Promote Yourself to CEO Podcast
CEO Capacity Series: Building Buffer Into Your Business
There's something nobody tells you when your business starts really growing. You think more revenue means more margin, that more team means more capacity. More systems mean more ease, but the reality is none of that is automatically true. Here's what actually happens when your business starts to grow.
Your cognitive load increases, your emotional load increases, the number of people depending on you to make decisions increases, the complexity of what you're managing increases. So if your structure stays in startup mode while your business is actually growing and getting bigger, exhaustion isn't a character flaw, it's a structural flaw.
So today I want to talk about what growth actually requires. And it's not more hustle, it's about having more buffer. And I'm going to show you exactly what I mean and how you can start building it into your business. 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.
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Hey there, CEOs, Racheal Cook here, founder of the CEO Collective and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO Podcast. We are going through the CEO capacity series here on the podcast, and I kicked off last episode talking about why I don't build my business for my best days. If you didn't listen into that, I highly recommend that you do because this is such an important topic.
Understanding your capacity as the CEO and making sure that you are building your business in a way that helps you have plenty of flexibility. What happens though for a lot of women entrepreneurs is I find that they become the ceiling of their business. And what I mean by that is they become the bottleneck in their business.
They become the ceiling of how much their business can reasonably grow. And usually the reason this happens is because for a lot of women entrepreneurs, we are starting our businesses and self-funding them. We are bootstrapping them. We do not come in and take out huge loans or go to get investors. Most of us don't have a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow or a trust fund.
We are running our businesses and figuring out as we go, and because we are self-funded in the early days of our business, in the startup stage, we are wearing all the hats. We are doing all the things. You are filling every gap. You are the bookkeeper, you are the social media manager, you are the service provider.
You are doing every role in your business, and that's kind of normal, right, for the startup days of your business. But there comes a point where you're actually out of the startup stage and you're starting to move into the scale up stage. And this should be really exciting. But what starts to happen is a lot of women entrepreneurs are never updating the operating model.
Underneath their business when they're making this shift from the startup stage to the scale up stage, and because they haven't updated the operating model underneath the business, they continue being the one who is doing all the things. And even if you're not doing all the things, all the things are still in your head.
You are still the system, and then you find yourself run down and exhausted because there becomes a limit where you simply have no more to give, you're completely maxed out. Your time is maxed out, your energy is maxed out, and instead of having the freedom and flexibility that you had hoped for when you started this business, you kind of feel like, okay, what am I doing here?
I continue to be the bottleneck. Nothing can run without me, and this is not exactly what I thought it was going to be. So what built your business, what got your business up and running in the startup stage is not what is going to be what grows it and also gives you back your time and your energy.
Something has to give, something has to change, and generally what needs to change is the way that you are operating your business. So what is happening when we get into this stage where we're definitely out of the startup stage, we have built something real. You are making great money. You have offers that are selling, you are getting results for your clients, but you're hitting this kind of ceiling that you can't break through quite yet.
What's often happening for a lot of people is because the operating system underneath their business hasn't really changed, the load has continued to escalate for the small business owner. So let's talk about what I mean by that. If you are growing a team, you're trying to bring people on into your business to help you implement and take things off your plate, it's really easy to believe the hype out there that just outsource it.
Just hire someone and let them take care of it. But if you have actually gone through the effort to hire someone and try to train someone, and lead that person, manage that person, then you know, it is not as simple as just outsource it. It is not as simple as just delegate it. In fact, as your business grows and you have more people behind the scenes in your business, you'll often find that there's a lot of time and energy that goes into leading a team, and I think this is the missing piece of the puzzle for a lot of small business owners. We have just been told to just outsource it. Just delegate it, but then we don't hear back, well, okay, if you hire these people, you're still going to have to train them.
You're still going to have to make sure they understand everything they need to know in order to make decisions on your behalf. Because if you don't do that, if they don't understand the vision and the values, they don't understand where the business is headed, they don't have clarity on their role and what they can make decisions around and what they can have ownership over, then guess what?
