Episodes

  • The Matriarchy Would Never Assume You Are The Safety Net

    The Matriarchy Would Never Assume You Are The Safety Net
    Nov 5 2026

    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
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    56 mins
  • The Matriarchy Would Never Sell You Patriarchy in Pink

    The Matriarchy Would Never Sell You Patriarchy in Pink
    Nov 5 2026

    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
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    41 mins
  • The Matriarchy Would Never Leave You Out Of Your Own Business Plan

    The Matriarchy Would Never Leave You Out Of Your Own Business Plan
    Nov 5 2026
    When you sit down to set your goals for the year or the quarter or even the month, do you make sure that YOU are in the plan too?After years of running the 90 Day CEO Retreat, there’s one major planning mistake we see again and again. Women who invest in resourcing their businesses without blinking struggle to spend that same time, energy, and money resourcing themselves, because spending on the business reads as ambition and spending on yourself reads as indulgence.That’s exactly why it feels impossible to actually follow through with that plan you so carefully mapped out for your business.We tend to set big business goals and write plans for a version of ourselves that doesn’t exist. The version that has unlimited time and energy, and more importantly, the version that never has to take time off to take care of a sick kid or help your parents downsize into senior living. So when there is a glitch in the matrix, and someone else needs you to step in to handle something (because guess what – you’re the safety net for everyone else), there isn’t any buffer in the plan.This is the episode where The Matriarchy Would Never Series shifts from deconstructing a patriarchal approach to business to building something that actually works for you and your real life – starting with redefining what success on your terms actually looks like for you. I promise you’ll want to grab a pen so you can go through this series of questions before you create your plan for 2027!What You’ll Learn in This Episode→ Why you need to create your own definition of success by looking at your life & lifestyle, health & wellbeing, family & friendships, creativity & fun, and spirituality & connection to self (and why I don’t measure success by my business first)→ Why I always consider the season of life and business I’m currently in, including how this actually looks in my real life day-to-day→ Why women entrepreneurs have an easier time spending money to resource their business than spending money to make their daily life significantly easier.→ Why I almost lost it when my husband asked me for a list to ‘help out’ – and the solution that has been a game changer both in our marriage and working together in the business.→ How I realized that I inherited impossible standards that were making everyone in my home miserable and how relaxing those have dramatically improved my quality of life.→ Do you know exactly how many hours you actually have in a typical week to work on your 90 Day Plan? I share exactly how many I plan for that helps me avoid putting too much on my plate.Resources MentionedThe CEO Ceiling Assessment.If you ran this exercise and something came back empty, this is where we find out why. Fifty minutes, live and free, and you score five capacity domains green, yellow, or red as we go. Tuesday, October 20 at 12pm ET, replay if you can’t be there live. The Get Paid Calculator. The $47 tool I mention in the life and lifestyle section. It works out what you need to pay yourself to live the life you want, then reverse engineers the revenue goal from that number, which is the right order. The CEO Collective®. The membership where service-based, relational business owners install the 90 Day CEO Operating System® and plan from their real capacity instead of an imaginary one. It is why Thursdays on my calendar belong to the members.The Matriarchy Would Never: Assume You Are The Safety Net. Episode 1 of the series, on the business advice that quietly assumes somebody else is handling life at home. This episode is the build that answers it. The Matriarchy Would Never: Sell You Patriarchy in Pink. Episode 2, on who is selling entrepreneurship to women and the personas built to make you trust them faster. The Matriarchy Would Never: Shut Down Your Critical Thinking. Episode 3, on manipulative marketing tactics and the one question that tells you which side of the line a tactic is on. It ends by promising this episode. Connect with Me:Instagram: @racheal.cookTikTok: @rachealcookmbaLinkedIn: @rachealcookYouTube: @the_ceo_collectiveWebsite: The CEO Collective
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    53 mins
  • The Matriarchy Would Never Treat You Like a Transaction with Cris Caruso

