Staying Focused Is Your Political Resistance Right Now

 If you've opened up the news on your social media in the last 60 days and just felt your stomach drop, this episode is for you because I know a lot of you are sitting there wondering, how do I keep showing up for my business when the world feels like it's on fire? It's just not stopping anytime soon.

I wanna say something that might feel controversial at first. Keeping your business going right now is not a distraction from what matters. It is what matters. Are you ready to grow? From solopreneur to CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host Rachel 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. Rachel Cooker, founder of the CEO Collective and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO podcast. And today I have a little bit of a Rach rant for you. I've got a little bit of a bee in my bonnet and we are really gonna go there today. Because I understand how stressed everyone is, how overwhelmed everyone is, how fearful everyone is of what has been happening in the world.

And I think it's really important that we have a conversation here about why we have to keep moving forward as small business owners. So I wanna name it directly. The news cycle has been relentless. It has been relentless. There's something new every single day. There's something horrifying every single day.

Something that I think a lot of us have been going, I can't believe this is happening. I can't believe they did that. I can't believe they said that. I can't believe this is where we are as a society. It is exhausting, like this is heavy. And I wanna be really clear that if you're feeling that way, if you are feeling the emotional weight of this, this is not a mindset problem, right?

This is a real response to real things, and I'm real tired of all of the people out there who are basically telling you to. Plug your ears and not see what you see and not hear what you hear, but instead go, you know, la, la, la. This isn't happening. And just pretend like you don't live and exist within a larger context, right?

You are not broken for feeling distracted or frozen or scared, and you're not broken for feeling guilty. When it comes time to focus on your business or to talk about your business, I think this is actually one of the most important moments in history for many of us to stay focused and to stay in the work.

That's my case for this episode. Okay, because we're gonna dive deep here into what I think is happening and why we need to stay focused and locked in. I think the fear that a lot of us have is that if we're staying focused on our business, especially if we are posting about our business on social media, or we're sending emails or we are pitching our offers, I think a lot of us are very concerned that if I keep talking only about my business, then people will think that I don't care.

That I'm not paying attention, that I'm not being a good citizen. Or on the flip side of that, right, you might also be thinking, well, if I'm not sharing how I feel, then people are gonna think I'm a terrible person and I don't care. So it becomes too opposite. Things that we're fighting against each other with, right?

Like either I have to be constantly talking about what's happening in the world, which is exhausting for everybody. Or else I don't care. Or if I'm talking about my business all the time, then I don't care. What I want you to know is I think this internal conflict is a sign that you have integrity because it means you do care, you care, and what it's costing you right now is not having clarity about your role.

In all of this, your role and how we're going to navigate this and how we're gonna move through it, and honestly, the world is losing so much when you go quiet. I think it's important that we share our responses to what is happening in the world. It doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be every single thing you share is about what's going on in the world, right?

It doesn't have to be an all or nothing. I think it's really important that we continue to talk about our thoughts around this and our feelings around this, because if we go silent, then we are complying in advance. We are not putting up a fight against it. If we go silent, then they can do whatever the hell they wanna do.

Because they're not seeing any opposition to it, and that is one of the biggest ways that fascism takes hold is people comply in advance. They go quiet and they stop resisting. You should be sharing what you're feeling. You should be sharing your opinions. We live in a democracy where our representatives are supposed to be representing us, which means we need to share with them.

And we need to share on the platforms that we have. You don't have to, I will say that caveat. If you're not comfortable sharing stuff on social, like no worries. I'm not gonna like look badly at somebody because they're not posting all of their thoughts and feelings about what's happening in the world.

But I just want us all to understand that we don't need to just go silent and comply in advance. In fact, that's one of the worst things we can do. We need to stand up, we need to resist. We need to talk about things, and we definitely need to make sure our voices are heard by the people who are supposed to be representing us and making decisions in advance.

And I can tell you I have not let up on calling my representatives. I have not let up on calling my senators. I have not let up on going to protests. I have not let up on a single one of those things, and I will not. Because I know how important it's, and I know that when we take 10 or 15 minutes a day to call your representatives and tell them what they're doing is not okay, or that they need to avoid this legislation getting passed or that they need to do something in order to actually being representing us.

Like that is part of the democratic process. And if we wanna live in a democracy, we have to engage in it. On the other piece of the puzzle though, right, is, well, how do you keep talking about your business? Because maybe it does start to feel like, well, this is silly or this is irrelevant. Um, I want you to know the world is losing a lot.