They're going to keep coming to you to make all those decisions, and this is something I hear all of the time, people saying, I thought by hiring people on my team, I would be freed up to do other work, but now I'm just stuck being the manager, trying to keep the team going, and I don't have time to be the CEO because they need me all the time.
They're always coming to me to make decisions, to train them, and it continues to escalate the load on you as a small business owner. The reality is as your team grows, that becomes another part of your role and you have to redesign your role in order to accommodate it, and there also becomes a point where as your team grows, once you get somewhere between five to eight people on your team now, your time as a CEO will be spent almost full time on managing that team if you don't start building out another level of management, meaning bringing someone on to help you manage the team. So there's a lot of complexity that goes into running a team.
It's not as simple as we were all sold to just delegate things. It takes a lot of work. It is one of the hardest parts of running a business, and it's definitely one of the things that creates this ceiling in small businesses where we can't figure out how to break through that ceiling because it starts to take up all of our capacity. The other area that really starts to take up our capacity is more clients. Now, I know a lot of businesses out there are able to sell infinitely to infinite number of clients, but for us, for the majority of the businesses I work with, we do have capacity, right? There's a limited capacity for how many people we can reasonably serve and maintain the level of service.
There's only so many spots in a day. And if you are working with people in a one-on-one way, then there's only so many slots in the calendar. And even as you are building out offers that maybe have more leverage in them, there's still going to be only so much time that you and the team have available to manage more clients.
So it's really easy to believe that the secret here is just to switch your model completely from a service model into what people think is some infinitely scalable model. So going into, usually I hear people who are like, I'm just going to create a course. I'm just going to create an info product. But that actually doesn't solve the problem if you don't have the right infrastructure in your business.
In fact, I see a lot of small business owners who have been primarily service providers try to shift into a whole other business model, and it requires so much more than they think it does. It requires completely different marketing strategy, completely different sales strategy, a completely different level of visibility.
It's really building a whole different business, and so you have a decision to make, right? As your business is growing, you get to decide, okay, am I going to continue being more of a highly relational high-touch business, or am I going to completely change my business model? The reality is either can work, I'm not going to lie to you and say one won't work either could work, but trying to do both at the same time is really, really challenging.
I tend to find that for my small business owners who are service-based businesses who are highly relational businesses, as they take on more clients, the biggest thing is making sure that they can manage all of the moving parts behind the scenes. One of my clients, Chris Caruso, called it having air traffic control in her business because you have more people that you are trying to move through your process to get the results they hired you for. There's more delivery complexity, there's more individual things that pop up, and there's a lot of expectations to hold. As you grow a service-based business, you have to be incredible at managing all of those relationships. And of course, as you have more and more relationships to manage, it can get a little complicated.
And I'm honestly going to say the same thing is true if you wanted to shift to a more info product course-based business. I think a lot of people think that it means, oh, I'm not limited by the number of clients I can serve, but I will tell you that we are seeing a huge shift in that world right now. The reason I am a lot more bullish on service-based businesses is because a lot of info products and a lot of courses are getting replaced by AI, let's be honest. So the opportunity is really in that personalized support, highly relational support.
But how do you do that and manage so many different client relationships and know how to keep people moving through your systems, moving through your processes and getting the results they're looking for? It requires a new level of sophistication so that you can manage that volume of clients. It's also easy to believe that more revenue will solve more problems, that if you just make more money, then you can throw money at the problems in your business.
Here's what I'll say about that. More revenue does not automatically mean that you're going to solve all the problems in your business. Usually it's only going to amplify any structural operational issues that are happening in your business. You're going to continue to bump up against those until you take the time to restructure your organization, to review your operating system and actually figure out how do you make it work better instead of just continuing to duct tape things together.
So more revenue is going to amplify issues, right? It's going to make it really clear if your business has a chaotic operating system or a calm and in control operating system, and as your business grows, you're just going to have to steward more money. That's more financial decisions. There's more tax complexity as your business grows and you have more people on your team, there's more stakeholders who have a stake in your business.
