How to Stay Focused During Unprecedented Times

Are you ready to grow from stressed out solopreneur to confident CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Racheal Cook, and I've spent the last 15 years helping women entrepreneurs to sustainably scale their life first business. If you're serious about building a more 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. Hey there CEOs, Racheal Cook here, founder of the CEO Collective and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO Podcast. Today, I am continuing the conversation about how we stay grounded during these unprecedented times.

And yes, we are back in unprecedented times. I know we are tired of being here, It has been a long five years. I can't believe at the time that I'm recording this, I'm starting to see all of those reminders on my phone. I know you probably see this on your phone or on your Facebook where it's showing your memories of photos from like five years ago.

And five years ago, we were CEO Collective for the first time. It was a major pivot. In my business, we were letting go of all of our previous business coaching programs and putting everything into the CEO Collective. We were rebranding to the CEO Collective and then the pandemic hit and it hit a week and a half before.

Our upcoming, uh, CEO Retreat. We host a retreat every March and we had contracts signed. We had people flying from around the world to attend the CEO Retreat. And suddenly we were in a position where I had to make decisions very quickly without having most of the information. I wasn't sure if I was going to get my money back, if I was going to get refunds from.

You know, all the contracts I'd spent money on to host the CEO Retreat. And we were going into several months, which turned into a solid 18 months of just unpredictability, uncertainty, and honestly, a lot of fear and a lot of stress for small business owners. And I remember that very, very vividly. So it's crazy to me that we're five years later.

And we're back in uncertain times, unprecedented times, and this time it's because we are in the middle of a coup here in the United States, where a fascist is trying to overthrow our government, overthrow our democracy, and the oligarchs are accumulating massive amounts of power. It is not a good situation.

It's incredibly stressful. And I'm here with you in it. And it's not like there's a book or a course on how to run a business during a fascist takeover, how to run a business during unprecedented times. There is no book. There is no guide. There is no step by step plan. But there is experience we can pull from.

And that's what I'm here to do for you is to bring my 20 plus years of working with small businesses and behind the scenes, a small business owner to provide very grounded insight. And thoughts about how we can keep moving forward. And I know if you're like me and if you've been following along for a while, I know our values are probably very aligned in this.

Um, you want to be a part of the resistance and you're probably doing things like calling your representatives, using the five calls app, using resist bot to make your voice heard and make sure your representatives know the policies that you are upset about. And with you, I'm doing those calls as often as I can.

You're probably also looking up. You know, what are the town halls I can go to or what are the protests I can go to, how can I get involved? How can I get engaged? And I'm doing the same things. And at the same time that we're trying to make our voices heard, and we're trying to fight against what is happening in the world.

We're trying to run our businesses. As small business owners, we don't have a safety net, you know, if a normal everyday person is a little distracted during their day to day, they're still going to get paid their salary. But when you're a small business owner, this stuff hits a little differently. It impacts us a little differently.

It impacts the way we show up. It impacts what we have the capacity to do. And honestly, it impacts our small businesses. Um, pretty drastically. And so I'm going to keep talking about this and keep acknowledging the situation. Honestly, I'm pretty pissed at the so called leaders and experts in the small business and entrepreneurship space who are acting as if this is all business as normal.

They aren't acknowledging what is happening in the world. They are just Continuing like they always do to talk about if you just make, you know, millions of dollars that all of the problems will be solved. And I'm really upset at a lot of them. I blocked a lot of them and I've given a lot of them a pretty big earful about their leadership.

Because I think right now what stands out to me is businesses that really lead with values and stand up. For what they believe and what is right. And I'm here to tell you that the current administration. Is not here to support small businesses, and they're definitely not here to support women and minorities in small business doesn't take a genius to understand that because a lot of the policies that they're pushing out there are going to directly impact our ability to run small businesses.

If not directly impact our ability to own a small business, have bank accounts for a small business, have access to funding for small businesses, by the way, any funding that was previously available for women or minorities for small businesses, grants for small businesses, guess what? Those are being rolled back.

