My Life-First Approach to Building and Growing a Business

Hey there, CEOs, Rachel Cook here, founder of The CEO Collective and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO Podcast. I am so excited about this new series and I am kicking off today with the very first episode, because I have been thinking about this a lot over the last few months, I have been thinking a lot about the life-first approach to building and growing a business.

And I wanted to kick off this series and share more about why this is so important to me. And if you are new to me, you're new to my world, you're new to learning about my background, this will give you a lot of context for the way that I think and why I not only have designed my business the way I designed it, but why I help women entrepreneurs to do the same; why I help them to build businesses that allow them to not only have the success in their business, the financial flexibility and success and freedom, but also the personal success and freedom.

This is something that is incredibly personal to me, and I think once I share this story about how I grew up, how I was raised by two entrepreneurs and what happened in my family, you'll really understand why I care about this so very much and why I want to get this message out to more entrepreneurs.

So let's rewind and go way back, travel way back in the time machine to 1987. 1987, I was four years old and my sisters were two years old and eight months old. At the time, my parents were both running their own small businesses. So my dad had just started his insurance agency. He was a few years into that and he was slowly steadily building his insurance agency.

My mom was a soil consultant, which essentially is someone who before any developer can go out and put in a housing development or develop raw land anywhere, they need to send out someone who is essentially going to do all of their environmental impact studies. So my mom was that person. She had previously worked for the health department, she had a degree in biology, my mom is one of the smartest women you'll ever meet. And at the time she was one of the only women doing this type of work. She would load up her trusty El Camino, put on her Timberland work boots, she had augers in the back of her truck, and she would go all over the southeastern part of Virginia doing soil testing, environmental impact studies to determine whether or not these areas could be developed and turned into housing, turned into other uses.

Well, in 1987, my parents were doing really, really well. They had three little girls, they were growing these businesses, by all accounts, they were just living this incredible dream life. But then, in July of 1987, something happened that changed our family forever. My mom had just dropped my sisters and I off at our nanny's house, who was our babysitter.

And we loved nanny and her family dearly. They were our extended family. And she had dropped us off, and was on her way to her office when she was at a stoplight. She was the second car in line at the stoplight to do a left hand turn across of Route 17. And a tractor trailer ran a red light and literally hit the side of my mom's minivan on the driver's side.

It hit her van so hard that they had to use the Jaws of Life to get her out of the minivan. And in fact, the only part of the minivan that survived was my little sister's car seat. And there's no way my little sister would have survived if she was in that car seat. She would not be here. So when they finally got my mom out and got her to the hospital, we realized how bad it was going to be.

She had incredibly severe injuries. She had a traumatic brain injury, a spinal cord injury. She was in a coma for three and a half months. And then it took about two years of inpatient therapy for her to relearn everything she needed to learn. I remember at this time very little 'cause I was so young, but we were lucky in a lot of ways that my grandmother lived right around the corner from our house.

And literally we moved in with my grandmother for probably that next year, my mom's siblings were all in college at the time. My mom was the oldest and all of her siblings came home to take care of the three of us kids while my mom was in the hospital, and while she was in this coma. When she finally woke up, we realized how hard this road was going to be.

She had an incredibly severe traumatic brain injury. She could not talk. She could not walk. She could not do any activities on her own. So it was a journey. And it was a fight for the next few years to help her regain what she had lost. And she didn't regain all of it. She would always, from that point on, have a hard time speaking.

She would have a harder time doing physical activity. She remains partially paralyzed. And it was a really incredible time in our family because everyone rallied around me and my sisters. Everyone rallied around my parents to make sure that the three of us girls were gonna be okay, and that we were taken care of and we were loved and we were surrounded by family, but also to support my dad so he could fight for my mom.

Because in 1987, they didn't think she was going to make it. They thought she was not going to wake up from this coma. There were a lot of people telling my dad that he should just let her go that she wouldn't have a life after this. Well, she was only 31. She was 31, with three little kids, four, two, and eight months old. She had this thriving business.

