When I first started my business, I remember being so frustrated that all the advice was ‘hustle harder’.

I was actively looking for my own coach in the summer of 2010, when my twins were about 6 months old, and I was trying to work out how to move a more traditional boots-on-the-ground, in-person local consulting practice to an online model using GoToMeeting and Skype (yep – we were in the early days of being able to work from home finally).

And so much of the advice I heard didn’t work because it wasn’t designed for me – a new mom, breastfeeding not just one but two babies, with a chronic illness, a spouse who also worked, and limited time, energy, and mental capacity.

• Attending conferences for education and networking? I was exclusively breastfeeding twins. Literally my boobs could never.
• Work 12 hour days? My chronic pain and fatigue maxed out at 3-4 hours of focused work before I needed a break.
• Fill your calendar with either sales calls or client calls? My husband was working as a teacher and didn’t get home until after 3PM. I didn’t have reliable childcare until then.

Most of the business advice always had an underlying assumption that someone else was handling LIFE. Someone else was handing childcare, planning meals, keeping our life running.

That’s because most accepted ‘good business advice’ or ‘best practices’ were created by men, for me. Specifically – for men who had a full-time stay at home spouse who took care of all behind the scenes details. So when I set the personal goals to ramp up my business to replace my six-figure consulting salary while working 25 hours a week (based on my actual capacity with chronic illness and as a new mom), most people didn’t believe it was possible.

Over 16 years later, I’m here to share that it’s 100% possible when you deconstruct the systemic patriarchy and hyper-capitalism approach that only works when women are the unpaid labor and safety net.

This is the first in a series of 5 episodes called The Matriarchy Would Never. Over five weeks we are going to take the things we have all been told are just the way business works, name the assumption sitting underneath them, and redesign so you can not only build your business, but build a business that continues to work for you even when your plans get derailed by a sick kid or a parent in the hospital.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

→ The book helped me explain to my husband exactly what the mental load looked like for me and the reason why ‘just give me a list’ was absolutely infuriating

→ Why I only build business strategy and 90 day plans based on 70% of my capacity (and what I focus on when I do have extra time available).

→ The questions I make every woman at the CEO Retreat answer before she writes a single line of her 90 day plan

→ Why the reason women entrepreneurs feel like they are constantly the bottleneck in their business

→ The difference between a massage that is self-care and a massage that is maintenance, and why only one of them protects your plan

Resources Mentioned

The CEO Ceiling Assessment. Free live class on Tuesday, October 20 at noon, walking through the five places your capacity is quietly maxed out and scoring each one green, yellow, or red so you can see where the actual constraint is. Replay goes to everyone who registers.

The CEO Collective®. The membership where service-based, relational business owners install the 90 Day CEO Operating System® and build plans that account for the life they actually have.

Fair Play by Eve Rodsky.The book that gave Racheal and Jameson the language for making invisible labor visible, including the difference between conceiving of a task, planning it, and executing it.

Fuck Patriarchy, Build Matriarchy Series by Wan Wan Luve. The Instagram series that inspired Racheal to create her own to primarily focus on women and business.

Connect with Me:

• Instagram: @racheal.cook
• TikTok: @rachealcookmba
• LinkedIn: @rachealcook
• YouTube: @the_ceo_collective
• Website: The CEO Collective

Somebody handed me a notebook in a conference swag bag in 2014. Rose gold foil. GIRL BOSS on the cover.

I was thrilled. I was in my early thirties with four year old twins and a brand new baby, building a business from the ground up, and after years of apologizing for being ambitious I was watching a whole generation of women get handed permission to want things out loud. Charge money. Take up room. Want more. Call yourself the boss.

What none of us could see yet was that the thing being handed to us was the approach we already had, in pink script font. It was the same hustle with better branding, the same expectation of sacrificing time with your family, and the same promise that if you wanted it badly enough for long enough you might eventually get to be one of the ones who made it.

Girl boss culture changed the vocabulary. It did not change the mental load, or the childcare, or who you call when a kid spikes a fever at 10 a.m., or who gets paid and who does it for free.

I call it patriarchy in pink, and this is the episode where I stop being polite about it. I also learned this model before I unlearned it, which is why this is not an audit of you. It is an audit of the structure that has been keeping many of us trapped in businesses that were never designed to fully support us.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

→ The reason the ‘girl-boss, boss-babe, boss-lady’ culture of the 2010s captured our attention and just as quickly fell apart.

→ How GenX and Elder Millenian women have watched entrepreneurship go from ‘I guess you just couldn’t get a real job’ to an aspirational title with visions of multi-million dollar valuations.

→ What a group of experienced women entrepreneurs hashed out during a peer-mastermind retreat that reshaped how every single one of us moved forward in our businesses.

→ How specific ‘celebrity entrepreneur’ archetypes have been carefully crafted to create a persona that is easy to trust and buy by short-cutting critical thinking and due dilegence.

→ If you’ve every raised a legit question and been answered with ‘just work on your mindset’, it’s a red-flag about the credibility and experience of the person who sold you the program.

Resources Mentioned

The CEO Ceiling Assessment.Free live diagnostic on Tuesday, October 20 at 12pm ET. Fifty minutes walking the five places your capacity is quietly maxed out, scoring each one green, yellow, or red so you can see which constraint is actually in your way.

The Matriarchy Would Never: Assume You Are The Safety Net. Episode 1 of the series, on the invisible labor built into almost every piece of business advice in circulation.

Kelly Diels on the Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand.The writer who named the pattern of selling women a lifestyle in the language of empowerment. If you are ready for a rabbit-hole that will open your eyes to how women tend to sell to women, start here.

Duped, with Maggie Patterson and Dr. Michelle Mazur. Two highly experienced communication experts and entrepreneurs, Maggie and Michelle’s podcast goes deep into the problematic practices that have invaded the entrepreneurship space. This episode dives into ‘celebrity entrepreneur archetypes’.

Adam Grant on culture versus cult. “The difference between a culture and a cult is whether people have the freedom to question and challenge the way things are done.” From his podcast Rethinking – Is your organization a little culty?

Connect with Me:

• Instagram: @racheal.cook
• TikTok: @rachealcookmba
• LinkedIn: @rachealcook
• YouTube: @the_ceo_collective
• Website: The CEO Collective