When you go quiet and you stop talking about your business, it really is. The world loses out on you. The world loses out on your work. The world loses out on your impact. And here's kind of the lens that I'm taking when it comes to understanding my role as a small business owner right now, especially a value driven small business owner.

What we're watching right now is not just political chaos. It is political chaos. It is definitely. But I truly think this is the death rows of a system that no longer works, and we've been in the death rows of this system for. A while now, it has been crumbling before our very eyes. The thing that we are seeing is that this system no longer works.

The reason it's getting louder and louder and louder is because finally people are all waking up to how much it's not working. So what is this system? It is the patriarchal. White supremacist, hyper capitalist, Christian nationalist way of organizing society and business, and it is loud right now because it is crumbling.

The death rows are loud because we are having an affordability crisis that has only escalated in the last really, really fast in the last 10 years, the last five years, but it has been continuing on up for decades. We are in the middle of a, you know, crisis of people not being paid living wages. When our minimum wages have stayed stagnant for forever.

We are in the middle of a childcare crisis, and it's just become so incredibly expensive. Like literally this system now is set up for pretty much everyone to fail. And the reason everything is so loud right now is because the people at the top are fighting for it tooth and nail because they are the ones that are getting the benefits out of it.

The rest of us are the ones who are tired of this system. So the death rows are gonna be loud, and that is how you know something is ending. Something is shifting. We are in the middle of that messy transition. And I can tell you this transition is gonna be a knockdown, drag out street fight until we get through it.

But here's what it means for us as small business owners that I really want you to latch onto, is that something is being built on the other side of this. And the question becomes who is building it? Who is building what comes next? Hopefully we are, right now, you and me in our businesses every single day.

We are the ones building what's gonna come next. We are the ones who are laying the foundation for what society and what business is going to look like when this finally crumbles. So I wanna explain and kind of. Give a high level of what these two paradigms are. The old way, the new way, the old model of the old model of patriarchal white supremacist, hyper capitalist Christian nationalist, and I am naming them, fascist is all about power over people.

If you think about. You know the shape of a pyramid, if you were to go to business school, they would literally tell you the role of a business is to create value for shareholders, and that's really the only role of a business in that context, is to create value for the people at the top. So that means it is okay within that to extract resources, to extract labor, to extract profits.

From employees, from team members, from communities, from buyers, in order to generate more profits for the people at the top, the CEOs, the board directors, anybody who's getting bonuses worth millions and millions of of dollars. And for the shareholders, right? And that model is all about having power over people.

It only works when they have power over people. But if you look back into history and if you look back into what's been happening, you can see so clearly how this has kind of happened, and it has kind of crept up on people. I don't think people knew when this shift was happening, when we really went.

Into this hockey stick like curve of hyper capitalism. Um, we didn't really see it for what it was at first, right? But there were a, a series of policy changes that have led to where we are. And I wanna talk about these a little bit because I think having this context is important to understand how we design something new and different.

So we think about the traditional corporate structure. Someone at the top is winning. That means someone at the bottom is probably losing. They have the least options. And our government, our society has set it up so that they have very few support systems. So if you think about this, one thing to consider is that when we're talking about extracting labor, extracting labor.

Has been part of this country since the very beginning. We were built on slavery. Extracting labor is nothing new here. But yes, it has technically evolved. You could question that, um, because now it's a different form of extraction where now you're paying people wages that are not living wages. Think about the largest corporation in the United States, Walmart.

They hire one of the largest corporations with huge profits, huge number of people they employ, but they also have the largest number of employees who are also on public assistance, who are not getting paid enough to the point where they have to go qualify for food assistance or they have to qualify for Medicaid.

That is wild that we live in a country where the most profitable corporations in the world have employees who are working full-time jobs and cannot support themselves. That is wild. And if you think about the level on that organizational chart of people they're extracting from the most, these are usually the people who are the easiest for them to exploit.

These are going to be the people who, maybe they don't have the education, maybe they don't have the resources to get higher paying jobs. You know, 40, 50 years ago, even before that, like there were so many generations of people who could have just a high school diploma or not even that, and still be able to earn a living wage and suddenly over time.

That no longer became the case. We went from a time period where somebody could have a high school degree and raise a family on one salary, have a pension, be in a union that protected them, and do the same job for the same company for a really long time. I remember talking to my dad about this once because he grew up in Michigan and had a ton of friends, um, and people he knew and grew up with who all worked for the major automotive companies.

