You've probably heard that saying that teamwork makes the dream work, but what does that actually mean for women entrepreneurs who are trying to not only grow their business but live their life? They're trying to raise their kids, trying to take care of their own health, trying to just have a beautifully full life. Today, we are talking about building your own support system and all of the different people who I have behind the scenes, helping me to show up and share with you each and every week, “This is how we make it happen.”

Are you ready to grow from solopreneur to CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Racheal Cook. I've spent the last decade helping women entrepreneurs start and scale service-based businesses. If you're serious about building a sustainable business, it's time to put the strategy, systems, and support in place to make it happen. Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, the hard lessons learned along the way, and practical profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.

Hey there, CEO. Welcome to another very real, very open, and honest behind-the-scenes conversation today on Promote Yourself to CEO. I want to talk about building your own support system because I find in my conversations with so many women out there, it is nearly a universal experience that we just don't ask for or seek out enough help and support. We tend to feel like we need to take it all on ourselves and this has led to so many women feeling overwhelmed, feeling exhausted, feeling like they're on the brink of burnout. There's another way that we can make ourselves have the support that we really know that we need in our lives.

I think this conversation is so important. I would love to hear more people talk about what it really looks like behind the scenes, who all is on their support system, their support team behind the scenes because when we're looking from the outside, looking in to a lot of the entrepreneurs that we might follow, people who are out there creating and doing all these amazing things, it's so easy to get sucked into comparisonitis and feel like, “They are doing so much, they are producing so much content, they are sharing so many things. How do they have the time, energy, and bandwidth to do that? I must be some failure because I can't seem to get it together. I can't seem to get all these things done.”

The truth is most of the people who are at the top of their field, who are the most successful entrepreneurs and small business owners, aren't doing this alone. They have a whole team of people behind the scenes, both on the business front and on the personal front. That's what I want to talk about today because this was a huge shift for me when I was getting serious about growing my business and I also had clarity in what I wanted this journey to look like. I knew that as an entrepreneur, it would be very easy for me to spend all my time doing work at the expense of my health, physical health, mental health, my family, nurturing friendships, giving myself time for rest in physical activity, nurturing my own creativity, just all of the things that create a beautifully full life. It's really easy to wake up and realize you haven't made time for any of that, so all of those areas of your life are just completely depleted. I knew that I needed to get support in place to make sure that I could live the life I wanted and grow the business I wanted. I knew I couldn't do it alone. Let's talk about the different areas you might want to consider when it comes to building your own support system.

Let's talk about the business side of things first because I think for a lot of us, this is the first area we start to think about. We're like, “I need to get an assistant. I need to get a bookkeeper. I need to get some people who are going to take some of this busy work or some of the admin or customer service work off of my plate so that I can stay focused on the higher level things that only I can do for my business.” That is where I started. I have had an assistant from basically day one in my business. I knew that I didn't have the bandwidth simply because my business started, then I had kids. I knew I needed support right out the gate. But over time, I've consistently reached out for more and more support in each area of my business.

Internally, in my team, as I started realizing I needed more help, I had my assistant first who was managing customer service and was managing admin types of tasks, then I needed a tech assistant because to be quite honest, I am just dangerous enough when it comes to the techy things but I knew that I didn't want to waste all my time trying to figure out how to make all the things work. Then I had one of my assistants moved up into more of an operations director role and we hired someone else to come in and be the customer service admin assistant. Over time, especially the last few years, I realized I needed more help in other areas of my business besides just the operations, admin day-to-day type of areas.

On the marketing and sales side, when I knew it was time to ramp up the growth for my business, I knew that the biggest thing that was holding me back was that I was the only person who was taking on the marketing activities. For a long time, I did all of this myself. I did all of the marketing work myself. I was creating my content every week. I was posting on social every week. I was writing newsletters every week. I was posting blogs. I was updating my website and tweaking my website. If you're anything like me, chances are you had to learn how to do a lot of these things, just because there's a lot that needs to be happening on the marketing front for your business. But ultimately, what I realized was a lot of the things that my time and energy was being spent on in the marketing side of my business were things that other people could handle for me. It would free up my bandwidth to not only do nurture marketing, which is my podcast, my newsletter, my social media, things that are going out to my existing community, but that would free us up bandwidth wise so that I could get more visibility for my business.

I could do more Attract marketing. This is where I have somebody on my team whose whole job is to go out and pitch me for podcasts. That's their whole job. Their whole job is to pitch me and book me for podcast interviews. This is hands down one of my favorite attract marketing strategies. For me, it works really well because it aligns very smoothly with my podcast. I find that if I'm interviewed on a podcast, those listeners tend to come check out my podcast, but I knew that if it was up to me, I could not stay consistent with pitching myself. In fact, this is one area where I was really limiting the growth of my business because when things got busy, I would stop pitching. I would stop following up. I would really only get these visibility opportunities when a peer, a colleague, somebody who was in my network was inviting me, not when I was being proactive about it.

That was a big shift for me, moving towards hiring somebody to help me with the visibility, hiring people to help me with the ongoing nurture marketing in the business, the podcast, the newsletters, the social, hiring somebody who was going to run and manage all of the ads, so this is another piece of our strategy. We don't always run ads but a few times a year, we do run ads to our Plan Your Best Year Ever Challenge or to the Fired Up & Focused Challenge. I have somebody on the team who manages and runs that. Then I knew that I needed some help with copywriting. Because of the way that my business operates, I spend a lot of time writing email copies for all of our promotions, all of our enrollment cycles for The CEO Collective. This used to be something that took up a huge amount of time. If you've ever put together a promotion to enroll for your signature offer, you know that there's just pages and pages, and pages of copy, like you have your whole sales page, you probably have anywhere from 7 to 12 emails going out and if you were to put it all together, it is so much copy that you need to create.

You probably want to freshen it up a little bit each time too so that you're not just sharing the same thing, so for me, hiring a copywriter to take on all of that work was such a game changer. It easily saved me so many hours. Honestly, she did a better job last year and the last two years than I could on my own because she wasn't so close to it the way that I was getting frustrated all the time that I was too close to everything and I was having a really hard time writing the copy. My copywriter was able to step in and totally help out with that.

On the marketing side of my business, I have six different people supporting me to help me get interviewed on a regular basis, to help me run Facebook ads and grow our audience in our email list, to produce my podcast, to create all the social media, newsletters, and all of those things. We have a graphic designer and a website designer who makes everything beautiful, and is working on our new rebrand. I have a photographer who I have a few times a year to create more social media imagery for us. That's a lot of people that I didn't have. Probably five or so years ago, I was trying to do all of those things myself. As I knew I wanted to grow the business, I knew I needed to pull myself out of the weeds of some of the marketing activities so that I could focus more of my effort on getting more visibility for The CEO Collective.

Now, on the tech and operations side, this is where having Amber Kinney on my team is just such a lifesaver because this is not my zone of genius. Like I said, I'm just techy enough. Because Amber is my director of operations, she reaches out and hires people to develop the website or to keep our membership site up and going. She has people who are doing the SEO type of things. If there's any techie things behind the scenes, making sure all the integrations work, all of that, she manages all of that so I don't even need to talk to the people who are working for her in order to make that happen but she has a handful of people who we outsource all of that tech and operations level stuff to.