    The Matriarchy Would Never Treat You Like a Transaction with Cris Caruso
    Nov 5 2026
    There’s a continuing education course in financial services where advisors get reminded to talk to both people sitting across the table from them. As in, actually have a conversation with the wife. That one reminder tells you a lot about the client experience women have been handed when it comes to their own money.My friend and client Cris Caruso (who first joined me on the podcast here) came up in that industry, and she watched what happened on the back end of it. When a woman who never had a relationship with the advisor was widowed or divorced, she walked away. Of course she did. Nobody had ever bothered to build one with her.The default setting, especially when it comes to money, is still that the man is the one who manages it, and an entire industry was built around that assumption.So Cris built Savoire Financial here in Richmond, and it just turned four. It’s woman-owned and queer-owned, built for Gen X and elder millennial women who make the money decisions in their households, who are often the breadwinners, and who have never once seen themselves in the financial services industry.She also brought a hospitality background into one of the most transactional industries out there. How? By building systems. When a client moves, a welcome-home card and a return address stamp with the family’s name show up from an Etsy seller her team has worked with for years. When her federal employee clients were carrying the weight of DOGE last year, her team sent care packages. And her practice grows primarily through referrals, because referrals only come when people feel cared for.And then she took the entire month of August off. We started planning that sabbatical together in January, and she walks through exactly how her team and her clients were ready for it.This conversation is part of The Matriarchy Would Never series, and it’s what the whole series has been building toward – a business where everyone at the table wins. Grab a notebook for this one, because you’re going to want to steal at least three of Cris’s ideas for your own clients!About Cris CarusoCris Caruso is the founder of Savoire Financial, an independent financial planning practice in Richmond, Virginia, built for Gen X and elder millennial women who are the financial decision-makers in their households, and for LGBTQ+ clients who were taught that money wasn’t for them. She has been in financial services since 2004, and she builds her practice around education, behavioral decision-making, and relationships.Cris is a twice career changer, with an associate’s degree in hospitality management and a bachelor’s degree in education, and she worked guest services and concierge in high-end hotels and on a cruise ship before she found her way into financial planning. She launched Savoire Financial in 2022, grows primarily by referral, and is a member of The CEO Collective®, where she plans her year (and her sabbaticals) on the 90 Day CEO Operating System®.Connect with Cris CarusoWebsite: savoirefinancial.comLinkedIn: Cris Caruso on LinkedIn, where she posts about current market events, financial news, and behavioral decision-makingWhat You’ll Learn in This Episode→ Why financial advisors still have to be reminded to talk to the wife, and what happens to that relationship the day she’s widowed or divorced→ How Cris brought a hotel concierge mindset into financial planning, including the welcome-home system that takes her team about five minutes→ The two premises Cris opens every new client conversation with, and why that’s the foundation of a referral-based business→ Why shame-based money advice keeps people from ever calling back, and how Cris delivers bad news in a way that is clear and kind→ How Cris planned a full month off this summer, from the decision tree for her team to Monday morning office hours (and why August was the only month that would work)→ What it means to work for enough instead of a never-ending more, and why some of her clients are saving so much for retirement that they aren’t living their lives todayResources MentionedUnreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. The book Cris recommends for anyone who wants to understand how the little things make people feel seen. If you’ve ever wondered how to bring a five-star hotel feeling into a service business, start here.Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. Brené Brown’s line that Cris leans on every time she has to deliver hard news to a client.How Cris Caruso Built a Financial Practice for GenX Women and LGBTQ+ Communities. Cris’s first time on the podcast, when Savoire Financial was just getting started. Listen to the two back to back and you’ll hear exactly how much has grown.Cris’s CEO Collective success story. How Cris built her first year with a foundation-first plan, in her own words.The CEO Ceiling Assessment replay. A free 50-minute workshop where you score the five areas that decide whether your business can run without you ...
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    44 mins