Um, through, you know, the time my dad was growing up in the fifties and sixties, and you could go without a high school diploma. Get a job on a factory line, have union benefits. Spend your entire career there, have a pension. Have raised your family, be able to buy a home, and that is unheard of now. Now it has become so much harder for that same person.

To be able to deliver those results for their family because all of those things have been stripped away. We don't have pensions anymore. We don't have unions anymore. Like there was a huge push to reduce those types of things, and it has only accelerated right now. These people went from being able to have one person support a family and buy a home to now everybody's a two person income.

Right. Wages have not kept up. Minimum wage has not kept up, but wages in general have not kept up. Meanwhile, the cost of housing has exploded. The cost of living has exploded. The cost of childcare has exploded, especially in like the last 30 or 40 years, my lifetime. If I were to compare and contrast what my parents spent to raise me to send me to childcare when I was a toddler, to send me to college, to what the equivalent things would be, now it is wild and I probably should sit down and crunch the numbers, but it is just wild to see the difference.

Now everyone is struggling with these challenges. Right. So that is on one level on how corporations have extracted from the people who work for them, how they have inflated the costs of pretty much everything. The other thing that they're exploiting from the other group of people they're exploiting from are their buyers, their consumers, their um, clients, their customers, and something I remember.

Learning about when I was getting my MBA, and also just because y'all, I'm a history nerd. I love learning about this stuff. But there was a period in, I wanna say the seventies, it might have been before or after, but kind of around that timeframe where the concept of planned obsolescence came to be.

Planned Obsolescence was basically companies realizing that they were. Making products that were too high quality and it was creating a one-time purchase versus repeated purchases. Now, I wanna be very clear. I love customer lifetime value, but I don't think we should buy something just to have it to be planned to break at some point, so that my only option is to go replace it.

And that's what planned obsolescence is. Like if you ever talked to your parents or your grandparents and they said, man, they don't make it like they used to. It's because they literally don't make it like they used to. They literally do not, I. I'm always baffled by this, that the lifespan of something like a household appliance, like a washing machine or a dishwasher or a refrigerator, those things used to last and now they don't.

Now they don't at all. And this is happening in so many different things where it has created a culture for corporations to figure out how can we shorten. The lifespan of this product so that our consumers have to keep purchasing it and keep replacing it, and that is happening more and more and more like things just do not last anymore.

Even think about our clothes. I was reading something recently about the difference between even like the mall brands, like so bigger brands, much bigger organizations. If you were to compare a pair of jeans from like the Gap in the nineties when I was in high school versus now. Completely different. If you were to compare a dress from the nineties to now, like it's all synthetic, there's no natural fibers, the construction is worse.

So quality has consistently go down. Gone down. Things are built with the intention that they will break and we will have to replace them, and all of that is to extract more outta buyers. And then you layer on top of it the shift that we've especially seen with technology in the last probably 10 or 15 years, where now we don't own anything, but we subscribe to everything.

So think about this. You used to be able to. You know, buy A DVD and that's yours. You can watch it as much as you want. Now we subscribe to Netflix, and so we're paying for that every single month. Now, I know we had cable before, but that's how most of us start to see subscriptions, right? We are subscribing to our entertainment, but what else are we subscribing to?

Well, software's a big one, and this directly impacts small business owners. There's a company, Adobe. If you aren't a designer, you might not be super familiar with it, but they have. You know, aade, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, all of those types of softwares. And when I was going through college in the early two thousands, you went as a student and you bought the software package and you installed it on your computer and you owned the software so that you could use it well, somewhere.

Around, you know, uh, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, they decided, well, why would we sell it to somebody for a one-time price when we can instead have them pay a subscription? And so now you can't just have illustrator and you own it once, and you can use it forever. Now you are paying for updates. You, you're paying for subscriptions.

I even see this now. I changed my software bundle, um, from one service that was hosting my checkout pages. Like if you go to buy any of my programs, um, that was charging me $99 a month because another offer was out there where it was a one time lifetime payment for I think it was maybe $800. The minute I made that switch, I was like, oh my gosh, this is crazy how much.

We are, you know, being extracted from as buyers so that only one person at the top wins. And if you think about this too, over this, you know, timeline of 50 or 60 years, in the early 19 hundreds, there was maybe one or two billionaires ever, 40 years later, like the, I wanna say the fifties or sixties. Maybe a dozen, but from then on now there's thousands, and it's because it has been built on a model of power over people, of extracting resources, of extracting labor, and extracting money from employees, from buyers, from communities where only a few people at the top win.

