This episode is a little bit different. I'm not teaching a framework or a new lesson today, but I'm taking you behind the scenes to a decision I made and why I made it. Because if you have been in my world for any length of time, I feel you deserve to hear the real raw, unedited version. Over the last few months, while I was still finding my footing after losing my mom, I have rebuilt everything.
My entire website, my positioning, the way I am talking about what I do and who it's for—not because I had to, but because I realized I have been playing it safe in my messaging and that the women who need this the most weren't necessarily seeing themselves in what I have been putting out there. So I have been taking a stand, and today I want to tell you about what that stand is, why it matters, and why I think this is the most important thing I have done for my business in years.
And I want to invite you to something that I'll be hosting soon. Are you ready to grow? From solopreneur to CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host Racheal Cook, and 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, hard lessons learned along the way and practical, profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.
Hey there, CEO. Racheal Cook here, founder of the CEO Collective and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO podcast.
I am really excited about this conversation today because I'm taking you behind the scenes, really sharing with you from journal entries that I have from the last few months because things are shifting, things are changing, and I'm pretty excited about it and I'm really fired up about this conversation we've been having around your CEO capacity.
So if you've been listening to the podcast the last few episodes, then hopefully you heard the first episode in this series about why I don't build my business for my best days—sharing some of the insights I have as someone who has navigated chronic health challenges over the years and why it was so important to not design my business for my best days, especially navigating a year of intensive caregiving.
The second episode in the series, we talked about why you need more buffer in your business and my approach to making sure I am designing my business based on me being at 70%, not 100%. And what that actually looks like practically when it comes to my calendar and how I have built in that buffer, built in feedback loops so that I can be present, so that I can have the capacity to handle whatever life or my business is gonna throw my way.
And today I want to talk about why I am so excited to announce my new website and all the things I've been thinking about and working on behind the scenes. Yes, I rewrote my entire website. Before I tell you a little bit about that, I want to kind of circle back to why I decided to do that because that's a big undertaking and I've shared that the last few months I've been really taking it pretty easy, slowly easing back into my work, into my business.
If you have been following along, if you've been listening to the podcast or on my email list, then you know last year I was deep into caregiving. I had been taking care of my mom my whole life. She's been disabled since 1987, but I took over managing her nursing care and all of their finances about five years ago, six years ago maybe now, and kept my mom home as long as I could, making sure that she had 24/7 private caregivers coming to the house. But last April it became really clear that that was no longer safe for her or for my dad, in fact, and had to make the decision to move mom to memory care, move my dad to senior living eventually. Mom ended up in hospice and passed in December.
It was a pretty intense year or really intense year, and after that happened, I took some time off. I took about six weeks off the end of December for the holidays. I am so grateful for my village that showed up and kind of held me and brought meals and kept things going, and I allowed myself to take January to just rest because I was burned out.
Caregiver burnout is so real. I literally could not make another single decision at that point because I had had to navigate so many decisions, taking care of mom, selling their house, making medical decisions, et cetera. I was just tapped out. I was beyond tapped out. I had nothing left to give, so I had to take that time completely off.
And as I have been slowly easing back in the last couple of months, I've been slowly getting out into the world again and catching up with people that I hadn't talked to for a while. And if anybody has been through an intensive season of caregiving, you know how it is. Things that you used to attend or people you used to catch up with, suddenly it's you're resurfacing. So the first things they want to ask, how are you doing? I know you lost your mom, everything going okay. And then the follow up question would be, how's your business doing? And a lot of people were worried about me knowing that I am the full-time breadwinner here in my family and my house, and that my business is our livelihood.
So people were a little nervous for us. Is everything okay? And it kind of was surprising to me because my response was, my business did exactly what I designed it to do. It ran on cruise control. I was able to step back to about five hours a week, the things that were the most essential for me. And other than that, the team ran the business, the systems worked, things ran. Our clients were taken care of. And it has brought up a lot of clarity for me as I've been having these conversations because it made me really see how amazing that is. A lot of businesses could not survive what I just went through. A lot of businesses would've shut down. The business owner would be starting basically from scratch after taking that much time back from the business.
And so I'm really starting to understand what I did, what I created, and how amazing that is. And in fact, it's made me really think about my role and what it is that I really want to be helping women with. It's just taken it to the next level. As I have been reflecting and processing over the last few months, whether it's been processing in therapy or in my journal or in conversations, I've realized that I'm at this really exciting new stage of my life.
It's a big transition for me, a huge transition for me going from being a caregiver to basically both parents to now mom is gone and my dad is in his senior living. He actually moved closer to my sister, closer to our hometown. So it's not as much on me and my kids are only a few—my twins are only a few years from graduating high school.
So I'm at this interesting transition where suddenly I have all this space back, all this capacity back, all this time to think. And what I really have is new clarity on my mission and what I'm here to do. And this led to me deciding to redo my entire website because I'm a little crazy, I think. But it's once you have this level of clarity, you just can't wait to start talking about it. You can't wait to start shaking things up. And I realized I just needed to be a lot bolder in my messaging because over the years some things have changed.