Then finally, on the customer experience and delivery side, this was a huge shift for me over the last few years and this was me learning that I don't have to do it all by myself. I think if you're like me and you've been in your work for a long time, it's really easy to feel like you have to create everything for your clients. It's really easy to feel like you have to be the one to create all the resources, to create all the training, to create everything that you are providing for them. You need to be the one to be on all the calls. You need to be the one organizing everything. This last couple years has really, really changed the game for me here because I realized that my goal was to provide the container for the transformation we provide in The CEO Collective but I don't have to be doing all of the implementation of that on my own.

On the customer experience and delivery side, we have somebody who's on our customer support team, then they are there to answer all of our clients' admin issues, getting access to the member's site, getting them registered for events or things that are going on. She keeps all of the details running for everybody. She manages all the calendars, making sure everybody has all the links, things like that. We have a program coordinator who is responsible for checking in on all of our clients and making sure they have everything that they need. She facilitates our live mastermind calls, which again, is a huge game changer for me so I don't have to be the only one facilitating these things. We have a whole success team of mentors who provide accountability to each and every one of our clients. They check in on them, they help them get their 90 Day Plan fine-tuned, then are checking in with them every single week with our coaching platform to make sure that all of our clients feel like they're getting some momentum moving forward, implementing their plan.

Then we also have guest experts come in and teach to all of our clients. I no longer am the only one creating content for The CEO Collective. All of my core content is there. There's a lot of things I've created over the years and right now, I'm really not creating new content because a lot of my stuff is evergreen and is proven and tested. I'm working on doing some upgrades this year to the pieces that I have previously created, but what I have loved is bringing in these guest experts to deliver their own master classes on topics that I'm not an expert in, topics like understanding your financials, topics like understanding all the legal basics that you need in place, thinking about how you can manage stress as an entrepreneur, looking at the different way you can improve your messaging as an entrepreneur. I have all these amazing guest experts who come in, and because we've got such a smooth system in place, they can come in and teach their amazing content, provide value. We are so excited to have them as part of this community. It really pulled me out of the weeds from feeling like every month, I'm solely alone for creating new things for my community.

That's a lot of people behind the scenes. Those are just the people who I'm in contact with on a regular basis, who I would say are part of our core team. Then I also have my CPA, my lawyer, my diversity, equity, and inclusion coach. Also on my success team, I have people on my success team who are there for me personally to get the business support that I need. I consider this almost like my advisory board. I have coaches and other entrepreneurs who are really familiar with me, and my work, who see the vision that I have. These are the people who, if I'm trying to brainstorm a new idea, if I'm trying to work through a challenge I'm having, if I just need to download something and verbally go through it with somebody, I have my own team of coaches. I have people who I will pick up the phone and say, “Hey, I'm trying to work through this thing. Can I get your thoughts? Can I get your insight? Can you help me work through these challenges?”

On the business side, I have built out so much support for myself and this really allows me to stay in my zone of genius, it allows me to stay focused on the activities that are designed to grow the business, and it allows me to get my time back so that I can have a beautifully full life. This was so incredibly important for me. I leaned so hard into these people, especially last year when I had to take on my mom's care. My mom is disabled and wheelchair-bound, and I had to step in and manage full-time nursing care for her, which is five to six different nurses coming in and out of her house every single week, managing all of her doctor's appointments and really had to take all of this on myself. If my team wasn't running as smoothly as they have been, if they weren't operating at the level that we've been operating at, I wouldn't have had the bandwidth to take all of this on without it dramatically impacting my business, and it didn't. In fact, my business grew last year even though I was actually working less than I'd ever worked before.

The other reason I was able to do that is because I also have my own personal success team. I have my personal success team at home and I also have a personal care team to help me manage my health. Let me talk about the success team at home because I think this is an area where a lot of women entrepreneurs, I think we still buy into a lot of these old-fashioned beliefs of gender norms where we can have all the help at the office, we can have an assistant at the office, we can hire people in our business but when it comes to getting back our time on the home front, we tend to overwork.

The science, the research proves that this is common for a lot of us. Even if you have the most progressive partner in the world, women still predominantly are responsible for running the house, managing the house, taking care of kids, being the default parent. This is something that has required a lot of open and honest conversations with my husband. We've had to decide together where we really want to be spending our time as a family, as a couple, as parents, as individuals, what are the things that we want to be responsible for, and what are the things that we want to get support with.

This was a huge shift for both of us, to be honest, because there's a lot of, “Well, I can do that,” or “Well, this isn't that big of a deal.” From the very beginning, we had child care help up until the last few years. Our kids are older now, so we don't really need the level of child care help that we had when they were teeny tiny babies, but that was one of my other big decisions was I knew I needed to hire babysitter to come, be in the house with the twins when they were really, really small so that I could get a few hours to work. For me, it was totally worth it to do that instead of trying to work after the kids had gone to bed or trying to squeeze things in during nap time. That just didn't work for me very well. Personally, I am not a night person, I need my sleep, so we decided that having child care was a priority and we made that happen.

We also decided that neither one of us really liked to do some of the daily grind activities that all families have to deal with but for both of us, especially over the last couple of years, we knew that we needed some help. For the last couple years with the pandemic, our kids have been home. We decided to homeschool at the beginning of the pandemic. They have not been in school since that started. Thankfully, my husband used to be a seventh grade English teacher, so taking care of the education side of things is really easy for him but I didn't want him to feel like he also had to be solely responsible for all the housekeeping, all the laundry, all the cooking, all of that, so we reached out and found a housekeeper who could come about every other week to the house. That was a huge upgrade for us. Previously, we'd sporadically have people, but having somebody to come on a regular basis freed up so much bandwidth for us. During the warm months, we have a landscaper that comes and keeps the yard in good shape. Again, this was giving my husband back some time since he's homeschooling three kids.

We also invested in having some support with feeding everybody. This might sound so silly but maybe not. I know for our family, getting meals on the table every single day can be a challenge. It gets really busy and it's hard to think about planning, we aren't that great at meal planning ourselves, so we got a Hellofresh subscription and have loved that, about three meals a week from our Hellofresh subscription. It shows up every week. We pick out the meals we want, all the ingredients show up. It's really easy to put together. It saves us a lot of energy when it comes to meal planning.

More recently, I decided to go ahead and sign up for a meal prep service, which thankfully, it's my brother-in-law's company, but he's a trainer and nutritionist, and he started a meal prep company where you could buy six, eight, ten meals a week and he will deliver them to you. They're already made, they're fresh, they're really healthy, they're all balanced based on your nutrition plan. For me, that became another easy, like yes, to say absolutely, I will do that because now I don't even have to think about what am I going to eat. It has dramatically reduced how much I eat out during the week because I know I have a refrigerator here at the office full of freshly prepped meals.

Who else is on our personal success team at home? One of the other things that we do is we just connect with each other on a regular basis to see where else we need help or where else we are stuck. There have definitely been times where we have brought in an organizer to help us get organized with a bunch of paperwork. We've had a personal organizer come in and organize our office and our paperwork. We've had people come in to help us set up some systems, just to keep all of this daily activity going in our business or in our life. This is just where I would say, if you are finding there's an area of your personal life that you're wishing it could be a little easier, chances are there's a company, there's a service out there that would free up some bandwidth for you. Yes, it will cost a little bit of money but I have found that I would much rather pay our housekeeper to come and get the whole house in shape within three or four hours instead of me spending a weekend morning trying to get it all done myself. It gives us so much time and energy back. That time and energy back are things that we can then spend with our kids, we can have more quality time with our kids, we can be more present as a family, which I think is so important.