And that's usually gonna be. Anybody who's getting a performance based bonus based on short term wins and it's gonna be shareholders. I could keep going on and on about this, but I wanna now talk about the new model where we're headed and that is gonna be power with people. This is going to be when I win, my clients win.

When I win, my team wins. When I win, my community wins. The rising tide lifts all boats. And for real, not just as a slogan, this is where we are headed. 'cause people are tired of being taken advantage of. The old model patriarchy hoards, it hoards resources and it hoards labor. The new model Recirculates, it makes sure that resources are recirculating through our communities, through our organizations.

The old model is built on exclusion, making sure only a few people at the top can win. And then new model is built on inclusion. It's built on anti-racism. It's built on intersectional feminism. It's built on diversity. Equity and inclusion and belonging, not just as a brand value that somebody slapped on a website, but as the actual infrastructure that is embedded into how that business operates, how that business actually works.

So what is this new model? This is a matriarchal approach to business and society. And I wanna be really clear, I think a lot of people believe that matriarchy is just patriarchy in reverse. So you still have the pyramid and instead of having men on top, making all the decisions, um, to benefit them, now it's just women on top.

That is not what this is, right? This is the same reason why white feminism doesn't work either, and it has to be intersectional feminism because you can't use the language of empowerment to only focus on one person. You have to actually focus on the system bigger, and if the system is broken, changing who's in charge of the system is not enough.

You have to change the system entirely. So the difference between the two systems is one is a pyramid with one person at the top, the other is a circle. And the way I have seen matriarchy explain the best is that where in patriarchy you're focusing on giving value in resources, mostly extracting them to take them all the way to the top.

With matriarchy, it's kind of like a bullseye. And everyone is focused on the people who need the support the most, which is usually gonna be children and families. The difference here isn't just a shape that I'm describing, but it's the difference between extracting and investing with patriarchy. It's all about extracting from the bottom up.

With matriarchy, it's about investing and recirculating that investment. So all layers of that community thrive, making sure that everyone has the resources they need to get their needs met. The difference between patriarchy and matriarchy is a difference between competing and collaborating. It's between winning alone and creating an ecosystem where everyone in your orbit, everyone in your community, everyone in your family rises.

So this is what I'm talking about when I am, when I'm talking about values driven businesses. It's not just a mission statement, but. It's really a structural choice, like this is truly more than slapping a few words that you pulled out of a word box of values that matter to your organization. This is literally thinking about how your organization operates.

This is a structural choice about how money moves through the organization. This is a structural operational choice around how decisions get made. This is an a structural operational decision around who has power over what and who benefits. So the through line here is, I want you to understand that focusing on your business right now is your resistance.

This is the actual work of building what comes next. If we stop. Building right now. If we stop building towards what's next, if we stop building the future that we want to see where everyone's needs are met, where we aren't sacrificing millions of people so that a few thousand can be billionaires. If we stop building now, then we are basically laying down and seeding the future to the people who are very, very loudly trying to hold onto the past.

We cannot go quiet. We cannot pull back, and we cannot let fear keep us silent or keep us frozen. The only way is through and the only response to the death rows of this system that has never worked. For many of us, except for those very few at the top, is to keep building something that actually does, to keep building something that actually does.

And there are examples of businesses out there that are already leading the way, and we need to lean into those. So how do I stay focused? How I'm staying focused right now, even with all that is going on in the world and all that I've shared is happening in my own life. You know, I have shared about caregiving, my parents and grief and navigating all of that, but what has me fired up right now is this right?

What has me fired up right now is having a vision of what I am building. Having a vision that is so clear that the chaos that is happening in the world really stays background noise. And yes, I will be a thousand percent on it. I limit how much of the news I'm watching. I check in. I have a few sources I check in with every single day.

I give myself like 20 or 30 minutes to read it, and then it's closed. I am not gonna focus on that. I'm going to get stay informed with the sources I've chosen and vetted. I'm going to take my action, which is usually phone calls, emails. I used Resist bot. I used five calls. I have gone to multiple protests.

I'm going to those things, making sure I know. What elections are happening, and if I need to go vote, which currently I do, there's a special election in Virginia that I'm going to go vote in. So I have my game plan for how I'm gonna do that part of my resistance, right? It is contained. I have my boundaries around it.