I have clients right now who are losing funding, who are losing grants that they won, who are losing awards that they won because those were considered DEI and they're getting rolled back. And it's not like women and minorities had a ton of access to all of those things to begin with. We didn't. So what do we do?

What do we do now? Well, we stay grounded. And that's what last week's episode was all about. Last week's episode was all about how do we stay grounded? How do we expand our capacity? How do we take care of ourselves? Some tools that you can use that I use every single day, my thrive list, my reset button over my easy button, all the different types of rest.

And today I want to talk about how we keep up with Our focus and stay focused as the CEOs of our small businesses. Okay. Because when things get chaotic, when things get chaotic and our capacity is limited and our attention span is limited, when we are feeling overwhelmed, then we can't operate the way we would if, you know, the world was great and everything was fine.

The world isn't great, everything isn't fine, this is not okay, and I'm not going to contribute to the hyper normalization, to the consent in advance of this fascist takeover. Instead, I'm going to provide you with really practical, grounded strategies and things to think about so that you can continue going as a small business owner.

Because small business owners are the canary in the coal mine. We are the first ones to start to feel the impacts of any sort of uncertainty. It doesn't matter what the uncertainty is. This is just historically what happens when there's any sort of economic uncertainty or instability, any sort of political uncertainty or chaos.

People are very. Like predictable and how they react to that. And so what starts to happen first is going to impact the general public consumers, right? Everybody out there buying things right now is already impacted and they have been impacted for a long time. Now we all know, we've been in a cost of living crisis.

The cost of housing has gone through the roof. The cost of child care has gone through the roof. The cost of health care has gone through the roof. People are struggling just to keep up with the cost of their groceries. And as someone with three teenagers at home who eat a lot of eggs. I'm really questioning if we should get chickens because the cost of feeding these kids has gone through the roof.

The cost for everybody just to live has gone through the roof. And what happens when people start to get squeezed by rising costs like that and then you throw in a tight job market? You throw in mass layoffs, you throw in all that's happening, is people start to look for safety and security. And when people are looking for safety and security, what do they do?

This is all very, very predictable, okay? So the first things they start to do is they start to cut back on their expenses. They start to tighten up their budgets. Right? They start to take longer to make buying decisions. For the average person whose budgets have gotten very, very tight, they're going to take longer to make a decision to work with you.

So if you're a consumer facing small business, Right. If you work with the general public, then you are probably already seeing people who are very cost conscious. They are very conscious of what it costs to get access to things that they need. And I'm seeing this across the board. I think a lot of us tend to think of small business that's like consumer facing.

We start to think of like consumer products, but that's not the only consumer facing small business. I have a ton of clients who run yoga studios. Who offer wellness, um, programming, who are therapists, right? Those are all consumer facing. And when their clients are strapped, they're going to stop spending as much, or they're going to really take their time to make buying decisions.

And that changes the way you need to show up as a small business owner. And that also starts to trickle up, right? And the reason it starts to trickle from just consumer facing small businesses to B2B and B2E, so business to business and business to entrepreneur, small businesses is because. Most small businesses do not have a lot of wiggle room here.

So for women's small business, only 12 percent of women owned small businesses make over a hundred thousand dollars a year, annual total revenue. Only two to 3 percent make over a million. So when I'm telling you that The policies in place right now are not here to help us. They're here to hurt us.

They're going to take away access to funding because they call women and minority owned small business DEI. They're going to take away access to landing federal contracts because that's DEI. Things are going to impact us. It's only been, you know, since the 80s that women could go out and get access to a credit card or a bank account or a loan without having to have a male co signer.

They are coming after us and our ability to run our small businesses. So what starts to happen here for these small businesses is as their clients stop spending as much money or they take longer to make these buying decisions, then that small business now is also going to start looking for safety and security because we're all human and we all follow human behavior, which is incredibly predictable, which is the good news for you all.