Now, the final area of my CEO support system has been my personal health care team. I wasn't sure if I was going to talk about this but I don't think I'm alone and that I've had some health challenges. Really the last, I would say, 15, 16 years, I have had pretty bad anxiety, which at times led to consistent panic attacks. I have some health challenges with things like my thyroid, things with my energy level. I have chronic pain that I'm dealing with on a regular basis, and a lot of me being able to have the energy and mental clarity I need to live my life and run my business, all comes down to my health. I've had to really invest in my health care team. A couple things that I've done here, I've definitely worked with, like I said, I have a meal prep service now and it makes it so much easier for me to eat healthy. Eating really impacts so much of my overall health and well-being.

I have had several different health coaches that I've worked with at different points, some who are focused on my overall mindset and habits, and some who are working with me more on things like, “Here's your workout plan,” that type of thing. I have a concierge doctor, which was a huge, huge investment for me. I never would have thought I would have said yes to that but I was finding myself so exhausted and so just feeling flat, like I had nothing left to give and a friend of mine said, “Oh, I have this great concierge, functional medicine doctor.” I didn't really understand what that meant but I knew something was wrong even though my regular doctor said all my labs were fine.

When I started going to see this concierge doctor, it was an annual fee of $3,000 to be a part of this practice but she only has a few hundred clients and I spend so much time with her. My physical every year is a two hour process. They check my labs every 90 days. Because she's a functional medicine doctor, she was able to find things that my regular doctor wasn't finding, like diagnosing a thyroid problem, helping me realize that I had some serious deficiencies in a lot of different vitamins and minerals that I needed to work on getting those up. She helped identify some other health challenges that were leading to chronic fatigue and chronic pain. Because she used this functional approach, we were able to really dial these things in. The return on my energy has been amazing. Those are a lot of big investments I feel because for a long time, I wouldn't invest in my health care in the way that I have over the last few years. I'm just so incredibly grateful that I did because it has made such a massive, massive impact for me.

The other person who, I would say, is on my personal care team is my therapist. I'm really lucky that I've had a relationship with this particular therapist for several years prior to the pandemic. But I remember the week that the pandemic started and I was starting to wrap my head around how intense this was going to be for me as somebody working with, and supporting and leading business owners. I reached out to her and I said, “Hey, I need to be on your calendar on a regular basis because I'm about to take on a lot of emotions and anxiety from other people. I need somewhere to process that.” She has been just such an anchor for me in this really, really intense couple of years. While I'm not as frequently seeing her, just knowing that I have somebody who I can go get on a call with and unpack some of these things that I might have been holding on to before, it makes such a massive difference. That's a huge part of my own personal care team that I think we don't talk about enough is getting the support you might need for your mental health.

One of the things I did this past year was I went to this program in Tennessee called Onsite. I did their week-long healing trauma program. It was an intensive therapeutic program that I heard about from some therapists I'd worked with. It was just incredible to give myself permission to really take care of healing some trauma that I had been still feeling stuck with. That's a lot. It takes a lot of people behind the scenes to support me. I do not do all of this alone. I think any time you see somebody out in the world who is showing up a lot, who's creating a lot, who it seems like they have it all figured out and they just, “How do they manage to get this stuff all done?” I promise you, they have a team of people behind them. They're either a team in the business, so people actually implementing things in the business, keeping the business running day-to-day and moving forward.

They might be advisors and experts that they reach out to and get support from. They might be people actually in their physical home who keep the home front moving, so when you are home, you can spend more time being focused and present. They might be people helping you with your health. They might be people actually actively helping you make sure that your body is working at the highest level it possibly can, that you are able to have the mental clarity you need, you're able to have the focus you need, you're able to have the energy you need. I think because I've had all of these different layers of support in my life and in my business, I was really tested last year when I had to take on my mom's care, not because I don't love her and wouldn't do it, of course, I would want to take care of my mom however I can, but it is very emotionally draining. Anyone who's had to care for an older parent, you probably understand that it is very emotionally draining to go through all of that.

If I didn't have this level of support system, I don't know how I would have gotten through that year, taking that on in addition to being an entrepreneur, a wife, and a mother and trying to squeeze some time for me in as well. I hope this gives you a little bit of a permission slip to ask yourself, “Where do I need support? Do I need support on the business side? Where do I need support in the business so that I can stay focused on my zone of genius? Do I need people in my corner who I can bounce ideas off of, who can challenge me, who can encourage me to step out of my comfort zone and into my growth zone? Do I need people on the home front to be my personal home success team? Do I need somebody to tackle some of these things so that I'm not spending the precious free time I have, doing the daily grind work at home? Do I need a personal care team? Is there an area of my health, physical and mental health, that needs to get some love and attention? Do I have people making sure that I am able to show up and that I have the deep reservoir of energy to draw from when times get tough? Do I have those people helping me make sure that I'm showing up the absolute best that I can?”

I hope this helps, I hope this gives you some insight, and I hope this really gets you asking yourself some questions about, “How can I get more support for my life and my business?” If you love this episode, please let me know. I want to hear from you, who's on your success team? Who's making it easier for you to show up 100% in alignment with your values, your vision, and just who you want to be in this world? I would love to hear from you. Sometimes, whenever y'all share with me who else is in your success team, it gives me more ideas of where else I could ask for some help in my life or my business, so I'd love to hear from you. Please tag me on Instagram @racheal.cook and let me know who's on your success team. All right, thanks so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon.

There seems to be this invisible ceiling in a lot of entrepreneurs growth journey where despite the fact that they are doing all the right things in their business—they are doing their marketing, they're doing sales activities, they have a great product, program, or service to deliver, they have clients they love—it feels like they hit this invisible ceiling on their growth and no matter what they try to do, and no matter how hard they try to work, they continuously find themselves plateaued at this level of growth. What is going on here? If you have ever found yourself in this situation, you feel like no matter how hard you work, you can't seem to get over that plateau and back into growth mode, you're going to want to listen in because today, we're talking about the three big shifts you need to make to get back into your growth mode.

Are you ready to grow from solopreneur to CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Racheal Cook. I've spent the last decade helping women entrepreneurs start and scale service-based businesses. If you're serious about building a sustainable business, it's time to put the strategy, systems, and support in place to make it happen. Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, the hard lessons learned along the way, and practical profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.

Hey there, CEOs. Welcome back to another episode here on Promote Yourself to CEO. We are continuing this conversation from the previous episode where I shared six ways to work smarter, not harder, for entrepreneurs and CEOs who are wanting to continuously grow their business but in a very sustainable way. One of the things that I have seen over and over again is that there becomes this point where a lot of businesses start to plateau, where their growth hits a certain level and it feels like no matter how hard you work, no matter how many hours you put in, you just can't break through. This happens often when I am working with entrepreneurs who have already hit their first six figures annually in business and now they're working towards multiple six figures in their business so that they can pay themselves a six-figure salary.