She had this incredible life and that was all about to fall apart. She lost her business. She never was able to regain anything with that. And in fact, when she told me not long ago- I was actually on a coaching call. I was hosting a coaching call for my mom's dining room table. While I was taking care of her and I was just asking her about her business in 1987 - and she said, you know, I was so excited because I had just the month before closed over, like 10,000 dollars in business. And in 1987, that was about 25,000 today. She was just getting started. She was just getting started. She could have had a multimillion dollar business herself, but because that is very physical work, very technical work, there was no one who could take that business and continue it.

That business was gone. Meanwhile, my dad's business, he literally stepped out of for at least four solid months while she was in a coma. He was there fighting for her, telling them he would not let them take her off life support. He literally slept on the hospital floor for months and months and months.

He did not leave her side. And the insurance agency he had kept on going because he had this incredible group of colleagues and friends who would pass around his agent number; every week somebody would take his agent number and basically give all their commissions to my dad so that he could focus on taking care of my mom.

That's pretty incredible if you think about it. That is very rare, but it's one of the reasons I'm so passionate about having a community and surrounding yourself with peers who care about you and who are there for you. There's a lot that you don't know at four years old, but now that I am in my 40s, I reflect back on this so much and the impact that it made. And now I'm so much more aware of why I have made the decisions I have made. Whereas before, when I made them, I was just going by instinct. Like, this is not what I want.

When I started my business in 2008, I knew in my twenties, I knew that I wanted to have a family. I knew that I wanted to do work that mattered with people I care about. I knew I wanted to surround myself with incredible people. And I also knew I couldn't take anything for granted. I knew firsthand how quickly things could change.

I knew firsthand how something could happen that could completely turn your life upside down. And because my mother has been disabled since 1987, I was very, very clear about: none of this is promised. Something could happen to me, something could happen to my husband, something could happen to someone else in my family, and I didn't want to fall into the trap of just work hard for, five years, 10 years, 20 years, and then you'll reap the rewards because my mother was only 31.

When she lost almost everything in her life and had to rebuild and had to learn how to walk and had to learn how to talk and had to fight for two years just to come home with her family. And from the time she came home, she was never able to run her business again, but she became a huge advocate for disability rights.

In fact, The 1990 American with Disability Act, she was a major force in that. She became an advocate who, we marched in that March on Washington. And at the time, I didn't know what we were marching for because I was a little kid. I was probably in like first or second grade. And all I remember of that is all these people in wheelchairs and walkers and motorized wheelchairs.

People who were, In vans being driven down the National Mall. I remember me and my sisters running around chasing squirrels, because here we are, three little kids marching with our parents, and my mom was so determined not to get in a wheelchair, she wanted to walk, so she walked the entire march with her walker. And we rested a few times on the park benches and stuff, but I just remember running around and not really understanding the impact of it until much later on. But my mom continued to be an advocate, to be an activist, to fight for disabled rights. She got involved with politics. She advocated for people with disabilities.

She met Jim Brady, who was the press director for Ronald Reagan who got shot in a attempted assassination attempt. She spoke on the floor of Congress. She fought against having these huge, massive tractor trailers on the roads because they're so incredibly dangerous. And that really, shaped and formed who I am as a human being.

So when I started my business, I knew very clearly that there were things that I wanted. I couldn't take any of it for granted. And I had to get really clear about what did I want my life to look like? What did I want my business to look like? What did I want my family to look like? Especially if there was no guarantee that I could just hustle hard for 5, or 10, or 20 years, and then it would all still be there for me.

And of course, as you get older, you start to see more examples of this. I started to see when I was still back in my consulting career, I saw all these very successful professionals who were working the 60, 80 hour weeks. They had all of the trappings of success. Like the parking lot was slam full of Mercedes and BMWs and Audis and all this fancy stuff.

But they were lonely. They had no relationships with their families. If they had kids, they didn't see them. There were also a lot who were divorced or who had a lot of stress in their marriages. They just worked all the time to have all the trappings of success. And then there was nothing left.