It doesn't mean they have ownership. But the people involved in your business, whether it is your team or your clients or anyone else who is involved in your business in some way, shape or form, they're depending on your business. And I can tell you, I have seen businesses making millions of dollars still stress out about making payroll.
I have seen businesses making very little money stress out about payroll. These are problems that can happen at every revenue level. So thinking that more revenue is going to solve a profit issue, that more revenue is going to solve a systems issue, it will not, it will only amplify it, and it is really hard to scale chaos.
I can tell you that a hundred percent for sure. You can't scale chaos without creating more chaos, so you have to press pause and overhaul your operating system, your internal operating system. It's also easy to believe that if you have more visibility, that you will have more freedom. Right? Well, if I can just get this huge opportunity, if I can just get this feature, if I can just get this opportunity to get my business in front of a ton of new people, then everything will work itself out. But just like the revenue issue, more visibility doesn't always translate into more business. More visibility doesn't always translate into the right opportunities.
And this is something that I think a lot of small business owners forget about, and it's one of the reasons why they stay stuck in that startup mode is because as you get more visibility, as you get more credibility, as you're growing, as you become established as an expert in your field and as a thought leader, more opportunities will probably come your way.
But not all opportunities are right for you and your business and one of the things that traps us in that startup trap is that when we were starting, we had to say yes to all the things in order to get some momentum going. But as you're growing, you cannot keep saying yes the way you did before. In fact, you have to be a lot more strategic about what you say yes to and what you say no to.
So I share all of these elements, how the load is escalating, the mental load is escalating as you're growing your business because your role gets more cognitively demanding as your business grows. If you are wanting to go from a one woman show to a CEO with a small but mighty team, if the operating system isn't upgraded, then having more team, having more clients, having more revenue, having more visibility is going to be more demanding on you, and you're going to need a whole lot more thinking time, not less.
You're going to need to give yourself a lot more buffer, not less. And if you don't give yourself that buffer, then you will find yourself constantly in reactive mode instead of in proactive mode. And that is what is creating the ceiling for a lot of small business owners. So one thing I do notice is this is actually kind of a safe spot, a comfort zone for a lot of us. Being busy, having so many things happening. A lot of women entrepreneurs are calibrated towards having pressure towards business. Being busy, busy feels safe. If we're always busy, if the things are always moving, then we are working hard, right?
And so when the business starts actually running smoother, when you start upgrading your operating system, it can be a little disorienting at first. It can feel like something's a little off, something's wrong, something's missing. Like I'm not working hard enough, so something's got to be wrong, right? No.
If you are in this zone where busyness is your comfort zone, then you have to recalibrate yourself. This is a nervous system pattern, not a productivity problem. Having a calm business, having a business that operates smoothly, having a business where you're not constantly responding to emergencies, it is not laziness.
Right? It sounds so wild that I'm even saying this, but I find so often that we are so bought in to hustle culture. We are so bought into the belief that we're supposed to be busy. We're all so bought into, you know, things are constantly happening that when things start to run smoother, we start to question, is this okay?
Because we're not used to calm. We're not used to it at all. And when you're not used to it, it doesn't feel safe. Busyness feels safe, calm feels like I'm waiting for something, and that's an adjustment that you have to go through. That is something you have to integrate into the way that you are approaching your business.
But the reality is, calm is capacity. When you have a calm in control business, when you understand everything going on in your business, when your operating system is running smoothly and your team is able to be basically self-managed and they don't need to come to you all the time, calm is what allows you to think clearly when things happen, and this is a huge shift for so many of us.
It's a huge shift because we have all believed that we have to hustle to deserve success. And even people who say, oh, I don't want to hustle, I don't believe in hustle culture. I don't want to burn myself out. The discomfort with things being calm and systematized is so strong that I will find those people self-sabotaging, finding ways to go and create challenges that weren't necessary because they're so used to the busyness.