Once you get to this point, it starts to feel very exciting because $100,000, $150,000, $200,000 a year of take-home income, a professional salary, that gets really exciting. That's when you really start to think about all of the things you can do for your family. This is when, if you are thinking about investing into your children's future or buying an amazing house or really creating wealth for yourself and your family, it can really happen. This is the level where you're able to do things, like allow your spouse to leave the job that they don't love anymore so they can get on the path to creating something that they do love. It's a very, very exciting level. But there are a few bumps in the road often when we start hitting this level. Yes, part of it is what got you here won't get you there. We talked about that in some of the lessons to work smarter, not harder, but when we start really thinking about what practically you need to do, there are three key shifts that are really helpful to think about to get you through that growth plateau.

If you've been feeling stuck in growth in your business, your business has been hovering around the same level for a long time and you know you just can't work any harder, then keep on listening here. Often, this ceiling is created because we have created it ourselves. We didn't mean to but it happens. We max out on clients, we have as many people as we feel we can reasonably serve, we max out on our pricing, so we've really hit the highest limit we can in the price range for our offer and we sit there, and are going, “What do we do next?” This is where we need to start shifting how we're thinking.

First off, first big thing, I want you to make sure that you are focused on what your time is being invested in. Too often, I see entrepreneurs who are spending a lot of their time on the busy work in their business. They are doing what I call $10 an hour activities. Now, if you have followed along with the podcast for a while, you've probably heard me talk about the Entrepreneur Scorecard. I have an entire episode breaking down exactly what this is. The scorecard is a huge part of our 90 Day CEO Planner that we sell but what the scorecard is all about, it's all about giving a dollar amount to the activities you are doing. It's not about how much you're actually invoicing and making in the business but what it does is help you to understand the value of your sweat equity into your business.

I didn't come up with the idea of a scorecard. This came from the book Marketing 80/20. They broke out a lot of the core tasks in a business and assigned each of them a value. There's $10 an hour tasks, $100 an hour tasks, $1,000 an hour tasks, then $10,000 an hour tasks, six figure CEOs that are creating a sustainable business where they're not having to hustle and work so hard. They know that their time and energy really needs to be spent doing the CEO level work that only they can really do. They know that if they are spending their time and energy in a $10 an hour bucket, doing those lower value tasks, then they will use up all the time that is available for them to work. Not only will they use up a lot of that time, by overworking in this way, their research has played out. Once you work over 35 hours a week, there are diminishing returns on your productivity. You have used up your brain power. Your brain needs a chance to rest, recharge, and recover from all of that work. If we are spending all of that mental energy on tasks that aren't the ones that are moving the business forward, that are really the ones that only we can do, then we're wasting so much resources here.

What are these different tasks? $10 an hour tasks are going to be mostly admin, customer-service level tasks. This is managing the inbox, managing your calendar, and sending out invoices. These are things that you can easily delegate to somebody. You can bring on an assistant. You can have a bookkeeper. These are things that are pretty easy and honestly not very expensive to outsource. They must be done but these types of tasks are really just going to maintain your level of business.

Now, the next category is $100 an hour tasks. These are more skilled tasks and often, these are things that, again, are maintaining your current level of business. These are going to be things like your ongoing marketing activities, like writing a blog post or creating a newsletter or putting stuff on social media. A lot of these activities are going to be those nurture marketing activities, so the things that are just keeping you top of mind to your existing audience. These activities could also be things like working with your clients. Again, this isn't about how much your clients are paying you. It's not about actual revenue numbers here, but I put it in this bucket because this is generally a maintenance area for your business. If you're focused mostly on the $10 and the $100 an hour activities, then basically, what is happening is you are putting your time and energy in the maintenance level. You are not putting your time and energy in growth level activities.

What are the growth level activities? These are the $1,000 and $10,000 an hour activities. Most of these are going to be related to Attract marketing, to sales, and to new business development, to more strategic activities. These types of marketing activities are going to be the Attract marketing activities, like pitching yourself to be interviewed on podcasts, getting publicity and media coverage for your business, running advertising campaigns to grow your business. These are activities that are getting you in front of new audiences. Often, they're going to be, again, putting yourself out there in the media, getting interviewed, being a public speaker. It's all about visibility. These are the things that get you in front of new potential clients and they grow your community, and your audience.

The second category here is sales activities. These are where the actual invitation happens. This could be sales activities. What I like to say here is the $1,000 activities are mostly sales activities that are prepping for the sale or their one-to-one sales. This could be creating a sales page for your offer. It could be pitching your offer. It could be having one-to-one sales conversations. It could be creating a webinar or a challenge or some mechanism that is designed to invite people to join your product, program, or service. The $1,000 an hour bucket is also where I put a lot of these strategic planning and new business development. This is where you are sitting down and having your CEO Date. You're planning your quarter, you're looking at how you're hiring your team and who else you need on the team. This is where you're planning out the vision for the business in the future and how you're going to get there.

Now, how do you get to the point where you're spending more time in that $10,000 an hour bucket? Honestly, this is all about getting in front of lots of people at a time. The $10,000 an hour activities are going to be the very high visibility activities. Anytime I am being interviewed for someone else's podcast, I track that in my planner as a $10,000 an hour activity. If I am being on the local news show, then I track that as a $10,000 an hour activity. If I am at a networking event, I track that as a $10,000 an hour activity. That's because that is how valuable it is to my business. This is such a game changer when you start to think about these things.

The big thing I want you to take away, and if you want to dive more into the idea of an Entrepreneur Scorecard and actually begin using one in tracking your time and seeing are you spending your time mostly in the maintenance mode for your business, the $10 and $100 an hour tasks or in the growth mode for the $1,000 to $10,000 an hour tasks, then we need to start shifting you and the way you're spending your time and energy. If you are letting those lower value tasks, the maintenance mode tasks, take out the majority of your week, what they're actually doing is wearing away at your capacity to show up for the higher level things and get the results that you want. Those are the activities that we really want to think about, “How can we outsource these? How can we put a system in place to make it really easy to have those things taken care of? How can we get a support team member in place to handle those things for you, so pulling you out of the weeds of your business and helping you to stay focused in growth activities?”

This leads to the second big shift we need to make at this point. I know so many people who have successfully built a six or multiple six-figure business and again, they hit this plateau of how much they can grow their business. It's usually because they are struggling with the idea of hiring a team, they're struggling with the idea of getting support in their team. Often, the conversation goes something like this, “It doesn't make sense for me to pay somebody to do this because I can do it. In fact, it takes so much time for me to teach somebody how to do it the way that I want it done. I might as well just do it myself.” While that might be true the first time, for a lot of these day-to-day activities, you recruit back so much time when you are able to hire someone to handle your email, to manage your calendar, you might find that even five hours a week of admin and customer service support, you might pay $100, $150 an hour for that but the trade-off is that then you are freed up to spend five hours a week on those higher level growth activities in the visibility marketing and the sales area of your business.

That's when you free up the bandwidth you need. If you haven't been able to create a more leveraged offer, maybe you haven't been able to create a workshop or a webinar or a training, then now you have time in your calendar to start creating that leverage in your business. You might pay a little bit, yes, to get those tasks off your plate and it is going to be a bit to get that person on board, so they can handle those tasks but it frees up so much of your time and energy to go after the higher value tasks. Higher level CEOs don't look at these types of tasks and think, “Well, I can manage my own calendar, so I should do this because I want to save a little bit of money.” Instead, they think about, “How can I free up more of my time?” Growth mode CEOs are always thinking about, “How can I conserve my time, my energy, and my focus to put them towards the growth activities?” They know that they can take these lower level things off their plate. That means they can shift their focus to what's actually going to move the needle in their business.