And I'm like, you know what? That's not the life I want. My definition of success is not about material things. My definition of success is being a good mom. My definition of success is being an amazing wife and having a great relationship with my husband. My definition of success is living the life I want right now and not putting it off for the promise that someday I will finally have the family and the friends and the fun and the hobbies.

I know so intimately how precious every moment is.

So then I got pregnant with twins. Some of you know this, but when I started my business, I had left my corporate consulting career. I really knew that was not the path for me. I had hit extreme burnout and that's when all of this kind of came crashing down on me.

And when I hit that burnout, that's when I realized, I needed to make a decision here. I needed to decide if working those 60, 80 hours a week were worth it. And because I had seen so many people in that career who were much further than me, and I saw what they sacrificed and I saw, you know, how really like sad and unhappy their lives seemed, I knew that that wasn't worth it for me. And it was a big wake up call. Right after I started my business, I got pregnant with twins. Literally about six months after I filed the paperwork for my LLC, I discovered I was pregnant with the twins and that was also a huge wake up call. I, we didn't plan to get pregnant that fast.

I did not time that. We wanted kids, but I didn't think it was going to happen that fast. And I certainly didn't think that it was going to be twins. They don't run in my family. It was just kind of out of left field. And I was like, okay, this is what it's going to be. We're going to have two babies and I'm going to have to figure some stuff out very, very quickly.

And I knew that for me, being a mom was going to be so important. I had always wanted to be a mom. When I met my husband, I knew this was the guy I wanted to have kids with. And I also knew that because of what I went through as a kid... My mom doesn't remember me as a kid, as a baby. She doesn't remember.

She has big gaps in her memory because of her brain injury. She didn't see me at, or remember me as a little baby. She didn't remember me as a toddler or a preschooler. My sister was only eight months old when my mom got hurt. And all my dad has shared about that is that mom didn't remember that she had my sister, Liz.

Lizzie is what we called her at the time, but she didn't remember. She said she thought she was still pregnant because of the gaps in her memory. And so I thought about that and she missed so much of those precious first years for me and my sisters because we were so little when she got hurt. And as a mom, I knew I wanted those years.

It was so important to me that I had those times with my kids. That was a huge reason why when I started my business and then I found out I was pregnant with twins, I realized I had to do things differently and a lot of people weren't going to understand it. So I set myself up from the very beginning to build a life-first business.

When I realized that I was having twins, I was also told there's a high likelihood I would be put on bed rest. Twins are usually considered more of a high risk pregnancy, and I have some health conditions that made that even more high risk. And I indeed was put on bed rest. And that's when I realized the way I thought my business was going to look - where I thought I was going to be like literally boots on the ground going into my client's businesses, because that's what I had done as a consultant. As a consultant, I had traveled all up and down the East Coast, I went into people's businesses, I was having meetings, I was talking to people face to face, I thought that's what it was going to look like, just for, different businesses instead of, you know, industrial manufacturing, machining companies or big utility companies that I was working with.

Like they were small business, but they were not businesses I was especially interested in. I wanted to work with people who I felt like the work they were doing was creative and interesting and important. So I knew I wanted to work and I started working with yoga businesses and holistic healthcare practitioners and life coaches and all these different types of businesses, because that was the world I entered when I was healing my own burnout.

And at the time I was incredibly lucky because the internet was really just starting to take off. Things were just starting to change as far as how you could do business. Prior to really, I would say, like, 2006 the ability to do anything online was not possible. Like, you could do phone calls. And I remember doing a lot of conference calls with my clients previously in my consulting life.

But doing Live video calls that was not really a thing and it was incredibly expensive when it first came out. But when I discovered I was pregnant with the twins and then put on bedrest I was like, okay if I am going to have to work from here, if I'm going to have to be on bedrest I need to figure out how I can do all of this given what I've got right now. And thankfully the timing just worked itself out.