The industry that I'm in, the world of business coaching and consulting, it has been fascinating to be a part of this industry for the past 20-ish years, running my own business for the past 18 and watching kind of the vibes change, the energy has shifted. In the early days of my business, all the messaging out there was very girl boss, very aspirational, very much reach and make millions. And in the 2010s, that messaging worked out well because things were going pretty well in the world for a lot of us. The economy was growing, things were pretty stable. There wasn't anything hugely scary going on, when things seemed in the world pretty good. When the economy is booming and growing, then that aspirational messaging lands for a lot of people.
And I've always still continued to be the very practical, profitable, let's build a sustainable business. I was talking about burnout-proofing your business years before anybody else was. I was talking about a 25-hour work week years before people started jumping on the four-day week trend. So I for a long time did have unique messaging in the marketplace because while everyone else was focused on being a girl boss and being aspirational and helping you live your laptop lifestyle, able to sit on the beach drinking margaritas for a month while your business magically ran itself.
I have always been talking about sustainability. I've always been talking about building a more consistent, practical, profitable business. And that's admittedly not very sexy. I talk about the not very sexy parts of business because honestly, the not very sexy parts of business, the systems, are what bring the stability and the stability is what makes your business unshakeable.
So what's been interesting is everybody else has caught up to me now because the world has changed. The world has changed since the Girl Boss days of the 2010s. The world has changed because things have become more uncertain and unpredictable. We went through COVID—that was a lot of uncertainty and unpredictability. We've had wars happen in the world, a lot of uncertainty and unpredictability. The economy has been a little bit more unpredictable. Goodness knows the last year or so has been incredibly unpredictable with every other day being something crazy happening in the news.
And one thing is true is that when things get unpredictable, when things are uncertain, when there's not as much stability in the world or in the economy, people stop looking for aspirational messaging and they start looking for safety. And so the messaging I had had for a very long time around building more sustainable success, building systems, building more predictable profits, all of that is based very much in safety, practicality. I'm very practical. If you want to know how to be practical in your business, I'm your girl. I'm the one to talk to.
But what started happening is now messaging that was unique for me is no longer as unique. More people have started talking about having more consistent revenue, having more systems in place. People are now tapping into the safety and security messaging versus aspirational messaging.
And I started really thinking about this over the last few months as I've been dipping my toe back into my work and easing back in and having more conversations. I started going back out to events, catching up with people I haven't talked to in a while. And what's interesting is when people know you've gone through some stuff, they know that you've lost your mom. The first thing, how are you doing, everything going okay? And then they want to know how the business is and I'm like the business is great. Business did what I designed it to do. And that always triggered another huge conversation because that's where people want to know more. Well, what do you mean your business survived that long without you working more than five hours a week? Tell me more about that.
And I realized that I was burying the lead. I was not really sharing with the world what we have been able to build here in the CEO collective, both in this business and for our clients' businesses. I have kind of been hiding a little bit of the magic of what we do here because it is practical magic. It is the practical, unsexy parts of putting systems and infrastructure in place in your business. And it's the magic that your business can handle whatever life or the world is gonna throw your way.
I realized that while a lot of people have been shifting their messaging and now using very similar messaging to what I've been talking about for years and years, for decades now, I have something they don't and that is lived experience. And that's lived experience. My own lived experience of being in this sandwich generation, raising kids while running this business, taking care of my parents and losing a parent while running this business, managing chronic illness and flare ups and new diagnosis while running this business. That's a lot of lived experience for myself.
But also the experience of supporting so many other women who have gone through huge things in their life and their business has still continued to hold. I have witnessed clients and supported clients through grief and loss of their parents, of a significant other, of another close loved one. I have supported clients as they have prepared for and navigated a divorce.
I've been there as clients have navigated challenges with their own health, with new diagnosis, with cancer, with things that their families have gone through. And I've been there through even natural disasters. I've had clients who've lost homes to wildfires. I've had clients who had their entire communities impacted by hurricanes and their businesses are still going.
And I've had clients around the world who have been impacted by wars and who I have been able to support. And how do they navigate through that? How do they navigate when their entire region is uncertain and unstable and they're literally able to see and hear war happening around them? That's a lot. That's a lot. It's kind of mind-boggling when I sit down and think about all the people and the different challenges that I've helped people navigate.
And the reason I've been able to provide that support is because nothing that I talk about and that I offer to my clients is theory. It's not just I read this in a book and this is how you do it, and it's also not just this is what worked for me, so this is how you have to do your business.
Everything that I focus on here at the CEO Collective is truly about research-backed and battle-tested methodology. This is not a one-size-fits-all approach to building your business. This is true strategic operating systems. This is true infrastructure in your business, and there are so many ways it can be applied and reconfigured to work for different scenarios and different people.
And so the more I have been thinking about this, and the more I've been sitting with this, the more I realized I wanted to be even bolder in my messaging. And that's why over the last few months you've seen me start to share more about—a few months ago I started sharing more about our client growth engine. It's one of the most powerful systems you can put in place in your business. Started talking about other things that I'm creating behind the scenes, and I started rewriting my entire website.