A huge part of this is hiring people who can implement for you. This is another challenge I see often, especially for entrepreneurs who are really uncomfortable with hiring people to implement for their business. They tend to do the same things later in their business that help them get going. Often, when a lot of us are getting started, we have to learn how to do all the things because we don't have the resources to go out and pay for help. Yeah, that makes total sense but what I tend to see is people who continue to invest in information instead of investing in implementation. I see people who are continuously signing up for more and more and more online courses who are signing up for more and more and more training so they can learn how to do all these things, so they can learn how to figure out all these things. They don't have any resources left to get somebody to implement that thing for them.

The way this often plays out is, let's say, you're spending $5,000, $10,000 a year on online courses, which is really easy because they range anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to several thousand dollars and now, you just have a list of all the things you need to implement but because that was your budget for getting things up and going in your business, you have no more resources to go hire the person who could set up the funnel or who could help you create the webinar or could help you actually implement the thing you just learned about. Now, you're still stuck a little in the weeds as you're trying to figure it all out yourself. This is a massive shift. I see people who join us in The CEO Collective and they will have been in our world, on the email list for six months a year, sometimes even two years, then finally, they join us to get some support and learn how to implement, and learn how to bring those implementation roles into their business.

Just know that if you find yourself at that stage where you're getting clients in the door and you just can't figure out how to scale anymore, like you know you need to be doing those higher level activities, especially visibility activities to get in front of more people but you just don't have the bandwidth, you don't have the time or the energy or the resources to make that happen, chances are it's because you need to get out of the weeds and get some support with the implementation. Instead of learning how to do it all yourself at this point, we need to start hiring experts, we need to start hiring people who can help you get there faster and help you implement a system that already works instead of trying to figure it all out from scratch.

I know that this has been something that for me, it took a long time for me to admit I needed this help. When I was at this type of plateau in my business, a lot of it was because I was so focused on two areas of my business. I was focused on the marketing activities—and that was my main area that I was responsible for in the business, and I was the only person doing those things—then the delivery of our service, of our product, programs, and services where I was the only person responsible for delivering those things. I realized that I needed to get other people in my team enrolled in these different areas so that I could free up my bandwidth even more and stay focused on the only part of it that only I can do.

For example, instead of me editing this podcast—and that's a core marketing activity—I have a team behind the scenes who all I have to do is sit down in this chair, press record, and they handle every other part of producing it. They take it, they edit it, they upload it, they put the show notes together, they put the newsletter together, they do all the things. That frees up so much bandwidth for me. It allows me to do the part only I can do without getting caught in the weeds of the whole entire process. Same thing with my visibility strategy. I realized, if I was responsible for putting myself out there a lot, honestly, I was a lazy pitcher. The reason I had so many interviews come my way wasn't because I was proactively going out there, it was just because I had built this network over so many years and people would ask me. But I knew that if I wanted to get back into growth mode, I had to get more strategic and proactive about this. But I didn't have the bandwidth to focus on all the pitch, and follow-up, and all that goes into getting more visibility for your business, so I hired somebody to support me with that. At this point, I've had three different people support me with that, probably since I want to say 2019. It has made such a massive difference and definitely shifted me out of a plateau where my growth had stalled for a little bit.

The other part that has been so, so important for my business, hiring people who can implement for me and not just trying to do it all myself, was in the delivery of our products, programs, and services. In 2018, 2019, I started in my masterminds that I was running, having my team, my core team be a part of that because these were the people who were helping me do things in my own business. I knew they were really amazing at helping me and that my clients should have access to them too. That was such an eye-opener for me to realize that oh my gosh, maybe my clients don't just need time with me, they need time with people on my team. I don't have to be the only one to deliver this thing to them.

Since we rolled out The CEO Collective, we're now two years into this program that we are now 100% focused on for the business. My whole team is involved in delivering that for me, meaning I'm not the sole person communicating to all my clients. Each of my clients, they all have accountability mentors in the program to hold them accountable to the plans that they're making. I show up for the things where I can provide the most value, then I bring in my team who are amazing and who have so much experience and expertise in their own rights to deliver even more value to our clients. That has just been such a game changer, just really shifting how we think about putting support systems in place in the team.

All of this frees you up, like the first thing I talked about, focus on the growth level tasks, $1,000 an hour, $10,000 an hour tasks. That is the growth mode. With your team hiring implementers, stop trying to figure it all out yourself, stop trying to piece it together, stop taking another online course. I know for a fact that most entrepreneurs who are making multiple six and seven figures, they are not investing in courses anymore. They're investing in experts. They're hiring people to implement, to get the thing done because they know that that is the biggest ROI, it is the best way for them to get out of the weeds and to just get the strategy out there into the world.

Now, the final thing that you really need to think about—this is such a huge mindset shift—is you really need to be evaluating your role as CEO on a regular basis. I think one of the challenges that I personally ran into and I've seen with a lot of my clients is when we all start our business, and we are doing all the things, we get pretty good at a lot of them to be honest. Like we are so used to doing all these small things in our business, that even when we hire people to do them, we can find ourselves getting in their way. If we don't reevaluate our role as CEO, what I find happens is we release an area of our business for someone else to be responsible for, for someone else to implement, then because we aren't clear about what our new role is and where we should be spending our time and energy, we find ourselves dipping our toe back in to something that we have already hired out.

I know that for me, I have found myself doing this so many times. I had to give my team permission to say, “No, get out of here. This is not your responsibility anymore.” That was hard for me. That was so hard for me. A great example of this is my inbox. Even though I've had somebody manage my inbox for such a long time, there would be times where I would jump in and start responding to things, and my team would be like, “Racheal, get out of there. This is not your best use of time.” I don't always know what conversations have been had already with everybody who's in the inbox, so I would tell them like, “Hey, just lock me out of the inbox. If I don't need to be there, keep me out of it.” With the website, I am just techy enough, I am just dangerous enough but if I start getting in a mood where I want to tweak something, like I want a sales page to look a certain way or whatever, they kick me out of there so fast you would not believe because they know that is honestly just making their job harder for them to have to go in and clean up after me or have to fix something that I broke, which is totally possible. It is really, really important for me to be clear about my role as CEO and where I uniquely provide the most value to the business.

Each time I hire someone else on the team, I sit down and rewrite my job description. I think this is such a great practice because if you have been responsible for everything previously and now you're bringing someone else on the team, and they're going to take something off your plate, you have to be clear about what that thing coming off your plate means you were able to do and have that reminder all the time. I think this is just such an amazing exercise. Each time we hire somebody on the team, I sit down and rewrite my job description, I rewrite my responsibilities, I review our organization chart and who all is on the team, and I make sure everybody's clear about what this person's role is so that people aren't coming to me and I'm not becoming a bottleneck. I make sure all the communication channels are really well explained so that no one gets confused, then we end up double dipping on those specific tasks that need to be handled.

I think this is one of the simplest easiest ways we can get out of our own way is getting very clear on a regular basis. Again, if your team is in growth mode, you're probably bringing people back onto the team, hiring more people on a pretty regular basis, so you've constantly got to be reevaluating what your role is and make sure that your time and energy is spent in the highest value area, that area that only you can do.