It's all very predictable. So if we can, um, Stay calm and grounded. We can be proactive and how we're gonna respond to it. So as these small businesses now are seeing slowing sales or lower sales, people are going for the lower price point offer instead of their highest package. People are taking longer to make a buying decision instead of buying right away.

It's going to start rolling up to the B2B and B2E space. They're going to start looking at, well, do I need to have all these, you know, contractors on my payroll? Do I need to spend money on all of these extra tools and services? They're going to start cutting back on their budget. They're going to start looking at where they can reduce their expenses.

So like I said, the good news is, this is all incredibly predictable. When things get uncertain, we know people are going to slow down their buying. They're going to stop buying as much because everybody leans to safety and security. We can use this to help ourselves. We can use this insight. We can use this information to help us make better decisions and to stay focused when things are chaotic.

So I want to talk about that part of it. How do we stay focused and how do we make better decisions right now? So bulleted list here. Um, we talked last week about maintaining your capacity, expanding your capacity, taking great care of yourself so that you can face what is coming at you. And that's incredibly important.

But we also need to talk about how do we continue being able to be proactive instead of reactive. And there's a few things you can do that will help make that possible. And it's all about understanding that when we are flooded with all of this happening right now, we are going to start experiencing decision fatigue.

And when we start to experience decision fatigue, we take longer to make decisions and we take longer to take any action. That's totally understandable, but there's a few things we can do to reduce that decision fatigue and to help you stay focused and to help your business keep moving. Cause I don't know about you, but I don't have a massive trust fund.

I'm sitting on my husband is a stay at home dad who works with me part time in the business. Like I am a hundred percent, the breadwinner of my business. So I need to be able to stay focused and keep bringing in revenue. Keep taking care of clients, even when The world is absolutely chaotic. So how can we reduce the decision fatigue and make things a little easier on ourselves so that we can get through this?

Cause this is not a wait and see situation. As we saw in the pandemic in 2020, people who decided to wait and see are the ones who went out of business. They waited too long to make decisions. And because they waited too long to make decisions, they got into a hole that they couldn't get out of. And because they couldn't get out of that hole, their business had to close.

Small businesses don't have a safety net, right? 82 percent of small businesses. Are worried about month to month cashflow. I know from working with thousands of small businesses that a few bad months can decimate a small business. And so right now you might not be feeling the impacts right away, but you will feel it and wait and see is not going to help you because this is going to be months, if not years of chaos that we're going to have to get through.

And it's a lot. And I'm, I'm a hundred percent going to be real while we're talking about this. It is a lot. I know it's a lot. I feel it very, very deeply. How much is happening and how upsetting it is. And I also feel very, very deeply that women are how we're going to get through it. And women leadership is what is needed.

Right now. And as small business owners, we are all leaders in our business and our community. We all have a way to contribute and a way to make a difference. And simply by showing up and running your business and thriving in your business, that is an act of resistance right now. So that's what I want to help you with.

Right. And we're going to do that by staying grounded, by staying focused and reducing some decision fatigue. So the first thing I want you to think about to reduce some decision fatigue is to one audit your own expenses. I'm going to start with the financial stuff first, because for a lot of us, this is the biggest stressor in our business is the money.

And it's also one of those areas that we tend to avoid looking at just in general. I'm right there with you. It's not my favorite thing to sit down and look at. But. It's really, really easy for our expenses to be bloated and have things going out that we could reduce, right? To have expenses and money going out of our business that we could reduce.

One of the simplest things you can look at when it comes to reducing your expenses is looking through all the tools and technology and systems you use to run your business. If you're not auditing those at least once a year. I encourage you to do that because it's really easy to find out that you've been overspending, that you could adjust to a different plan level or that maybe some of the tools and technology you're using are duplicative.

So often I'll sign up for one tool and they don't have a feature I need. So then I sign up for another tool to get that feature. And then that feature is Released in the initial tool, which means I'm now paying twice for the same feature. That's not necessary. So where can you streamline your expenses? I know it's not a whole lot of fun, but you can probably sit down in an hour or two.

