‘Support your women’: VCCP’s Sophie Maunder on her journey from CEO to maternity coach

It’s rare to find someone leaving a CEO role for a whole new career. Rarer still for that person to be departing a business they’ve worked at for more than two decades to strike out on their own. Sophie Maunder, however, is on a mission to help working mothers not only survive, but thrive.

When she started at VCCP 23 years ago she was the first woman to go on maternity leave, return to work after having a baby and take flexible working. Breaking new ground is never easy and she recalls the pressure of balancing being a mother and an executive.

Maunder was promoted after the birth of her second son, and when her children were three and five she took on her first CEO role.

“I was doing four days a week and I said: ‘I’m not going to take that role if I have to go back to five days a week,’” she remembers.

The agency, which Maunder describes as “brilliantly supportive”, let her try the role for three months on a four-day working pattern. She proved it could be done, but not without sacrifices in a working world a decade off embracing hybrid working. She also became a single mum just two months into assuming her initial CEO role.

Working women are literally some of the most awesome, industrious, effective, brilliant brains you can have in a business, especially in our industry. Losing them is a societal tragedy.

Sophie Maunder, Matri

“It was absolutely exhausting and I look back now and think, I’ve no idea how I did that. I just know it was raggedly run. It was chaos every day. It was a logistical car crash most days. It was hugely anxiety ridden,” she explains.

As the most senior mother in the agency, returning mums were pointed in her direction for a chat. They asked for help, questioning how Maunder made it “look so easy”.

Quick to dispel those myths, she started to share what she’d learnt along the way about everything from dealing with guilt to boundary setting. Working with mothers became a passion, to the point where despite serving as chief executive, Maunder was mentoring upwards of three women a week.

Leader of the agency’s parental group, Maunder wrote a programme suggesting new mothers should receive a session of coaching before they left, on mat leave and when they returned.

This informal mentoring dynamic continued until the pandemic hit, when, while working and homeschooling her sons, Maunder trained as an executive coach.

“When I came back, I said: ‘I’ve retrained as an executive coach. This is my passion. I’ve written the programme and I don’t care what job you give me. Very happy to go on doing my executive role, CEO, whatever job you want me to do, I want to launch this officially for VCCP mums,” she recalls.

The programme rolled out and momentum built. Every mother informing HR they were pregnant was offered access to the 18-month maternity coaching programme. VCCP’s retention rate of mums returning from mat leave hit 100% for the first time in 2024 as a result. She has, however, experienced companies with retention rates for returning mums as low as 55%. 

“Most women take a whole year off now and that’s great, but it’s a really long time to keep the confidence. It’s a really long time out of business,” Maunder reflects.

“It’s brilliant, because obviously they get that amazing time they’re never going to get again with their baby to bond, but it’s got drawbacks as well.”

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Over the years of running the programme at VCCP, she began to see the same anxieties cropping up or issues first-time mums, in particular, had not considered. Maunder developed ways of helping mothers to manage their confidence, signal their intent, set boundaries and have conversations with their team. She quickly identified how crucial the conversations are before going on leave, which are also not easy to have.

“The trouble is you catch women when they’re really vulnerable. They’re not sleeping, they’re exhausted and they’re staring down the barrel of childbirth. They’ve got other things on their mind – nurseries and probably moving houses – and everything else. That is the time to get them, a month before they go and say: ‘Before you go, do these things. Have these conversations’,” she explains.

“You’ve really got to put a bit of effort into that moment to make sure you leave well, feeling strong and confident. This is where the confidence starts to get eroded and it’s all about confidence. There are many reasons why a woman doesn’t come back, but confidence is the killer.”

Not only do women start to doubt their abilities, many question whether they will be welcome back at all.

“They’re saying ‘I can’t even remember what I used to do and I’m sure I was no good at it anyway’ because women are so busy pulling themselves down. Or ‘The mat leave cover I’ve heard they’ve been great’ and that’s a disaster, because it’s going to be like ‘Oh, she’s come back and I wish it was the other person’,” says Maunder.

The coaching process

Armed with decades of mentoring experience under her belt, the VCCP boss decided earlier this month to leave the agency world and go full time with her pro-business and pro-mum maternity coaching company, Matri.

A B2B proposition, partner companies sign their employees up to the programme. Each firm sends Maunder the mother’s email address, intended leave and return dates, and they are auto-enrolled.

There are three aspects to the programme. Before going on mat leave there is bite-sized, on-demand content on how to manage your departure. During maternity leave, users can access content on specialist subjects such as post-natal depression, separation anxiety, boundary setting, maternal guilt and flexible working.

On their return, the content shifts to topics such as managing boundaries, dealing with unsupportive colleagues and keeping your confidence high.