I hope that helps because at the end of the day, if you are in a plateau in your business, if you feel like you've hit a certain level of growth and you've been here for a while, and you aren't exactly sure how to move the needle anymore, I really want you to think about these three shifts. I want you to think about these three things. One, where is your time going? Is your time in maintenance mode tasks, those $10, $100 an hour activities or is it in growth mode tasks, the $1,000 to $10,000 an hour activities? Second, are you getting a team in place who is helping you to implement in your business; and not just implement the basics admin customer service but implement things like marketing, sales, the delivery of your product, program, or service? If you are wanting to be in growth mode, you've got to stop getting out of information overload. You've really got to stay focused, both yourself and your team in implementation.

Then third, are you reevaluating your role as CEO? As you are growing and you are bringing people onto the team, are you getting in their way? Are you trying to double dip back into those tasks you tried to outsource? Are you micromanaging people? Are you finding yourself just not clear about what you should be doing and feeling like maybe you should take back things you tried to get off your plate? It is time to rewrite that job description and get super clear about where you actually provide the highest and best value.

This is an ongoing process. All of these things are an ongoing process. You can't just continue doing what you have done and hope that it will shift you out of a plateau and into growth. You've got to be laser focused and you need to be thinking a little bit differently about your business. If you want to work with us closer and learn more about these types of mindset shifts, and how we can support you, this is the work that we do inside of The CEO Collective. One of my favorite things that I do inside of The CEO Collective is to remind our clients and work with our clients again and again and again as they're implementing our 90 Day CEO process, is to help them make sure that the time they're spending every single week is in those growth mode activities. We help hold them accountable to see where they're spending their time and energy to make sure that they are going to get the results that they want to see.

If you're interested in joining The CEO Collective, we would love you to come check out more of the details and get on the waitlist for the next enrollment cycle. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. I'm going to be following up this conversation, talking even more about the types of support that a growth mode CEO needs to have in their business and in their life in the next episode. Make sure you are subscribed so that you get all of the upcoming episodes of Promote Yourself to CEO. If you love this and want to continue the conversation, please tag me on Instagram @racheal.cook. I would love to hear your biggest ahas, insights, and takeaways. All right, I'll talk to you soon.

Do you ever get frustrated when people say that you need to work smarter, not harder? This is one of those concepts that used to frustrate me so much because I was raised by two entrepreneurs who worked so hard. They really embrace the hustle to start and grow their businesses. I thought that success meant having not just a strong work ethic but a work ethic where you are willing to do anything and everything, you are willing to put in 80, 100-hour weeks. I think I'm not alone here. I think a lot of us saw, as an example, that success required really hard work and really long hours.

But as entrepreneurs, at some point, there's this point where we just can't work any harder in our business. It's almost like we hit a point where we have now become the bottleneck. There is a ceiling to how much growth we can achieve. How do you get to that next-level success? What does it actually take? Working harder is not the answer. In this episode, we're going to talk about six ways you can work smarter.

Are you ready to grow from solopreneur to CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Racheal Cook. I've spent the last decade helping women entrepreneurs start and scale service-based businesses. If you're serious about building a sustainable business, it's time to put the strategy, systems, and support in place to make it happen. Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, the hard lessons learned along the way, and practical profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.

Hey there, CEOs. Welcome back to another episode of Promote Yourself to CEO. If there is one thing I have really tried to share in this podcast over the years, it is that you don't have to sacrifice yourself on the altar of hustle and hard work in order to have a successful business. I have shared over and over again in so many different episodes that I only work 25 hours a week. I intentionally designed my business so that I could have a beautiful, full, rich life. People sometimes think that that's some magic trick when I tell them that I'm only working 25 hours a week, and still, my business has reached this level of financial success where I am able, as the sole provider for my whole family, to bring in my personal income multiple six figures and I'm able to support all these incredible people on my team. That is one of the most amazing things that we've been able to create. It didn't happen by accident. It was all very intentional.

When I show up and share ways that you can work smarter, not harder, I really am advocating for a huge mindset shift, a huge shift in the way we think about our relationship with work, our relationship with time, our relationship with how we think that in order to deserve the outcome of a successful business, we think we have to just sacrifice ourselves, burn ourselves out, and hustle and grind so hard. We don't have to. But this is contrarian thinking compared to the way most of us were raised, in the way most of us saw work. Here are six ways that you can start to work smarter, not harder.

First up, do less with more focus. Do less; that might sound so opposite of what many of us think we need for success, especially because we are in a world where we are told we have to do all the things. We have to show up everywhere, we have to try every marketing strategy, we have to have all these different things happening in our business. But I'm here to tell you that when you do less with more focus, you get exponentially higher return on that time and energy. As I've shared, when I started this business, I only had 25 hours to work a week and that was because I had small children. I had newborn twins at home and I knew that I needed to maximize those hours.

For me, I wanted to make sure that when I was at my desk doing work for the business, I was focused on the things that would have the biggest impact in my business. I was looking for the tasks, the strategies, the activities that were going to get the best result for my business, not the things that were just going to give me a bunch of busy work. In fact, anything that started to feel like busy work, I said no to it. I think a lot of times when people think about productivity, they think that it's all about learning to get as much done as possible, to work as fast as you can, and it's about just doing more things in a shorter amount of time. To me, that is the opposite of how I want to spend my days. I love having a relaxed pace through my day. I love feeling like I'm never in a rush. I love feeling like I can be in the flow with the work that I'm doing. I'm only able to do that when my time and energy is invested in activities that lead to the best results for my business.

How does this practically show up? One way that I do less with more focus is I have a signature offer. That is where the majority of my energy goes; to The CEO Collective. You will not find a ton of other offers that we are promoting. This is the primary thing that we are focused on. You can sign up for a CEO retreat once a quarter or you can go to our website and buy a CEO planner where most of my focus is on The CEO Collective. I also do this in my marketing strategy and my sales strategies. I am not trying to be everywhere. I am not trying to do all the things. I'm focused on the things that I know work really well for me. The podcast is a great example of this. Once I landed on the podcast—being my favorite way to share information, my favorite way to share content—and I realized that it really connected with you, my listener, I was like, “Okay, I can let go of a lot of these other things I felt like I should be doing and I can just stay focused on this.” Think and ask yourself what are the things that get the best results for you that you could laser focus on and let go of all the rest.

The second big way to work smarter, not harder is to remember that CEO does not mean Chief Everything Officer. This is a lesson I learned the hard way because, again, when we are type-A perfectionists, feeling like hard work is the answer to everything, we might have a hard time letting go of control of things in your business—I'm sure that doesn't resonate at all with any of you—chances are you're shaking your head right now like, “Yep, I'm also a slight control freak. I want things the way I want them. It feels easier to just do it instead of explaining how I want it done.” Then you find yourself feeling completely overwhelmed. You're working too hard because you can't let anybody support you. You can't allow help to happen. You have to remember that your role as CEO is not to do all of the jobs. It is really to fire yourself from all of the jobs that are not the ones you are the best at.

I look at this as it is all about, as CEO, how can I build a support system in my business and allow other people to fill in the roles, to take over the strategies, to own these different areas of the business, and get out of their way so they can do a great job? When I first started hiring for my team, I knew one of the most important things I needed first, one of the biggest areas I needed to get off my plate and was the day-to-day busy work that wasn't where I needed to be putting my time and energy, was some of the admin and customer service. I knew that I needed someone to manage my inbox. I needed someone to manage my calendar. I needed someone to make sure that client invoices were paid and we were on track of how many sessions somebody had left. I needed someone to do some basic administrative customer service types of tasks. These are the types of things that for a lot of us, it's not that it's hard, it's just that it's time consuming. This is really the day-to-day busy work. They can quickly take over our time and it can take up a lot of time on our calendar. I knew that was the first area I needed to reclaim my time so that I could spend it on the most important things that only I could do in my business.