GoTo Meeting had just come out. There was Freeconferencecall. com. So I could do conference calls with people and I realized, okay, I can do the work I want to do leveraging the internet. And that would allow me to one, get through this pregnancy, which - I literally, I had some clients who as soon as I discovered I was pregnant, I was like, okay, I'm going to lock in some year long contracts where I'm going to do a combination of coaching and consulting.

So a hybrid of coaching and done for you consulting work - and a lot of them didn't even know I was on bedrest. I literally was doing calls on my phone with them while I was laying on my left side, because you know, if you're ever pregnant, you're told you have to lay on your left side. And they had no clue.

As long as I had my laptop and a phone, I could do the work I wanted to do with those clients and support them. And that's what I did. And when the twins were born, I took some time. I did the bare minimum. I probably scaled back my client load to like 10 hours a week. I really was focused that first year just on figuring out how do you balance being a mom, having these two babies? You know, my husband was working as a teacher at the time.

I was getting support. I was hiring nannies to help me out, but it took me a while to kind of adjust to things and wrap my head around: what is this going to actually look like? And that's when I decided that I really wanted to do something different. I wanted to build my business to allow me to work part time hours, part time hours being like 20 or 25 hours a week, which was such a huge shift compared to what I had been doing in my corporate work where I was working 80 hours a week. I actually had a hard time believing that was even possible, but I knew that's what I had. That's what I had the capacity for. And I knew that I wanted to be able to work from home. I didn't want to have to travel.

I wanted to primarily be with the kids. I wanted to be able to be a primary parent. And that meant I had to make some big decisions about how to do things differently. That's when I realized I needed to shift away from only one-to-one work; and within the first year of the twins being born, I developed my first online course and group coaching program.

I realized that if my income was tied to the hours I have available, it was going to be really, really hard. There just simply weren't enough hours available to me with two babies that I was taking care of. So I chose a business model that was more flexible for me, and I knew that group coaching was going to allow me to do that.

I still had some one-on-one clients, but I shifted from primarily one-to-one in 2008, 2009, 2010, when the twins were born, from doing done-for-you consulting and done-with-you coaching to turning all of that into coaching programs and online courses. Then by the time my next child came in 2013, I really was a hundred percent in a more leveraged business model.

And this whole time I was able to work about 20 25 hours a week. It was just incredibly important to me. And right now, my kids have just started the school year. So my twins are now In high school.

We're lucky that our area has a program where they can go into these specialty center high schools based on their interests and their talents. So one of the twins is going to a computer science program. He wants to be a video game developer. So he's going to learn all about computers and technology and coding and development. That's where he wants to be. I'm really excited for him. It's just such a cool program.

And then the other twin is an artist and is in an incredible visual arts program. And I'm so excited for them to explore that interest. And I truly believe there's so many applications for art.

And as they have been going into high school, My youngest has been going into middle school, so he's in 6th grade now.

And it has been really interesting for me right now, I've been super emotional going through this because you realize, one, how fast it goes when suddenly your kids are in like the last stage of being at home. And I'm gonna try not to cry, but it has gone so fast. It's just gone so fast, and I'm so grateful for past me making the decision to set up my life and business the way that I did, so that I could be there every step of the way with them, so that I could be at every dance recital, so that I could go see every art show, so that I could see every orchestra concert, everything they wanted to do or participate in, I've been a part of that with them.

And even, the last few years. It's crazy because the pandemic seems so far away, but if we wouldn't have set our life up this way and our business up this way, I don't know. I mean, that was such a hard time for so many families, but for us, it was okay because I was able to continue doing the work that I do in the hours I have set aside to do it.

I was able to continue taking care of our family financially with the business that I've been growing and was able to be present and available to my family, to my kids.

Now, something I haven't mentioned here is as I've been growing this business, right, since 2008, working 20-25 hours a week, my husband left teaching in 2014 and became a full time stay at home parent. He took over the role of default parent, and that was also a huge decision because it really meant we were all-in on this business. It was like the last little tether to "job security," which is not a real thing; like if you can get fired anytime, that's not job security to me. But he was ready to leave teaching.