If you need to grab a buddy and do it together. This is a great thing to do together. You could probably go through all of your tech stack, all of the tools, all of the things you pay for in your business and look for where can I reduce this cost? Is there a different plan? Is there anything that's duplicative?

And streamline that for yourself. You could probably find a few hundred dollars, if not a few thousand dollars a month. It's so easy for us to waste money and not realize it until we go through some sort of expense. Now, other things that might cost you a lot of money in your business is clearly if you have a team.

And I know not everybody has a team, but a lot of people do have a team. And this is where you really do have to start looking at, okay, what is your cost of your team? Maybe you have a, mixture of employees and contractors. Maybe you're paying some agencies for some things. I know at the beginning of this year, I had to make some big decisions about what I wanted to pull in house versus paying out at an agency level because I was like, we need to tighten up a little bit here.

I want to make sure that I'm not overspending when someone in house. Um, for a lesser cost because generally it costs more to outsource, um, to an agency. So think about those types of things, right? Even if you go through and find 500, a thousand, 2, 000 a month, that is something, right? That's money that you can now put into.

The second big thing that will reduce your stress, especially if you have financial stress with your business and that's making sure you have a cash cushion. Having a cash cushion is something a lot of small businesses do not prioritize. And when they don't prioritize it, then they're just one. Refund request away from being in trouble.

And unfortunately I saw this a lot at the beginning of the pandemic, especially for my business owners who had brick and mortar businesses or in person businesses. And they were having to shell out a ton in refunds, but they didn't have the cash cushion to allow them to do that easily. So they had to get real creative with how they were going to refund those clients.

That could no longer attend the event they had booked or what have you. So how much of a cash cushion do you need? I like to have three to six months of a cash cushion. It depends on your business and your personal finances. Um, but again, I'm the sole breadwinner for my family. I like to have a bigger cash cushion.

And if I have to dip into that, that's when it's a good sign for me that it's time to cut some more expenses or streamline some things some more. So how can you create that cash cushion? Well, one is to streamline your expenses and start saving. whatever you've now found. Another is make sure you have a business credit card or make sure you have a line of credit.

I know we don't talk about this enough. There's a lot of stigma around debt, but most small businesses, if you do not go get the credit card or the line of credit when you need it, or when you don't need it, If you wait till you need it, then you're more likely to struggle because they're not as likely to approve that if your sales have dropped and if you don't have the revenue coming in.

So go ahead and make sure you have a credit card. Make sure you have a business credit card. Make sure you have a business line of credit. Um, go to your local, um, credit union. Go to the bank that you work with. If you don't qualify through one of those, there's a lot of things you can look at online to find access to, um, a line of credit or credit card.

And the beauty is it's there when you need it. I'm not saying go spend a bunch of money that you don't need to spend. I'm saying have a little peace of mind so that if you do hit. A slower month. If you do hit lower sales, if people do take longer to say yes and sign up for your programs, or here's another one we see a lot.

If you start seeing people shift from a lot of pay in fulls to more payment plans, trust me, it's really helpful to have that line of credit. It's helpful to have that cash cushion. That was one huge thing we saw during the pandemic was this shift from pay in fulls to payment plans. And in my business, I used to see about 40 percent pay in fulls and it dropped to like 10%.

And that was huge on my cashflow. So having that line of credit gave me a lot of peace of mind and it. What it really gave me was it gave me a little more time to make decisions without having to make any drastic changes. It gave me time to respond and think through strategically what needed to happen instead of knee jerk reactions where I might have made, you know, bad decisions for my business.

So, easy ways to remove some of the financial stress. Simplify your expenses. Make sure you have that cash cushion. Okay. Other things to reduce stress and eliminate some decision fatigue. I want you to also audit your client growth engine. Now we talk about this a lot here in the CEO Collective on promote yourself to CEO.