The next area that I decided to get off my plate—and this was such a huge bottleneck for me—was I needed to get some of the techie stuff handled. Have you ever run into tech problems in your business? I know I have. I joke with people, I am just techie enough to get into trouble where my team now knows, if they see me inching towards the back end of the website, they're like, “Nope. Get out of there. Please don't play with that,” because they know that I know my way around it just enough to do the basics, but if I get going too hard, I will probably mess something up, lose an integration, or do something wrong. I realized that I was wasting way too many hours trying to figure these things out myself, especially in the early days. I realized that if I just hired somebody who knew how this stuff worked, it would save me so much headache and it would save me so much stress. Again, I could go back to doing the things that only I could do in my business.

Getting support, building a team, building systems, streamlining things, putting the right technology in place, these are the things that will really allow you to work smarter, not harder because you're not doing the busy work and you're not fighting against things you don't really understand how they work very well. I don't need to go out and become an expert in all the technology we have in my business in order for that technology to work. In fact, me going off and becoming an expert is the opposite of what I need to do. I need to be an expert in what I actually am an expert in. This is one area where I feel like if I can save another person 5 or 10 hours a week because they hire some support behind the scenes on these admin, customer service, techie-related things, even hiring like five hours a week of help could really pull you out of the weeds and give you back five hours to work on the higher level activities in your business.

Third, what got you here won't get you there. This is something that you've probably heard before. This is such a typical little phrase that people say over and over and over again. There is some truth to it. This is a big thing that I've had to go through once I find myself crossing another threshold in my business and things have to shift in order for us to reach that new level of growth in the business. You've probably been through this. I feel like there are certain times in your business when you cross the six-figure mark, you cross the $250,000 mark, or you cross the half a million dollar mark, there are certain breakpoints here where something has to shift behind the scenes for that to happen. There's now some capacity challenge somewhere where we have to shift things around. When I wanted to go from six figures to multiple six figures, a big shift for me was I needed to go from working one to one to having some more leveraged offer.

Before I decided to take my business more online in 2011—which seems like forever ago now—but prior to that, the first two or three years of my business, I was consulting in person. This was how I had been consulting when I was in corporate. You actually go boots on the ground into somebody's office and you're meeting face to face with people. That business was very referral based, it was very word of mouth and organic, which is a fantastic way to start a business. You know I love referral based, high-touch, word-of-mouth businesses. It's a great way to get started. But eventually, there comes a point where you've hit a capacity. You can't work more hours, you can't really take on more clients. You could just continuously try raising your prices, but there fundamentally is a point where you can't even do that anymore to see the big shift that you want in your business.

If you're running into that, if you're finding yourself realizing, “Okay, I really can't raise my prices much more. I'm at the top end of the price range for this type of offer. I don't have any more bandwidth. I know I need to really shift how I'm doing things,” that's when you have to start thinking about “How can I go from one-on-one to one-to-many? How can I create something that's a little bit more leveraged?” That's when I created my first online program. If you've also been somebody who has been growing an organic, referral-based, word-of-mouth business but then you get to the point where you realize that you want to grow beyond that—so you don't just want referrals to be the only way you're generating potential clients, you want to have other marketing channels that are bringing those potential clients to you—then, that's another shift. That means we probably need to start really building out a marketing system and a different path for people to become clients.

This was one of those pivot points where I realized that I couldn't hope that organic, referral, word of mouth was going to grow the next stage of my business. I knew I needed to add in more marketing channels and do things other than referral. I also knew one-on-one wasn't the way. I was going to have to create a more leveraged offer. I had another tipping point when I was crossing about $250,000 a year where I realized, “Okay, I need to hire more support.” Even though I was seeing some growth and seeing things happen, I found myself going through this period where I was really nervous to hire more support and step even more into the CEO role and let go of some of the tasks that I was still doing. That was a big shift for me. I knew that I could no longer stay where I was. I needed to let other people take ownership of these things in my business and I needed to get it off my plate. Every other stage where I've hit a tipping point, there's some big thing that happens that shifts the way that I work, shifts the way we look at the business, and it's something that happens every few years.

I remember even about 2018, when we decided to completely shut down one program and launch another program, it took us a couple years to decide how we were going to design and develop The CEO Collective. It was scary and we had to approach everything differently and think about things completely differently. Just remembering this for yourself is really helpful. There are points where if you're starting to feel like it's not working anymore, if you're starting to feel like you can't get the results that you're looking for, if you're starting to feel like you are just reaching some level of capacity or things are not flowing the way they should be, then you might have to be thinking, “Okay, what got me here isn't going to get me there. What do I need to change up?”

Fourth way to work smarter, not harder is to embrace rinse and repeat. I think this is one of the things that so many entrepreneurs find challenging because a lot of times we start businesses because we are that visionary creative person. We love coming up with new ideas. We love experimenting. While that is amazing to get that energy behind us and get a business up and going, it can also sabotage you down the road because if you're continuously recreating the wheel, then you're always starting over instead of building systems in your business that do the hard work for you. I know this might sound like I'm now giving you a completely opposite thought of the previous one which is what got you here won't get you there, where you do have to change sometimes, that's about when there's a reason to. This is about not just changing things because you're bored or not just changing things because you have a new idea.

One of the things that gives me so much freedom is that I have assets in my business. I think of all these systems that I have in my business as assets. I have a marketing system. I have a sales system. I have a delivery system for all of our offers. It means that if you have an asset, you do the hard work up front, you do the hard work once, and then that hard work pays off for you again and again and again. An example of this is if you have a signature offer. A signature offer is something that you put all the hard work into designing up front and then instead of creating the program over and over and over again, you can focus on the marketing and sales of that program. Now you have something you can sell again and again and again.

Even in the sales process, you can build assets around that. Every time we go to enroll for The CEO Collective, I don't create a whole new sales page. I might tweak a few things but I don't create a whole new sales page. I don't create a whole new launch strategy. We pretty much follow the same launch strategy over and over and over again. We might tweak a few emails but it's not recreating the wheel. We have a system that works. Eighty percent of it is there. We might adjust 20% each time we go to enroll. The marketing system is so rinse and repeat. If you were to look at my 90 Day Plan, you'd be like, “Oh, my gosh, you just do the same thing over and over and over again.” Absolutely. Every week, you get an episode of Promote Yourself to CEO, you get a newsletter announcing it. I have certain assets in the business that are growing our list. I'm actively going out there and being interviewed on other podcasts. It is all super rinse and repeat.

The beautiful thing about it being so rinse and repeat is the systems are fine-tuned, the systems work really well, people in the business know exactly how things work. Even if I have to step away from the business for a little bit, like I did last year when I had to take on helping my mom in managing her care for several months, the team was like, “No worries. We got it. We can keep these systems going.” That was magical. That was absolutely amazing. One of the things I'm just telling my clients all the time in The CEO Collective is, “Hey, once you have built the system, don't recreate it each time. If it's working, then you want to optimize it but you don't need to recreate it each time.”