Our youngest was about a year old. We had just moved into this house that I was able to buy with this business. And he came home to be the stay at home dad and to really support me behind the scenes in the business. And together we have been able to live this life of flexibility, of family, of being able to do the things that we love to do together.

And I'm so incredibly grateful for that. Now, does it mean that I have sacrificed some things? Probably, there's probably some truth to I could have gotten my business to a bigger size if I would have worked more hours, or if I wasn't the sole breadwinner for my family. But I'm willing to make that trade off because I've been present for my family from the beginning.

I've had time with each and every one of my kids from the early days when they were little teeny tiny babies. And I was working in the back bedroom hiring babysitters to help me so that I could get some work done until Jameson got home at three o'clock from school and then he could take over. I was still able to do that and feel like it was really, not perfectly balanced, but in harmony with what I felt was most important.

I've been able to do this as all the kids got into school. And Jameson was able to then, while the kids were in elementary school, he was able to help me in the business some more. And he has. He's been behind the scenes doing all sorts of different things, from editing videos to writing content. He's always been there behind the scenes helping me in the business in whatever way we needed. And then keeping the home running; he's actually become a really great cook, way better than I am. And when the pandemic hit, our kids were in fourth grade and first grade. And we decided to homeschool them until we felt confident to send them back. Jameson is a former teacher.

So we were able to prioritize our family and do the things we felt were the right things for our family at the time. And again, that was putting a huge load on him to homeschool. He took a that on a hundred percent. But I was still focused on the business and able to, we were still able to support each other in a lot of ways.

Now that all the kids are in this, you know, I don't have any little kids anymore. No one's in elementary school. The twins have four years before, I don't know, are they going to go to college or, go right to work or take a year off? I don't know. We don't know that yet. But I'm very committed to being here for them over these next four years and supporting them and really, my role as a parent has changed a lot.

And when they're younger, it's very much hands on type of things. Now it's a little bit more like you're their coach. You're not there to tell them what to do; it's their turn to become more independent and you're there to support them in making decisions, and making mistakes, and making the things happen that they need in order to become fully grown, independent human beings that can take care of themselves one day.

On top of all that, I've also had to step in and take care of mom again. Some of you have heard me talk more about this, but again, my mom was hurt in 1987. She has a traumatic brain injury. She has partial paralysis still. As she's aged, things have gotten harder and her neurologist shared that, when you have the type of injury my mom has, you recover what you can recover.

And he said, she probably got back to like 50 percent of what she was by 1990, in those first three years of her injury. He's like, that first year or two is really when you get back whatever you're going to get back, and after that, it's like a decline. It's a little bit of a decline. You start to lose mobility, you know, you have to work really hard.

That whole saying, you use it or lose it, is super important if you have an injury of this type. And as she's gotten older, she's had things happen. She's fallen, she's had hip replacements, she's had to go back to the hospital. There was a point around the time I had twins where she had her hip replacement and then had - what was it - some sort of infection. It was like one of the really bad ones. I can't remember. It was like MRSA and something else. And at that point, she lost a lot of mobility, and was really limited then to being back on using a walker a lot, using a wheelchair even more, needing even more help. Then, around the pandemic, right before the pandemic, she had fallen, broken her ankle, was off her feet for a few months while that ankle healed.

And that was it. She would never walk again. She couldn't use a walker. She could barely stand up on her own. And now, since then, she's been fully wheelchair bound. And that has, that decline has been very fast. We've had to get nurses in place very quickly. And because she was in the rehabilitation convalescent hospital, because of that injury, we knew some nurses and as soon as that pandemic hit, I was like, get them out of there, I want them just with mom. I don't want anyone else who's in the hospitals around her because we didn't know what's going on. But I had to get really involved really quickly because while my dad could be that person for her when he was like 35, 36 when he was a young man, now he's in his seventies.

