The news is good: someone on your team is having a baby. Then comes the practical question nobody likes to ask out loud. Who keeps the marketing going while she is out?
In a small business, marketing often lives in one person's head and one person's logins. She knows which reviews still need an answer, when the next post goes out, why the Facebook campaign is set the way it is, and which customers always ask about financing. The day she leaves, all of that leaves with her unless someone writes it down.
This guide is for owners and managers who want the leave to go well for everyone: for her, for the team and for the customers who keep searching.
Why marketing is the first thing to go quiet
Most daily work has a visible deadline. Payroll runs on Friday. The truck leaves at seven. Marketing rarely does. If nobody posts this week, nothing breaks today.
That is exactly the problem. Three months without posts, without review replies and without anyone checking the ads adds up quietly:
- Reviews go unanswered, and new customers read the silence.
- Holiday hours never get updated, and someone drives to a closed door.
- An ad campaign keeps spending on an offer that already ended.
Google's own help for local businesses says that businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results, and that replying to reviews shows customers you value their feedback. A profile that stops moving for a season looks, to a customer, like a business that stopped paying attention.
What the law covers in Florida, and what it doesn't
Before planning the work, it helps to know the frame. This is general information, not legal advice.
- Federal law. The Family and Medical Leave Act applies to private employers with 50 or more employees. Eligible employees can take up to 12 workweeks of unpaid, job-protected leave, and they need at least 1,250 hours of service in the 12 months before the leave starts, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
- Florida. The state has no paid family leave program of its own for private-sector workers. The Florida Policy Institute estimates that 76 percent of working Floridians don't have access to paid family leave through their employer.
Many small businesses fall under the 50-employee line and decide their own policy. Whatever you offer, talk it through with an employment attorney or HR professional. The rest of this article is about the work, not the policy.
Map the role before the last day
The most useful hour you can spend is sitting with your marketer and listing everything she does, how often, and what happens if it stops. A simple table is enough:
| Task | How often | Can it pause? | Who covers it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Answer Google reviews | Every few days | No | |
| Post on the Google profile and social media | Weekly | Not for months | |
| Update hours for holidays and storms | When it happens | No | |
| Watch and adjust active ad campaigns | Weekly | No, or pause them on purpose | |
| Send the monthly email | Monthly | Maybe | |
| Plan next year's campaigns | Once | Yes |
Then collect the things that only she knows: logins (stored in your company's name, not hers), the content calendar, the agencies or vendors she talks to, and the reports she reads each month.
Write down the voice, not just the passwords
Access is the easy part. The hard part is sounding like the same business.
The best material for a voice guide is already in your accounts: her last posts, the way she answers a bad review, the words your customers use in their messages. Ask her to pick five posts she is proud of and two replies to reviews that she thinks sound exactly right. Turn that into one page: the tone, the words you use and the ones you avoid, how you answer complaints, and the questions customers ask most.
Those questions are worth their own list, because they are your content:
| What customers keep asking | Where the answer should live |
|---|---|
| "Do you work on weekends?" | Profile hours, a post, a pinned reply |
| "Do you speak Spanish?" | Profile description and website |
| "How long does it take?" | A service page and a weekly post |
| "Do you offer financing?" | FAQ on the site and in the profile |
Whoever covers the role can keep publishing useful content from that list without guessing.
Three ways to cover the work
- Split it among the team. Works when the tasks are few and someone has real time for them. It tends to fail when marketing becomes everyone's fourth priority.
- Hire someone temporary. Gives you one person focused on the role. It takes time to recruit and onboard, and that person's skills decide which channels get covered well.
- Bring in an outside team for a fixed term. Useful when several channels have to keep running at once. It only works if they follow your plan and your voice, with one person on your side approving the work.
None of these is right for every business. The question is how much has to keep running and who can do it well, every week, for the whole leave.
What I see in my work
Marketing isn't static. It moves with the season, the competition and what customers are asking this month. Some things can be scheduled ahead in a calendar, but others need analysis and a strategy that adapts, and those can't wait three months for someone to come back.
When a handoff goes wrong, it is rarely just one thing. The access, the brand's voice and the calendar tend to get lost together, which is why all three belong in the same handoff.
Veronica and I are both moms. We know what it feels like to step away and what it feels like to be the one covering, because we have been on both sides. What matters most is that communication and the plan keep moving smoothly until the day she comes back.
Plan the return before the leave starts
The leave ends too, and the return deserves the same planning. Agree now on what she will find when she comes back:
- A written summary of what was published, what ran and what it produced.
- Every access back in place, with nothing changed that she doesn't know about.
- A short handoff conversation, so she starts with context instead of a pile of notifications.
Many teams also schedule a few weeks of overlap, so the person who covered and the person returning work side by side before the handoff is complete.
Questions to ask before you hand over your marketing
Whether you hire a person or an agency, ask:
- Will you follow our current plan, or rewrite it?
- How will you learn our voice before you publish anything?
- Who approves each piece on our side, and what happens if they are busy?
- Which channels will you cover, and which are out of scope?
- What exactly will we receive at the end, and when?
- Do the accounts stay in our company's name the whole time?
The short version
Marketing goes quiet first because nobody else knows where it lives. List every task, decide what pauses and what can't, write down the voice and the questions your customers ask, choose who covers it, and plan the return on the same day you plan the leave. The goal is simple: she comes back to work that is current, and your customers never noticed she was gone.