From head to toe, the entire thing. And as I was starting to rewrite my entire website and really get into, okay, what is it that I really want to say that I really want to talk about? It's funny because I will have these moments where suddenly something will hit me and I'm like, oh, that's a great line. And I had one of those moments where I was literally asleep and woke up in the middle of the night and had this line, this headline, come to me.
If you are the system, you are also the ceiling.
And that hit me in the middle of the night. I emailed it to myself and the next morning I opened my inbox and there was this headline and I was like, where did that come from? Did I read that somewhere? And so I was searching my inbox to see, did I read that from somewhere? Put it in Claude and ChatGPT to be like, is anybody else saying this? Is this something that just hit me in the middle of the night and it's the perfect headline for my website? Turns out it was just, I don't know, divine intervention here. I just downloaded in the middle of the night and I had it. I knew exactly what the stand is that I want to take and how I want to talk about the work that we're doing.
So what's different now? Well, brand new website, y'all. I completely rewrote my entire website and I'm so excited about it because I feel for the first time I'm really clearly articulating what it is that we do here and why it matters and why it matters specifically for women entrepreneurs because I don't know about you, but I didn't get into this business in order for one hiccup in my life or one thing out of my control in the world to decimate everything. I got into this so that I could do the work that I love and live the life that I love.
Yes, there's the aspirational tagline. Everybody wants the business in life they love, right? But I also got in this knowing that I could help women truly make their business unshakeable, to truly build a business that can handle anything. And that is so incredible and I'm really only starting to accept how amazing it is. I'm starting to see in the conversations I'm having with people that this is what women are really, really wanting. They're really wanting to have an unshakeable business. They're really wanting to feel like they are truly in control of their business. They're not running in emergency mode, they're not trying to scale chaos. They want to have an unshakeable, stable, sustainable business.
So we are being bolder about it. I'm not softening anymore edges. I'm not hiding or burying the lead here. I am talking directly to you. If life has been lifing, if you are going through transitions and you are tired of feeling like your business is constantly in emergency mode, you are tired of feeling like your business is just barely controlled chaos. And if you are ready for things to truly be life-proof so that you can enjoy it. You can enjoy your business more. You can enjoy your life more and not feel like you are the only thing moving this thing forward and keeping this thing together. You deserve more than that. I deserve more than that. We all deserve more than that.
So I invite you to come check out the new website and I'd love to hear your thoughts. I have spent a lot of time really trying to clearly express and articulate what it is that we do, and the part that I'm most excited about is the case studies. So right now there's about 15 live case studies. I have even more. It just takes time to go through and get all of them put together. But these case studies are really highlighting the women that I've worked with who have gone through some major challenges in their life and in their business, and how our approach has helped them to truly build an unshakeable business, a real sustainable business, and help them reclaim their life in the process.
I am also inviting you to come check out our open house as we get ready to open the doors to the CEO collective. On April, let's see, I think it is April 20th, we are reopening the doors to the CEO collective, and on Tuesday, April 21st, we are hosting a live event, and it is called the CEO Ceiling Assessment or the CEO Capacity Assessment.
Basically, we are going to go through and do an audit of five areas of your business where CEOs most commonly get maxed out and get stuck and create a ceiling in their business. We're going to go through and evaluate your business, green, yellow, or red across each of these five areas, and when you're done, you'll have clarity on what is it that I need to fix and optimize so that I can create more capacity for myself, more capacity in my business, and break through this ceiling that is limiting where I want to go.
You'll also see in the next few weeks, I have some new episodes with clients coming out, and I really can't wait to share those. I think a lot of amazing lessons about how to navigate transitions in your business, how to unlock the growth potential when you have stronger systems in place in your business without sacrificing your life. And I'm just really excited. I'm so excited about what I've been working on behind the scenes.
Kind of surprised because I didn't expect it was not on my plan to rewrite my entire site, but every once in a while when the inspiration hits, and I just have this really strong urge that there's something coming up here. There's something that's bubbling and overflowing from me. It's time. It's just time to do it and go for it. And the fact that I rewrote this entire website basically in less than two weeks, I redid my entire website, should tell you how excited I am about this because it just flowed out of me. I feel like this was the easiest website I've ever had to create, which is wild.
So I rebuilt this entire website. I am redesigning the way that we're talking about the CEO collective because I believe that more women entrepreneurs in this messy middle stage of entrepreneurship—again, where you're past the startup stage, you're successful. You've built something real. But you're still operating from that startup operating system. You deserve more than inspiration. You deserve more than one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter advice. You deserve real infrastructure. You deserve real systems. You deserve a real operating system that supports you and your business.
And if that's you, if you are in that messy middle where you are ready to break through that ceiling, then I want you to go check it out. Look at the new CEOcollective.com. Check out the new case studies. See yourself what's in there. Have some new exciting things on the site. I can't wait for you to share with me what you think.
And of course, come to the open house that is coming up on Tuesday, April 21st at noon. The CEO ceiling assessment, it is free, it is live. You're gonna walk away knowing where you are and having clarity on what needs to shift in your business and the next steps in order to unlock the next level of growth for you. The link is in your show notes. Can't wait to hear from you. Okay, I'll talk to you next week.