The client growth engine is our framework for your marketing system, your sales system, and your delivery system. Now if you have been running your business for a while, hopefully you have a marketing system in place. You have a strategy to attract people towards your business, get in front of people for the very first time, to engage them, to get them to request a consult or request content, so now you can nurture them, and then you invite them and sell your product, program, or service, and then you deliver that product, program, or service.

You want to think through each of those. When I sit down with my clients, one of the first things we do is audit that client growth engine. Because often what I find is a lot of small business owners have kind of cobbled theirs together, kind of Frankenstein style, where they have learned a marketing strategy from over here.

And then they learned a sales strategy from over here. And then they learned something about content over here and they kind of just. You know, duct tape it all together. It's not very cohesive, it's not efficient at all. And often it's full of a lot of should do's. I heard I should do this. I heard that I should create a ton of content.

I heard I should be on this social media platform instead of really thinking through what works best for their business. So there's nothing that will like waste your energy more than doing things that don't move the needle in your business. So I want you to think through where did your last 10 clients come from?

If you're not sure, go ask them. If you're not sure, go look at your data. I often get a lot of clients who will tell me the majority of who comes to them is referrals and word of mouth. And then they're wasting hours and hours every week trying to create content or trying to be all over social media.

Don't do that. Double down on what is working for you. If most of your clients are coming from referrals and word of mouth, then let's build out a referral growth engine for your client growth engine. And let's make sure we've optimized towards that and streamlined it as much as possible. You don't have to waste time doing things that don't actually.

Build your business. And right now no one has the capacity, the bandwidth to just be churning out stuff when it doesn't move the needle. So I really want you to be very critical and discerning about what your marketing strategy, your sales strategy, and your delivery strategy is. You need to think about what works best for you and your business.

So for me and my business, I know what works best for me is the podcast is a major component of my marketing strategy, right? This is why we really build our entire client growth engine around the podcast as our core content. And then I make sure everything is aligned to it. All the rest of the marketing is aligned to the podcast.

All of the sales and delivery is a lot. Everything is aligned and it works together. And because it works together, I am not wasting any effort on any extra things that don't move the needle in my business. So I just want you to be very, very thoughtful. And intentional about those systems because it's really easy to give yourself a whole lot of work that doesn't do anything.

And when you do streamline it, when you do decide to do less but better, amazing things can start to happen. And I know it seems very counterintuitive, but this reduces decision fatigue so much. When you decide to do less, but then decide to really, really do it well. So for example, for me, I'm doing the podcast.

The podcast again is the core of my marketing system. I want to do less, but better. I decided this year we're going to add in the video. So you can find me on YouTube, right? You can find me on YouTube. You'll probably see my cat or my dog running around in the background, but I decided I wanted to do less.

I didn't want to add a whole nother thing, but I wanted to do it better. So I wanted to add in the video component because then I can get more out of it. More out of one thing that I'm doing. If your strategy is built around referrals, then how can you do less but better? It might mean you need to focus on just creating referral opportunities every quarter in your business and.

All roads lead to those referral opportunities, right? All your marketing leads to those referral opportunities. So less, but better is a mantra I think about all the time. And it really eliminates the decision fatigue because right now, if another thing fell into my lap, another, well, I could add this type of content or I could do this other thing.

I would be like, okay, but that does that allow me to do less, but better is that built around my core. Marketing system, which is the podcast and it's either a yes or a no. It becomes very easy to make a decision then because I'm very clear on what is aligned for the business. Now, as you're trying to stay focused in your business right now and eliminate the decision fatigue, eliminate some of the stressors.

The final thing I want to say is we want to talk about navigating capacity when you have high capacity days versus low capacity days. As someone with chronic health issues, I've had a lot of high capacity days versus low capacity days, and I do not attack them the same. I do not try to do the same things on a low capacity day that I could do on a high capacity day.

And I'm going to share this with you because I see a lot of people who are actually making things harder than it needs to be. Because on days where they just have very little to give, they have low bandwidth, low capacity, low mental clarity, um, it takes like five times longer to do the same thing. But if you have a high capacity day, You could have gotten that thing done in no time.