He needs help. And he needed help too, because the pressure of everything was hitting him too hard. And I had to help him get to rehab for alcoholism in 2021. And at that time I was getting dad into rehab, helping him learn that he needs to ask for help, he can't just bury everything and muscle through. It was time for him to take care of himself and he also deserved to be taken care of.

I had to step in and handle my mom's care. I had to make sure that we had enough nurses around the clock to take care of her. I spent probably three months working from her dining room table while I was hiring and interviewing nurses and trying to make sure she would be good. And so the last three, four years have been pretty chaotic.

But I am always grateful that I set my business up to be life-first, to allow me to take care of my family, to take care of my kids, to take care of my husband, to be available and have the capacity to step in and help my parents when they really needed it at a time where they both, they just couldn't do it on their own anymore.

They needed me to step in and help. And that would only have been possible because of the decisions I made early on to make sure that my business was life-first.

Whoo, okay. That's a lot. And I'm feeling like all the feels sharing the story with you and sharing my journey with you. I think this is something that I've had an extreme version of this, right?

Not everybody is raised with a fully disabled parent who needs so much care. Not everybody has chronic health conditions that contributed to massive burnout that limit your energy and your physical capacity to grind it out and work it out. I've had these lessons early on in my life and they're always reminding me of what is actually most important?

What actually matters right now? And to me, it's always going to come back to the people I care about the most. And I know from experience working with thousands of women entrepreneurs that it's often not a matter of if, but when something in your life is going to happen that is going to cause you to make a decision about how you're going to show up and how you're going to proceed.

I have helped so many clients get through incredibly hard things in their life that could have just totally destroyed their business. I've also helped clients who've gone through hard things and they just had to close their business. It wasn't going to be a life proof situation. The business could not handle what life was throwing at them at the time.

I've helped clients go through getting sober. I've helped clients go through horrible divorces. I've helped clients go through miscarriages. I've helped clients go through losing a child. I've helped clients go through cancer diagnosis and treatment. And every time somebody goes through something that is incredibly hard, I keep coming back to: this is why we need to build life-first businesses.

As entrepreneurs, we often don't have a huge safety net. You know, if something happens to you and you're traditionally employed, you might have access to FMLA. You might have access to a bunch of things that are available to you to keep you afloat, or to hold on to your job until you're able to come back.

Business owners usually don't have that. If you're a business owner and you have a family emergency that takes you out of your business for more than a couple of weeks, most small business owners don't have the infrastructure in their business, they don't have the business model that allows them to take time away.

It's heavily dependent on them being the one doing all the things. They don't have the systems that can run without them. They don't have the team in place that can run those systems. They don't have the strategy and the plan that allows them to step out of the business. And it's often an afterthought only when there is an emergency.

So I used to call this building a life proof business, because life is going to happen. And there are going to be periods where hard things happen. There are going to be times where shit hits the fan, and you really have to make some decisions on how you're going to move forward. But now I'm like, you know what?

I don't want to call it a life proof business. I want to call it a life-first approach to business because this is all about building around our definition of success, around what we really care about - about what success actually looks like for you as an individual human being, for what you want your family to look like, for what you want your marriage to look like, your friendships to look like, for how you want to take care of yourself and your health and your wellbeing - that should absolutely be a part of your definition of success.

And your business should be built in a way that fully supports that. You shouldn't have to sacrifice going to your kid's piano recital because you have too much stuff on your plate at work. You shouldn't have to work while you are sick because you have no wiggle room in your business. You have nothing in place to take care of you.

You have to muscle through everything. That is not a way to live. And while my examples here are - I know that they are more extreme. I know that if your business is designed with more of a life-first approach, where you can step out of your business for not just a week at a time or a month at a time, but maybe even three months at a time where you can look at your team like I had to in 2021, when I needed to step in and help my dad get into recovery and take over my mom's care. I literally looked at Amber, my director of operations on a call when I knew that's what's going to happen. I knew, let's see, we had his intervention in April of 2021 and I knew the Thanksgiving before that it was not good, that he was not handling things well, that he was struggling and needed help.

