The Matriarchy Would Never Leave You Out Of Your Own Business Plan

When you sit down to set your goals for the year or the quarter or even the month, do you make sure that YOU are in the plan too? After years of running the 90 Day CEO Retreat, there’s one major planning mistake we see again and again. Women who invest in resourcing their businesses without blinking struggle to spend that same time, energy, and money resourcing themselves, *because spending on the business reads as ambition and spending on yourself reads as indulgence.* *That’s exactly why it feels impossible to actually follow through with that plan you so carefully mapped out for your business.* We tend to set big business goals and write plans for a version of ourselves that doesn’t exist. The version that has unlimited time and energy, and more importantly, the version that never has to take time off to take care of a sick kid or help your parents downsize into senior living. So when there is a glitch in the matrix, and someone else needs you to step in to handle something (because guess what – you’re the safety net for everyone else), there isn’t any buffer in the plan. This is the episode where *The Matriarchy Would Never Series* shifts from deconstructing a patriarchal approach to business to building something that actually works for you and your real life – starting with redefining what success on your terms actually looks like *for you.* I promise you’ll want to grab a pen so you can go through this series of questions before you create your plan for 2027! About an Hour and a Pen **What You’ll Learn in This Episode** → Why you need to create your own definition of success by looking at your life & lifestyle, health & wellbeing, family & friendships, creativity & fun, and spirituality & connection to self (and why I don’t measure success by my business first) → Why I always consider the season of life and business I’m currently in, including how this actually looks in my real life day-to-day → Why women entrepreneurs have an easier time spending money to resource their business than spending money to make their daily life significantly easier. → Why I almost lost it when my husband asked me for a list to ‘help out’ – and the solution that has been a game changer both in our marriage and working together in the business. → How I realized that I inherited impossible standards that were making everyone in my home miserable and how relaxing those have dramatically improved my quality of life. → Do you know exactly how many hours you actually have in a typical week to work on your 90 Day Plan? I share exactly how many I plan for that helps me avoid putting too much on my plate. **Key Concepts from the Episode** **The Engine, Not a Destination.** Business is deliberately missing from the five areas of your definition of success. Ambitious women default to working all the time when the other areas are left vague, and the business outcompetes everything else because it is the only area with a clearly defined scoreboard. > *If you lack a clear definition of success for your LIFE, your business will always take over because it’s the only thing you can clearly meansure!* **The Season of Life & Business Is a Design Input.** Before you set a goal, name the season your life and your business are in. Mine right now is teenagers getting ready to leave the nest, caregiving for my dad, and a business ramping back up after a year on cruise control while I took care of my mom. > *Seasons come and go. There will be seasons where life demands more of you and business needs to adjust accordingly.* **Ambition Versus Indulgence.** Investing in the business feels like ambition because it promises an ROI. Investing in your own capacity reads as indulgence, so women keep adding support at work and keep none at home: no home success team, no personal success team, nothing scheduled for their health or their people. > *As your business grows, you naturally resource the business with more support, more team, more systems so you can stay in your role as CEO. You need to resource your life the same way so you can spend your time and energy on what is actually important to you!* **Hand Over the Category, Not the List.** “How can I help? Just give me a list” hands somebody the execution and leaves you holding the planning. Hand over the whole category instead, the way dinner five nights a week (planning, shopping, and cooking) and every email from the kids’ schools now belong to Jameson. > *Handing over tasks isn’t enough. Stop delegating to-do lists and start giving people OWNERSHIP over the entire category.* **Plan for ONLY Seventy Percent.** If your entire calendar is back-to-back, then you have no buffer to actually handle things that come up unexpectedly. Planning for just 70% means that you intentionally leave 30% buffer. > *Before you plan your business, plan your life! This will help you see what capacity you actually have instead of attempting to life around your business.* **Resources Mentioned** The CEO Ceiling Assessment.If you ran this exercise and something came back empty, this is where we find out why. Fifty minutes, live and free, and you score five capacity domains green, yellow, or red as we go. Tuesday, October 20 at 12pm ET, replay if you can’t be there live.  The Get Paid Calculator. The $47 tool I mention in the life and lifestyle section. It works out what you need to pay yourself to live the life you want, then reverse engineers the revenue goal from that number, which is the right order.  The CEO Collective®. The membership where service-based, relational business owners install the 90 Day CEO Operating System® and plan from their real capacity instead of an imaginary one. It is why Thursdays on my calendar belong to the members. The Matriarchy Would Never: Assume You Are The Safety Net. Episode 1 of the series, on the business advice that quietly assumes somebody else is handling life at home. This episode is the build that answers it.  The Matriarchy Would Never: Sell You Patriarchy in Pink. Episode 2, on who is selling entrepreneurship to women and the personas built to make you trust them faster.  The Matriarchy Would Never: Shut Down Your Critical Thinking. Episode 3, on manipulative marketing tactics and the one question that tells you which side of the line a tactic is on. It ends by promising this episode.  **Connect with Me:** - Instagram: @racheal.cook - TikTok: @rachealcookmba - LinkedIn: @rachealcook - YouTube: @the\ceo\collective - Website: The CEO Collective **Subscribe & Review:** If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! 🎤 Thanks for listening! I'll see you next week!