I take action on it consistently, and then I shift. I stay grounded in my vision for what I'm building long term. I stay grounded in my vision for what I'm building here at the CEO collective, and I stay grounded in my vision for what I'm building with my family, and I stay grounded for what I'm building for the community around me.

That is what is holding me long term, knowing that what I am. Helping you create what I'm helping my clients create. What I'm helping my community create is radically different than what many of us were told a business should look like. We're breaking a lot of those rules and we're doing it differently.

So the things that I am focused on. How do I operationalize a matriarchal paradigm in my business? And I'm not saying I have this perfectly right, but I am sharing that. I think I've figured a lot out. I think I've really made an impact in the difference in the way we are running my business. So what I have seen, because I have this new lens of how I want things to be, is we have built this beautiful.

Ecosystem. We have built this beautiful economy that I continue to see grow. As my business grows, I have a lot of clients who have become collaborators. I have clients who I have then gone and hired for their area of expertise. I have clients who I have learned from for their area of expertise. I have clients I send business to for their area of expertise, and I have a lot of clients who've become more than just a client.

They've become friends, like they've truly become part of my community. I have team members who came from my community and who now are truly shoulder to shoulder with me building this business who are identifying opportunities for the business, who are helping me deliver the level of service we want for this business, who are seeing ways we can grow this business and make a bigger impact, and who are also holding me in check, who I ask for their opinions because I trust them who I default to when it's.

Time to make a decision, and I think they're the one that can handle it. The resources here are recirculating in the CEO collective, and I think this is really important because in the last, I don't even know, 20 years this rise of Boss Babes and girl bosses. I have seen so many people talking to women entrepreneurs and women, small business owners who are trying to use the language of female empowerment, feminist empowerment, but the only person it empowers is the individual who is still operating in a patriarchal business, in a patriarchal society and a patriarchal system.

If you are watching people who are talking about. Live your best life and find, you know, create freedom for yourself, but the only person is that's being amplified is them. Right? If, if all you're seeing is their success, then I'm like, they are not actually embodying and operationalizing these values.

They're using them as a way to extract what they want. I have a huge issue with that. I want to see businesses where we are recirculating power, where we are recirculating resources, where we are recirculating support, where we are actually building a new economy. That is what I, I love seeing. I love when I hear from my clients, oh, I went and hired so and so, oh, so and so, and I went and we decided to go on our own little retreat.

We decided to do some planning together, or we decided to collaborate on this together. That makes me so happy. That makes me so happy. So this is the vision of what keeps me grounded is seeing what's possible because I'm literally experiencing it. I'll share another quick story too about how I'm experiencing it.

Over the past five years, I don't know if I've really talked about this on the podcast much, but over the past five years, um, really since I approached 40, I realized I spent most of my thirties so focused on taking care of my kids and raising little kids. And then when I was approaching my forties, I was like, wow, I don't really have much of a personal support system that I actually have real support from.

Um. And that I don't pay to give me that support. I had a lot of people I paid to give me support, but I didn't have much that was there on the emotional front. Right? And so I was like, I need to prioritize building real relationships and real friendships. And so I did, I put myself on a mission to find and make friends in my forties, and I think I've succeeded and.

A couple of things that really highlight to me that I have succeeded on creating exactly what I've been talking about is the way my community shows up for me, the way my friends show up for me in the last five or so years. I started showing up for other women saying, you know what, if I wanna build a village, I have to be a villager.

So when there were women who I was like, I really like this person. They are so interesting. I think we, I think they could be a great friend. I started showing up for them. If they were hosting something. 'cause of course most of my friends are small business owners. If they were hosting something, I was going to it.

Um, I signed up for their programs, if that was something that I was interested in as well. I wanted to show my support, not just by saying, cool, that sounds great, but actually, hey, I'll be there. I'm in it with you. And that has become incredible. Because we've had this really free flow of if I'm paying you for your expertise, then everything feels equal.

No one feels taken advantage of. And also we can do things together just for the fun of it, where we don't have to necessarily have that sort of like, you know, business to business exchange. Instead, we can just be there on a friend level. When I lost my mom, my community showed up for me. Like I couldn't believe.

They organized a meal train. They brought a huge box. My friend Chris showed up with a huge box of snacks for all my kids. 'cause she was like, it's, you have teenagers, you need snacks. Um, I had my friend Michelle showed up and help me go pick things up from my mom's room because I needed to clear out her room and her memory care after she died.