Fifth way to work smarter, not harder: create the money you need to invest back into you and your business. Now we have talked a lot about investments in your business over the past few episodes. I talked about The ROI of Thinking Like a CEO, I talked about how to make the most of your investments, so this is tagging along with that. I will say that when I got started in my business, I was somebody who did not like being in any debt. I do not like debt in general. I had zero credit card debt. I didn't want to go into debt starting my business. I had just heard so many horror stories of people who went into a lot of debt in order to get their business off the ground. Now my relationship has changed a bit and I've learned how I can take other people's money, thank you so much, from the bank, and get a line of credit. I might pay a small interest rate on that but my ROI is so much higher, which is amazing.

But one of the things that I really, really know needs to happen is I have to invest back into my business and I have to figure out how to make that happen. If you are like me and you don't necessarily love having a bunch of debt, and maybe you started your business and you don't have a massive savings account, you don't have a trust fund, or you don't have a partner who is funding all of your lifestyle so you don't have to pay yourself anything right away, those are all amazing privileges that I didn't have. I knew early on in my business that I needed help and I needed support. I knew that there was a point where I didn't need another course to teach me how to do something. I didn't need to spend so much time on Google trying to figure out how to do it. I just needed to invest in getting the answers because that's the fastest way to get the answers, is to invest in the support or hire the expert so that I can move forward.

I started really working on my mindset around this and I started shifting my mindset. Instead of thinking, “I don't have money for this. I don't have money in my savings account. I don't want to go into debt for this,” I started thinking, “I can create the money for this.” That was such a huge shift for me. I started looking at new investments and realized, “Okay, if I need to hire this person to implement this thing in my business, I need three clients to pay for that.” I realized I could create the money I needed to invest into my business. We all have to keep in mind that there are investments we're all going to have to make in our business, there's no business that I know of that operates without some level of investment. We all need to continuously work on ourselves as the CEO of our business. We have to work on our skill set, we have to work on our leadership, we have to work on our mindset. There's so much we have to learn.

I can make a whole nother episode just about the mindset shifts you need to go through, but honestly, one of the biggest challenges that we all face as an entrepreneur—and I've seen this over and over again—where people let things throw them out of the game of entrepreneurship is because they're not changing the way they look at their relationship to money and the way that they're looking at investing into their business. If there's one thing that I have learned over and over and over again, it's that when I choose to think differently about money and investments into my business, when I choose to look at what's going to help me buy back my time, what's going to make this easier for me and the team, what's going to help us leapfrog over this learning curve because it's the right tool, the right technology, or the right strategy, when I start thinking differently and stop thinking of these things as expenses, and instead, really think about them as investments, everything starts to change. When I really started paying attention to, “Oh, I can create the money that I need in order to make that investment,” then I stopped cutting into my cash flow which ultimately meant cutting into my own personal take-home paycheck, which I didn't want to do. When I was able to shift from trying to squeeze money to invest in these things out of existing cash flow and instead focused on how I can make the money to make that happen, everything changed.

The sixth big shift to help you work smarter, not harder is to find a mentor and find, join, participate in a mastermind. This is such a hard lesson for a lot of us because I think a lot of us just have this belief that we should do it all on our own; that if you are in business for yourself, you have to figure it out yourself, and that asking for help is somehow not okay, that you should know how to do it. I'm here to tell you none of us started knowing everything about what being an entrepreneur was going to be like. I have an MBA in entrepreneurship and small business and I didn't know what being an entrepreneur was truly going to be like until I started going through it. I found over and over again that when you are in business for yourself, you are just going to come up against so many questions, so many scenarios, and so many situations where you have to figure things out. You could spend a ton of time trying to figure it out yourself, you could Google to your heart's content trying to find the right answer, but you can't really Google your way to success.

There are too many things out there that are going to pop up on your journey that you really need people that you can talk to. You need people who can see you, who understand you and your business, your strengths, and what you're about, your vision, your values, who can help you along this journey. We need those people in our corner. I think that's why having a mentor is so powerful because they know what you don't know. Most mentors are either subject-matter experts or they are further along in this journey. They know other things that you probably don't know yet because you haven't gone through them before.

There are a lot of things that are rights of passage that we all are going to go through and we don't know how to handle until we get there, like the first time you have a client who asks for a refund, or the first time you have somebody who's copying you and you have to send a cease and desist letter. There are so many things that happen that are just these random things you couldn't ever dream up when you sat down to become an entrepreneur. Having someone who's been there and done that is a game changer. Having someone who you can talk to, who can help you to navigate the future, that is huge. They really shine a big light on what you don't know that you don't know. They can really help you see the big picture and all the blind spots you might have because you don't have that experience.

A mentor might be paid, they might be free. I have a lot of people who are mentors and they don't necessarily know they're mentors of mine but I follow along with a lot of what they put out there. There are people that I learned from who have no idea I consider them a mentor but I read their books, I listen to their podcasts, and I've attended their conferences. They have given me so much incredible value. They have given me so much clarity and so much insight. Then there are people who I have invested into mentoring me. I've invested in coaches. I've invested in consultants and experts, people who are actually going to get to know me personally so that I'm not just getting one size fits all feedback, I'm getting something specific to me, which is just incredibly valuable. You can have a paid mentor. You could have mentors who don't realize that they are mentoring you but they are. It will help save you so many mistakes and so much time on this journey that you would probably spend years trying to figure out on your own.

Along the same lines here is surrounding yourself with a mastermind; finding people in your corner who are going along this path same as you are, who are navigating the same challenge as you are, and who can be peer-to-peer support. If you haven't participated in a mastermind—again, these could be free, they could be paid, they could be formal, they could be informal, they could be one time, they could be ongoing—there's so many ways to mastermind with other business owners, but I find over and over again that the beauty of having people in a mastermind, who get to know you and who get to know your business, these are the people who, as they get to know you better, they can tell you what they feel is a great idea or what is a distraction. They can call you out when you are hiding. They can tell that you are playing small or you're avoiding something.

These are the people who are going to pump you up when you just feel the worst about your business, because we all have those days where we are just like, “We're done. We want to throw in the towel. We hate everything. We hate everybody.” You need these people who you can text and be like, “I hate everything,” and they'll be like, “Right with you, sister, and I'll get back to work.” We need that. We all need those people in our corner because they will help us to problem solve, to hype you up, to give you feedback, to give you love, to give you support. These are two of the most important ways I think you can work smarter, not harder is having a mentor and a mastermind.

Now I will say one of the biggest challenges that a lot of people have is they try to get feedback from the wrong people. I want to be clear here. When I say mastermind, I don't mean going to get advice or feedback from just anybody. I mean, getting advice or feedback from the right people; people who understand you, who understand your business, who are also—as Brené Brown says—in the arena, who are doing the hard things, who are putting themselves out there. Those are the people you want to get feedback from. Those are the people you want to mentor you, the people who are actually doing the thing, not just people who want to get together, brainstorm, and talk about doing the thing.

That is what we do inside of The CEO Collective. I have to say if you have enjoyed this episode, then I hope you'll come check out The CEO Collective because this is a 12-month experience where we help women entrepreneurs to really embrace this whole work smarter, not harder mindset. If you've seen some success on your own and you know that you need a mentor and a support system, a mastermind to help you get to that next level of success without the hustle of burnout, make sure you come over to check out The CEO Collective.