They're so used to that busyness being the comfort zone. So I want you to remember, you don't have to hustle to deserve success. That belief is a legacy from a patriarchal, hyper capitalist white supremacist system that was not designed for us. It was designed to extract from us, to keep us always in that worker bee mode, but it was never designed to help us achieve the type of businesses that we're trying to create now. So how can we start shifting and creating some more capacity, some more buffer for us? One thing I often say is you shouldn't be designing your business around you being at 100% capacity. If you are designing your business and setting your goals, and it requires you to be at a hundred percent capacity, then it requires you to be at your best all day, every day, 24/7, 365. That's what we talked about in the last episode. And let's be really clear here, that is not realistic. Most days we are not at a hundred percent and that doesn't even matter if you like me have chronic illness or not. If you're a caregiver or not, if you're a mom or not. Most of us as humans don't have a hundred percent to give every single day.
We have some days where we have less. We have some days where maybe we have more and we're just kicking ass, but high functioning CEOs, people that understand you need buffer in your calendar, in your business, in your operating system, they design at 70%. 70% is what I design for, and this is a shift, right?
This is another shift because if I know my community, I know that a lot of us are super high achievers. We love learning. The idea of 70% is like, that's a C or a D. I don't know what grading scale your school had growing up, but I never got a 70% on anything if I could help it, a hundred percent all the way, but that is not a sustainable way for us to approach our business. We need to give ourselves 70% as what we are aiming towards so that we have 30% buffer. 30% buffer is where strategic thinking lives. It's where problems get solved before they become a crisis, and this is where you can lead instead of react. This is why you can be more proactive because you are keeping 30% available for you to take action where you need to take action.
When your calendar is at a hundred percent, if every hour of your day is scheduled, and if your calendar is just completely blocked out with meetings from your team and your clients, and you have no extra space, no wiggle room, you're always going to be in reaction mode. You can't see 10 steps ahead from inside the fire.
Buffer is not a reward for getting through a hard quarter. I want to be really clear about this. Buffer isn't just vacation time, okay? This is infrastructure that makes good leadership possible for your business. So in my business, I work about 20 to 25 hours a week, and admittedly, I'm working less than that right now.
I think I shared in the last episode, I'm slowly kind of ramping back up and giving myself a lot of flexibility as I am navigating grief, but I don't schedule every hour of my day, and I know there's people out there in the productivity world who would say, oh, you need to have time blocked completely every hour of every day.
I do have a model calendar, and I have an idea of what I'm going to be focused on every day, but I make sure that 30% of my week or more is unscheduled. In fact, I would say most of it is unscheduled at this point. I really only have a few days where I have a strict schedule, and the rest allows me to have a lot of flexibility.
And the reason I do that is because it gives me the buffer I need to think strategically to look ahead to sharpen my skills as a CEO. And one way that I do that is I make sure that I have built in time into my 90 day CEO operating rhythm to constantly be checking in with the business. So if you've ever taken any of our programs, if you've purchased a 90 day CEO planner, if you have attended a CEO retreat or working with me in the CEO collective, then you know, some of the habits I teach are all about building this buffer in and also building in these small feedback loops throughout the week.
This is something that I find is really, really essential and a lot of small business owners don't do this. They set their goals, and then they just kind of race towards them as fast as they can, but they're never pausing to check in with their plan. They're not pausing to check in with their goals and the progress they're making in their goals.
So there's no feedback mechanism in place, and if you're just working by yourself, that can be kind of okay, but as you are growing your business and as you have more people on your team who are implementing on your plan, if you don't have feedback loops built in, then it becomes really, really hard to see where the problems are.
Without any of those feedback loops, you end up flying blind and you often don't know something is not going to work out, or something needs to be adjusted until something bad has happened, right? Until it becomes an emergency. So when you have no margin, then you don't have that time to look at your data to see what's trending, to see what's working and what's not working, and to adjust it before it becomes a problem. In our 90 day CEO operating rhythm, there are two habits that we have that help us recalibrate every single week, and then four recalibration points per year. So every 90 days we have a CEO retreat where we're setting up our next 90 day plan. That is a recalibration point. The goal is that you are stepping out of the day to day of your business, getting the space you need to think strategically and going through a process to set your 90 day plan up so that you and your team all know what the priorities are. And then once you have that 90 day plan, our two weekly habits are CEO dates and our CEO review. Our CEO dates kick off for our week where we're looking at our plan. We are deciding what is going to happen this week, we're clearing the path for our team, making sure our team has everything that they need to keep moving forward on our behalf.