I had people that drove three hours round trip to go to my mom's funeral, and they continue to show up for me. They continue to check in on me. They continue to come over and sit with me and you know, do boring activities that I needed to get done, but I needed a little bit of extra support. And recently my friend Jackie and I have a bunch of friends who have birthdays all in the same week.

Um, we're all a bunch of Pisces and so for the last few years, my friend Jackie and I have been celebrating our birthdays together. And this year we decided to have a favorite things party. If you don't know what a favorite things party is, it's when you invite, you know, a bunch of your friends, and everybody brings two of their favorite item.

You have to do a show and tell of why this is your favorite item, and then everyone gets to go around and pick two new things to take home. That was the most fun. And as I looked around the room, I was like, the room was filled with women who I've done business with, women who have been friends, women who have been part of different communities.

You know that I move through locally and it was just so much fun. We had the best time and it really made me see that this is possible, right? This is possible. We can can continue building this new way forward where. It isn't centered on one person winning at the expense of everyone else. Instead, it truly is how do we build organizations where we all have the village and everyone's a villager?

How do we build organizations where everything is energetically exchanged equally, right? Where we are compensating each other well for things, we're hiring each other for. And we aren't asking women to just do it for the exposure or I should get a friend discount. Instead, we're showing up and saying, no, I'm here for you.

I love what you're doing and I'm paying full price. Like, how can we create that y'all? That's what I want. That's what I want. So I wanna hear from you. I really wanna hear from you. 'cause this was a Rach rant of a different kind. This was a little bit more of my philosophy and. What I wanna see happen and where I wanna go, and I'm hoping you're on this journey with me.

If you are, make sure you head over to, um, Instagram and message with me at Rachel dot Cook. I want you to remember that, you know, last month we talked about you don't need to do more to grow your business. You need to focus on the right things. And I want you to know that focus is a practice. It is a choice you make.

Every single day to stay focused, and especially when the world is loud. I understand how hard it is, but the worst thing we can do is let the news hijack our attention and let it hijack our focus and let it hijack our future. The businesses that will be best positioned when we're on the other side of this crumbling.

Old world paradigm, patriarchal paradigm. The ones that are gonna be on the other side are the ones that are being intentionally built right now. And the best news is you don't have to be per uh, perfect to do it. Either you can, you, you're gonna mess up. I mess up. But if we have that intention and we have that vision and we're willing to keep showing up.

Keep taking one step and one step and one step and moving forward, shoulder to shoulder, supporting each other. We are gonna get there. So the question for March isn't, should I keep going? I think you already know the answer. If you listen to this point, then the question really is, am I putting my energy, attention, and focus on the right things?

So lock into your vision, get excited about it. And if you want help continuing to take those steps forward, that is why I'm here. That is why the 90 day CEO operating system exists. That is why our, um, planning rhythm exists. And it's not to be rigid. It's not to pretend that the world is fine and to just, you know, ignore it and be oblivious to it and surrender to it in advance.

It's to give you an anchor. To really lock in on when everything else is unpredictable. Your plan is not meant to be a cage. It is a compass. It is about helping you make sure that the work you're doing today is actually moving you forward towards the future that you're trying to create. And that's the work we do together at the CEO collective, and it is the work that we are doing.

Inside of the CEO retreat. Just gonna put that out there. We have one coming up. We're gonna host a virtual CEO retreat on March 27th. I'll put all the links in the show notes. I know that, um, at the end of last year, I released an on demand version of the CEO retreat, which is also available on our website.

I'll put the show notes, uh, link in the show notes for you there too. But if you are interested in. Joining me live, I'm gonna be hosting a live CEO retreat March 27th to help you lock in on like what are the things you need to focus in on for the rest of this year, for Q2, April, may, June, and then help you reverse engineer that.

So every week you show up and know what needs your attention. What I need you to hear is the world that is falling apart right now. It wasn't built for us anyway. What gets built next that's on us. That is built in businesses like yours and like mine. It's in the way you pay your team. It's in who you hire.

It's in the culture you are building. It is in the way you lead. It is in the way you make decisions. It's in the way you treat your clients. It's in what you do with the resources your business generates. It's how you redistribute and recirculate those resources. That is not small. That's everything. So I wanna encourage you to keep going.

Not because you're ignoring what's happening, but because you understand exactly what's happening and you've decided to be a part of what comes next.