You probably know exactly what I'm talking about. For me, it's content. When I have high capacity days, I can sit down and do like three or four podcast episodes, like boom, boom, boom. I can create a whole training. It just happens really, really quickly. I get in the zone, I get in that flow state, and it all flows.

But when I'm in a low capacity day, when I'm having a flare up, I have chronic pain and chronic fatigue as part of my chronic health issues. If I'm in the middle of a flare up and I'm having a lot of brain fog and I can't think clearly. It will take me forever to record that episode. I will stop and start it about a gazillion times.

And then I will just get more pissed and more frustrated with myself. So on those lower capacity days, instead of trying to do the, you know, higher level CEO type of work, creating my content, creating trainings, doing speaking things. Instead, I will default and I will shift down into things that need to get done, but don't take a whole lot of bandwidth.

Updating the bookkeeping. Responding to emails I haven't responded to. I'll keep it really, really simple. I think it's so helpful to give yourself permission because often when we try to force it, when we try to force ourselves to perform, when we haven't slept well, when we're tired, when we're fatigued, when we're emotionally.

You know, not a hundred percent when we're mentally not a hundred percent, trying to force it is actually going to make it harder. And I guarantee you're not going to do your best work. So keep that in mind. You can always eliminate some of that decision fatigue. Like you have permission, I'm giving you permission, but you can always give yourself permission.

You have permission to adjust things around. If you had a day planned where you were going to map out. Your whole referral strategy and you were going to put that together, but you slept horribly and you didn't, you know, have what you need to make sure you're thinking clearly. And it seems so hard just to get the things out of your head.

Change the plan, pick a different day. We're going to tap into all those capacity builders. We're going to look at how we can improve our rest so that we have more energy the next day. And we're going to go to a lower level task for today. Get some things done, keep it simple. If all you do that day is like one or two things, that's perfect.

And then focus on getting your capacity back so that you can show up. Okay. I hope this is helpful. Um, I know it's a lot in this episode and it's been a lot about talking about how to stay grounded and today how to stay focused. But I feel like these are the things I'm hearing from people over and over and over again that they need right now.

And especially as women, we do not operate on like a 24 hour cycle where we're Every day is kind of the same. We have to think about our cycle. We have to think about, you know, our hormones, I'm going through perimenopause and that definitely impacts things. Like we have a lot going on that might impact our level of focus, but then you throw in.

The government instability and economic uncertainty, and it can just become really, really, really exhausting to try to stay focused. And my goal for you and for all small business owners right now is to prioritize what's going to keep moving your business forward, to give you the tools to help you maintain and increase your capacity so that you can handle what's coming at you, but also so that you're being very intentional in what you're saying yes to right now versus Just letting everything kind of fall on your plate.

It is okay to not say yes to everything right now. It is okay. In fact, I encourage you to say no to things that are not a hundred percent aligned. It is okay to say no to things that are not going to move the needle. I know there's a lot of, you know, stuff that we feel like we should be doing as small business owners.

But if we get really, really clear, About what actually works for ourselves and our business. And we can kind of put those blinders on just like race horses and stay focused on that. We will get much further. We will protect our capacity. We will protect our energy. We will protect our focus. And that is what's going to allow us to keep.

Going through this time. So I hope this was helpful. If you found it helpful, please come over and connect with me. I'm on Instagram all the time. I would love to hear from you. And again, I have more headed your way. We are going to stay in this fight together. We're going to continue resisting together and your business.

Is a form of resistance. When more women step into true leadership, when more women are impacting their clients and communities and making a difference, we are resisting everything out there that is saying that women aren't worthy. That women aren't capable. We are more than worthy. We are more than capable.

And we are here together to support one each other and be the new economy. We are the new economy, but we can't stop. We just have to be willing to take our time and take care of ourselves in the process and take care of each other in the process. All right. I can't wait to hear from you about this episode.

Let me know what you think, and I will see you in next week's episode.