Summer Shutdown Survival Workshop - Expat Mom Founder Network

The reality

Nobody tells you how expensive summer actually is.

Not in spending. But in the impact on your business when school stops. Your rhythm, your focus hours, your accountability, and your sense of who you are when you're working: all of it gets put on hold. Not because you need it, but because you now need to manage 6 to 8 weeks of child entertainment, travel, family reunions, and everyone else needing something from you.

01 Everyone assumes you're "off" for the summer. Family and old friends expect full availability. Saying no feels selfish, and you end up resenting the people you actually came to see.
02 Kids are more demanding than at home. They're in an unfamiliar environment, extra clingy, no local friends to play with. You become the entertainment, leaving zero mental bandwidth for business thinking.
03 Family doesn't take your work seriously. "But you're on vacation!" or "Can't that wait?" You're already second-guessing yourself, and hearing it dismissed as a side thing stings.
04 You compare your life to people who stayed. They have careers that make sense, proximity to grandparents, stability. You feel a flash of envy, followed by shame for feeling it, because you chose this.
05 Client communications get messy. Different time zones, chaotic schedules, no clear boundary because you're technically still working. Half present everywhere and fully present nowhere.
06 You realise how much of your identity still lives "back home". People there know the old you, before the move, before the business. Explaining who you are now feels exhausting. Imposter syndrome on full display.

By week three you're the full-time entertainer and everyone's emotional support system. Your business is running on whatever's left of you, which by the end of July is not much. You half-work and half-rest and you come back in September just feeling terrible. You need a plan.

What you will leave with

Not inspiration. An actual plan.

We'll make it together, designed by two expat mom founders who have been there and done that. This session has two parts.

Part 1

We talk about what's actually hard about summer

Not to wallow, but because feelings are bad indicators for business decisions. Or any decision. You can't plan well from inside the resentment. We start there.

Part 2

We build your Summer Operating Plan

Six questions. Not rocket science, but important pieces to have on paper for peace of mind and continuity in your business. You leave with a one-page plan that's real, yours, and ready before July.

Who this is for

You'll recognise yourself
in at least three of these.

You're building a business, as a freelancer, consultant, or founder, and you do it around school hours, in a country that isn't your own.
Summer is six weeks minimum, usually more, and nobody in your extended network quite understands why that's a logistical operation.
You try to keep working through the summer and come back in September realising you failed.
Your family at home thinks you're on holiday. Your clients think you're at your desk. You're somehow both and neither.
You've never actually made a plan for summer. You've just reacted to it, every year, and promised yourself next year will be different.
You're done pretending this is fine. You want the practical version of how to handle it.

Your facilitators

We built this because it's what we were missing.

Combined: 13 countries, 5 kids, 6 businesses built in the gaps between school drop-off, dinner, and relocations. We are just like you.

Iva Buschmann

Executive Coach

Iva works with female founders. The ones running real businesses while raising kids in countries that were not on the original plan. She's moved seven times in the past 25 years, restarting her life from scratch each time, just as the last one was starting to make sense.

She's a certified executive coach, which mostly means she's done the hours nobody asks about. She'd argue the real qualification was the years spent learning to coach herself first.

In the workshop, Iva runs the part most founders try to skip: the emotional weight that quietly shapes every business decision you make this summer.

Linda van Egmond

Fractional CMO & Operator

Linda is the one female founders bring in when the business is working but feels held together with a string. 18 years inside impact-first businesses. Her superpower is optimising strategy, marketing, and operations and tying everything together to make a company grow.

She's built her own company twice. Once in the Netherlands, and again after a move that asked her to rebuild it all from scratch: clients, network, infrastructure, the lot. Linda reads a business the way some people read X-rays.

In the workshop, Linda runs the operational side: the decisions you need to make before July 1st so you and your business survive while you're away.

Summer shouldn't cost you your business.

Nobody tells you how expensive summer actually is.

Not inspiration. An actual plan.

We talk about what's actually hard about summer

We build your Summer Operating Plan

You'll recognise yourself
in at least three of these.

We built this because it's what we were missing.

Iva Buschmann

Linda van Egmond

Make this summer different.

Summer shouldn't cost you your business.

Nobody tells you how expensive summer actually is.

Not inspiration. An actual plan.

We talk about what's actually hard about summer

We build your Summer Operating Plan

You'll recognise yourselfin at least three of these.

We built this because it's what we were missing.

Iva Buschmann

Linda van Egmond

Make this summer different.

You'll recognise yourself
in at least three of these.