And that sets our week up for success. It allows us to catch things before they become an issue. And then at the end of the week, we have our weekly review. And this also is a feedback loop, right? It helps you catch things before they become a problem. It helps you see, okay, we got off track this week or something slowed us down, or we got ahead this week.
So these feedback loops, again, these habits seem so simple, but they help you to be more proactive. They help you to truly have the finger on the pulse of your business instead of assuming everything is going okay and not really being clear about what's happening. So these feedback loops are essential as part of building more capacity for yourself, and we encourage you to set those into your operating system.
Whether you ever work with me or not having a CEO date, you can go grab the CEO date checklist. It is something I've talked about for forever and a day. You can get it on our resources page on the website. The CEO date is one habit that can save you 10 hours a week just because you're setting your week up for success and getting really clear about what the priorities are, and the weekly review, it's in the 90 day planner, you can get access to it very, very easily.
Those habits are deceptively simple, but incredibly powerful, incredibly powerful. So later this week I'm going to announce something I've been working on behind the scenes and we're really leading into this shift even more. And I have a full CEO capacity assessment that we will be doing live. I'll be announcing that one on Thursday, so get ready for that announcement.
I can't wait because I think this is just so powerfully important. All right, as we wrap things up in this episode, try to aim for 70%, aim for building your business around 70% of your capacity. If you're building it at a hundred percent, then you are setting yourself up to be squeezed, you're setting yourself up for success only if you operate at a hundred percent a hundred percent of the time.
And that is not realistic. It's not realistic for any of us. It is putting pressure on yourself that is not necessary. It is hustle. It is busyness as, you know, a feeling of busyness as a comfort zone, busyness as this is what I'm used to, and regulation under pressure is a leadership skill. It's not a personality trait.
You can build an operating system in your business that supports you being more regulated, being more calm, feeling more in control, feeling like you can handle whatever is going to get thrown your way. You can build your infrastructure in your business to protect your thinking time. You can build capacity into your business that allows you more space to make clear decisions.
Instead of panicked decisions, you can build more capacity that includes clearer metrics to check, feedback loops that help you really have your finger on the pulse of the business before you make any big moves, and that's what the 90 day CEO operating system gives you. It is our growth framework for recalibrating.
Once you are out of that startup stage and you've had some real success in your business, you have to recalibrate the way that you are running the business if you don't want to continually bump up against the ceiling. So, where in your business are you maybe reacting where a feedback loop would've helped you to respond thoughtfully and be more proactive instead?
It's essential that you recalibrate before you react, and that's not a mindset shift, that is building structurally opportunity for you to get grounded to have clarity before you make any big moves in your business. So this week I want you to look at your calendar and ask one question: if something hard happened tomorrow, a team issue, a health thing, a family emergency, is there room in your schedule? Is there margin in your schedule or buffer in your schedule to absorb it? Would you be able to get everything done if tomorrow completely fell apart? If the answer is no, you wouldn't be able to achieve your goals this week. You have no other time that you could do those things. You have no place else you could put those meetings or those calls or no other way to do those things on your list. Then I want you to know that's not a discipline problem. That's a design problem. That's a design problem that will keep you stuck in your business indefinitely.
You'll always be struggling to feel like you're getting ahead and that's what we're going to fix. So in the next week, I am going to be sharing a lot more with you. Big announcement coming on Thursday, we are going to be hosting a live CEO capacity assessment and we are reopening the doors for the CEO collective soon, and I can't wait to tell you more about that.
So get excited. Thursday, I'm dropping a special episode about what I've been working on behind the scenes for you and you don't want to miss it. All right, I'll see you on Thursday.