And I could see my mom also needed help. And then when she finally called me and said, Rae, we got to do something, I don't know what to do. And I knew she's not capable of doing this on her own. I talked to my director of operations - I mean, we're open about this, we both are sandwich generation; we both have had to care for parents and grandparents while raising kids - and I said, this is what's going to have to happen: I'm going to have to let you run the show for the next three months. And because of the way the business is designed, literally she and the team were able to just run everything and pull me out of anything that wasn't essential so that I could focus on what mattered most.

And that's a life-first approach to business. It's not a matter of if, it's when, that you will need to take care of yourself, that you will need to take care of your kids, you will need to take care of your parents, that there will be something that will become like all encompassing and you will need your business to survive through that.

And honestly, to thrive through that. And that will only happen if you design your business with your humanity in mind, if you design your business with your definition of success first, and are really, really intentional about how you put that in place. This is why I do what I do. This is how I developed The 90-Day CEO Operating System because I had this definition of success for myself, for my family, for my health and my wellness, for what mattered most to me.

And when you know what matters most, it's so much easier to make the trade off. It's so much easier to make the trade off of, I'm going to hustle for five or 10 or 15 or 20 years, and then I'll be able to relax and enjoy my success. No, I want to enjoy my success now. I wanted to be there for my kids as they've grown up.

And I've been able to do that. I knew I'd have to step in and help my parents at some point because of my mother's brain injury. And as I've been able to do that, I knew I'd have to help my dad figure out how we are going to honestly pay tens of thousands of dollars a month to take care of my mom. And we've been able to do that.

And it's all because I have been so crystal clear about what matters most and I've designed this business with intention to be life-first. So maybe I didn't grow as fast as some of my peers and my colleagues who started businesses around the same time. I was having a family. I was going to preschool. I was going to the park.

I was going on vacation with the kids and playing on the beach and making memories. And I'm okay with that. Maybe I don't have all the design or whatever. And actually I could care less about design or whatever. Anybody who knows me, you know, I drive a minivan that has a hundred thousand miles on it. And I will drive that thing until the wheels fall off because I don't care about that stuff.

What I care about are the people in my life. So now you just got a huge insight into who I am as a human, why I do the things that I do, why I teach and support entrepreneurs and business owners the way that I do, why I'm so focused on women entrepreneurs. There are more women entrepreneurs starting businesses now than ever before, and that number is only going to increase. We live in a society that is not life-first. It's not family first. We live in a society where if you are a mom who works in the corporate sphere, you're expected to work like you don't have children, but then be the mom as if you don't have to work. And that's not fair.

It's an impossible situation that so many are put in. And that's why so many women have left traditional employment to start businesses. The research shows the number one reason that people are starting businesses - that women are starting businesses - is freedom and flexibility. It's the freedom and flexibility to be life-first.

But most of the messages in the entrepreneurial space are not about life-first. They're about hustle. They're about grind. They're about doing the absolute most with the hope that it will pay off in the future. And I just feel like there's a different way to do it. And it starts with getting really clear about what matters most to you.

So in this series, my life-first approach to building and growing your business, I'm going to be sharing a lot more about the shifts that will need to happen in order to make that your reality. If you don't want to have to sacrifice your family, if you don't want to have to sacrifice yourself, if you don't want to have to sacrifice, your health and your wellbeing and your mental health, then this is going to be an important series because we're going to talk about some things that I know you might have heard, but I really want you to take to heart. Most of the information and approach to business, the old school approach, the incredibly patriarchal approach that expects us to just hustle, hustle, hustle, work, work, work is not what most of us actually want.

I'm willing to have a slower pace to my life and business so that I can prioritize what matters most. And if you've been listening this whole time, I'm pretty sure you're on the same boat. You're on the same page with me. So make sure you are subscribed to this podcast to make sure you continue listening.

We are going to be diving into a lot over the next few episodes. All right, if you love this episode, please let me know! Comment, connect with me on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok, wherever I'm posting this. Let me know your insights and ahas and stay tuned. The next episode is coming soon.