Trimester Zero

the career work that can’t wait until you’re pregnant

From the very first day of my first big girl job, I had an inkling that working for other people might not be for me.

Not because I didn’t respect the people I worked for - I had the pleasure of collaborating with some down right smart, cool people. But I noticed something in myself early: I struggled to build someone else’s vision. I could do it and was good at it. But I was always slightly aware that my energy had a ceiling when it was pointed in someone else’s direction.

I didn’t have language for that at 22. I just kept moving. I pivoted four times across a decade from biometric data to hardware manufacturing, then fintech and compliance tech, to now being a business owner. With each move, I developed a growing conviction that the most important currency I could accumulate wasn’t salary.

It was options.

The moment I understood this was 2018. On my commute to work one day, I listed a service on Fiverr: helping students with their grad school, college, and medical school applications. My zone of genius since I was a kid was the ability to hear someone’s story and make it land on the page the way it deserved to.

Within six months, I was the top-rated seller in education consulting on the entire platform and held that spot for four years.

I didn’t have a business plan or a mentor or a course. I just had a skill I used every day in my product role [storytelling, making complex things legible, helping smart people become competitive] and I pointed it at a market that needed it. The extra income was fabulous, but more importantly it showed me I could create my own luck.

I’m telling you this because I want to introduce you to a concept I’ve started calling Trimester Zero - the career edit.

Trimester Zero is the 1–3 years before you’re thinking about starting a family. It’s not the pregnancy itself, rather it’s now when you’re ambitious and high-performing and the question of kids feels real but not urgent, close but not imminent.

It is, I’d argue, the highest-leverage window of your professional life.

Here’s what I’ve heard repeatedly and without exception from the women I work with who are pregnant or who’ve already had children:

“I wish I had built options before I got pregnant. This stuff takes time.”

Not one of them said they wished they’d waited to see how they felt. Every single one said some version of the same thing: the work that gives you choices [not just the illusion of flexibility your HR policy offers] takes years to build. Not months my gals - years!!

I’m writing this essay because most of us aren’t building it.

I’ve been thinking about this through a framework that Codie Sanchez articulated in her recent conversation with Maggie Sellers Reum on the Hot Smart Rich podcast (Season 2, Episode 1: “How to Get Financially Free with Codie Sanchez” - linked below, it’s worth your full hour). Codie talks about what she calls the asset ownership race: the idea that we’re in a moment where those who build equity in its various forms will be categorically separated from those who don’t.

Most ambitious women are building exactly one form of equity: salary.

Salary is income that requires your presence, stops when you stop, and is entirely controlled by someone else’s HR policy. It’s also, not coincidentally, the equity type most devastated by a career pause, a maternity leave, a pivot, or a negotiated flexible return.

What Codie talks about, and what I’ve been teaching my clients for years without calling it this, are the other forms of equity that most of us were never shown:

1. Time equity aka owning your hours. Building fractional income, consulting relationships, or flexible work arrangements that aren’t contingent on one employer’s goodwill. Time equity means you decide when and how you show up rather than a contract + leave policy.

2. Skill equity aka the rare, portable, high-leverage capabilities that travel with you regardless of who you work for or whether you work for anyone at all. Skills that compound, are hard to replicate, and mean you are always the asset.

3. Brand and reputation equity aka your name as something that precedes you. This looks like an audience, a body of work, and/or reputation in a space that means opportunities find you. Brand equity is slow to build and almost impossible to manufacture quickly which is exactly why now is the time :) — PS - reputation equity is HUGE for helping you land jobs if you see yourself back at a company post-kids. My brilliant friend just landed her dream VC role 19 months PP and mentioned the podcast & TikTok account she started years ago gave her SO much credibility when networking.

4. Financial equity aka ownership. Some formats for ya include: revenue share and profit participation. This is money that doesn’t require your physical presence to keep moving. It’s often stake in something that grows independently of your working hours.

These are not limited to entrepreneurs or influencers or people who quit their jobs dramatically and post about it on TikTok. They are available to anyone willing to build them deliberately and they are almost entirely unavailable to anyone who waits until they need them.

Here’s the mental model I keep coming back to when I talk to my clients about this:

Imagine you have five pots on a stove. Each one is a soup representing a different income stream, skill, and reputation in a different space. In Trimester Zero, your job is NOT to cook all five soups. Your job is to prepare the ingredients. To do the chopping and the mixing, to have the broth ready, to know what you’re making. Then when the time comes, your priorities shift, your hours contract, and you need something you can turn on without starting from zero, all you’ll have to do is put the heat on.

Most of us don’t think about the pots until we’re standing in the kitchen starving, realising we should have started two hours ago.

The women who find themselves at the end of maternity leave, staring down a return to work that doesn’t fit their life, wishing for options they don’t have DID NOT get here because they were careless - let me be SO CLEAR about that. We need to extend grace in all ways - this is a hard world.

BUT, from all of the mothers I’ve spoken to, they report that nobody told them the planning window was before they were pregnant and before the urgency felt real.

I want to be honest with you: I don’t know exactly what I’ll want when I become a mother.

I’ve had this conversation with enough women who have been through it to know that you can’t fully predict it. What you can do is make sure that future you [me] has choices.

Not the choice between your job and nothing. Not the choice between full-time and a benefits package that dictates your time. But choices you built and own.

You will never fault yourself for building options you never need to activate. But you might fault yourself for not building them when you had the time.

This is what Trimester Zero is. It’s not a panic or warning, rather a reframe I feel called to speak up on.

The career work that matters most for the family life you want is not the work you do after you get pregnant. It’s the work you do no while the urgency feels abstract, while the stakes feel theoretical, and while you still have the time, bandwidth, and space to build something that lasts.

If you’re one, two, three years out from thinking about starting a family, this is your window. Not because you’re behind. Because you understand the game now.

Start mixing the ingredients.

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When you’re ready, here are two ways that I can help you:

→ The Trimester Zero Career Audit — Not a personality quiz. This free tool shows you exactly where your career stands before starting a family, so you know what to protect, what to build, and what to stop ignoring.

→ I’m building something specifically for ambitious women in Trimester Zero: the 1–3 years before family planning begins. If this landed for you, forward it to the woman in your life who needs to read it. And if you’re in this window yourself and want to talk about what building looks like for you specifically, you can chat with me HERE.

→ Codie Sanchez on Hot Smart Rich: “How to Get Financially Free”