need to plan a bit more carefully.

Besides me, we have a full-time Customer Success Manager and a part-time CMO.

So here's how we're gonna go about it...

I want to be there 100% for my family - family first.

I've spent the last few weeks fixing bugs, implementing improvements, and making sure everything runs more smoothly and stable - with the hope that our product will continue operating without issues or outages.

It usually does, I mean, I haven't received an alarm from our surveillance in months now. But still, I am investing a bit more for that trend to continue.

(this also has the additional advantage of simply offering a better product to our customers, but that's a different story).

When you're the founder of an early-stage start-up, it's almost impossible to go 100% offline for several weeks.

But at the same time, I can't tell in advance when, how often or for how long at a time I'm able to be online.

Fortunately, Sara is 100% capable of handling all customer-related tasks and meetings (She's only been with us for 3 months, but I'm already fully confident about her running everything - how awesome is that?!)

So we agreed on this:

Sara is running Herodesk while I'm focusing on family.

At the end of every day, if she needs my help with anything or needs me to follow up on something, she'll drop me an e-mail with those bullets.

I'll check it when I can and get back with what she needs.

Maybe that night. Maybe tomorrow or in three days. I don't know.

If a customer has to wait longer than usual because he/she is asking about something that Sara needs my help with, we'll just be honest and say that it'll take a bit longer than usual to answer that question, because I'm on maternity leave and she needs to await my reply.

It is what it is, and I'm sure most will understand.

Finally, if there's an emergency (system outage, supercritical bug/issue or something similar), she can call my cell, and I'll get on it ASAP.

Would it be more ideal if I could just go 100% offline for four weeks? Sure.

Is it realistic? Not really at this time, no.

So we've found a compromise.

One that lets me be 100% present for my family, but at the same time check in on the business when mommy and baby are asleep ??

See you in a few weeks ??