This content typically consists of 10-minute films hosted by Maunder, who also plans to collaborate with expert guest speakers on specialist topics such as finances, confidence and postpartum nutrition. There is a group webinar and Q&A during each of the three pivotal moments – leaving work, during mat leave and returning to the workplace – which unites women from different companies with similar due dates.

There are many reasons why a woman doesn’t come back, but confidence is the killer.

Sophie Maunder, Matri

“I wanted to go to businesses and say: ‘Please support your women. Here’s a scalable, affordable way to do it’,” she explains.

“It’s like a mash-up of proper coaching support, NCT in terms of its community webinars, where they meet other women going through mat leave at exactly the same time as them, but working women who have a very different lens on life. It’s a Mumsnet type for working mums and a platform that really supports each other.”

Being prepared to have honest conversations is central to Maunder’s approach. She has identified, for example, what she calls ‘The great maternity leave trap’. Maunder describes this as a scenario where extremely capable and high-performing women embark on mat leave, go through the steep learning curve of early parenthood and return to work fully intending for the childcare to be a 50/50 split with their partner – if they have one. However, in practice, many find that’s not always the case.

“Two years later, they turn around and go: ‘Well, this is a disaster.’ Then they go: ‘I can’t do it. It’s all too hard.’ And then they go ‘It’s not worth it’ and they give up, and we lose 55% of our women. That is a societal tragedy, because then we wonder, where are the women at the top?” she says.

For this reason, Maunder coaches mothers to have a conversation with their partner, before even giving birth, about what life will look like when she returns to work, setting her – and by extension the family – up for success.

This moment of embarking on motherhood is, Maunder points out, the start of the gender pay gap becoming entrenched, as women are forced out of the workforce, give up full-time work or level down their expectations.

“This is where this great divergence happens and yet nobody’s helping these women, and what I can see, which is why I’m so passionate about this business, is with a bit of grounded, genuine, useful support it really can make a massive difference,” she says.

“I can’t fix childcare costs, but I can fix confidence and the ability to own it, to manage it and to get that partner support from the get-go, because no one’s having this conversation.”

Avoiding tripwires

Another crucial conversation Maunder coaches women to have is around pay prior to going on maternity leave. Regardless of when the pay review typically happens, she urges women to ask for the meeting before they depart.

“Women are going ‘I can’t ask for a review now, because I’m about to have a year off. They know I’m going on maternity leave and I certainly can’t ask for a pay rise.’ But if you weren’t pregnant you’d be asking for a pay rise. What’s going to happen to the last 10 months of work you’ve just done?” she asks.

Then when they return, working mothers often hold back on asking for a pay rise again because they’ve been away and wait another year to broach the subject. Maunder estimates three years of pay rises are lost for every pregnancy.

“I understand they take a gap out of work. It’s difficult for everybody, but it is life,” she states.

“Yet these women feel like they can’t ask for a pay rise, they can’t ask for a promotion. They come back and say: ‘The last thing I want right now is a promotion, because I’ve lost my confidence so I can’t do it anyway… But then they’ve lost two years.”

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The maternity coach also advises women to think clearly about flexible working and resist boxing themselves into routines that don’t have resilience built in. She gives the example of a business needing a working mother to be in the office for 9am and her having to refuse because it doesn’t fit with the childcare pattern.

“That’s a massive disadvantage for women, because they haven’t got the resilience and support to be able to manage on the days when the business needs them, so their career can progress,” Maunder argues.

“You don’t want to be the person going ‘I can’t do that’. You want to be the person going: ‘With notice I can fix that. I’ve built in resilience to my support, which means either my partner will do it or my mother-in-law will do it, or a friend will do it.’ But don’t say ‘No, I can’t do it’ because that’s a problem for businesses and it’s a problem for your career in the long run.”

She is determined women aren’t “tripped up” by things like not having a pay review, failing to speak to HR about their flexible working arrangements, and not doing their keeping in touch (KIT) days to lay the groundwork for their return.

Maunder coaches women to understand their ‘Why do you work?’ truth, understanding of which she believes can help prevent them being pushed into leaving the workforce. Remembering your ‘Why’ means on a really bad, day when everything goes wrong, women can appreciate how much their career matters to them and that “tomorrow is another day”.

From an employer perspective, the damage to company culture of failing to support working mums is “huge”, Maunder adds. She argues that apart from the clear employer branding benefits, keeping women in the workforce creates value for businesses.

“Working women are literally some of the most awesome, industrious, effective, brilliant brains you can have in a business, especially in our industry. Losing them is a societal tragedy on so many levels. The ramifications are huge and endless,” says Maunder.

Supporting working mums says a lot about the kind of organisation you are, she adds.

“It doesn’t take much just to signal to women: ‘We’re on your side. We value you. Please come back and be happy here. We want you to stay’.”