Promote Yourself to CEO | Small Business Strategy for Women Entrepreneurs

Епизоде

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  You Can't Delegate Confusion to AI 10.09.2026 43мин

  Two overlapping circles on a piece of paper. Human only on the left, AI only on the right, and the overlap in the middle where almost nobody is spending any time at all. That is the whole exercise. My cousin Kendall gave me the version of it that ended months of AI pushback inside her tech company, and I tell that story at the top of the episode. What matters here is what it does. This is episode three of Human First: AI for High-Trust Businesses (you can catch up with episode 1: Human First ...
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  Where AI Is Quietly Breaking Trust With Your Clients & Community 07.09.2026 32мин

  A few months ago I made three photorealistic images of myself, put my logo on them, and posted them to Facebook.People laughed. They were supposed to. I had run my real photo shoot images through a meme generator with a 2,000 character summary of my business, and what came back was, in my head, cartoonish. Obviously fake. A joke. Then a couple of comments came in. This is kind of creepy. This isn’t you, right? I went looking for those images this week to pull them for this episode, and ...
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  Human First AI Is a Decision Not a Vibe 02.09.2026 58мин

  Most of the conversation about AI is happening at two extremes. Founders bragging publicly about the payroll they cut, and founders refusing to touch any of it. Both are missing the point, and neither one leaves you with an answer you can actually run a business on. So I spent six months deep diving into AI so I could form my own thoughts. Three programs, an intensive, and a lot of building. Not reading about it. Not collecting other people’s opinions. Actually using it inside this business u...
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  My 90 Day Plan Did Not Survive July 26.08.2026 36мин

  There is still a block sitting on my calendar from the second week of July that says “Record new podcast episodes.” I never moved it. I sat down in front of it most mornings, pushed it to the next day, then to the next week, and eventually I stopped pretending and just let it sit there being wrong. My granny died while my family was in Italy – just 6 months after my mom passed away. So instead of returning home and jumping right into my Q3 90 Day Plan that I’d created before traveling, ...
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  Why Your Right Hand Person Belongs in the Planning Room with Elise Arsenault and Priscilla Leonard 09.07.2026 25мин

  You come home from a planning day lit up. Six hours of clarity, a wall of Post-its, a quarter that finally makes sense. Then you sit down with your team, and somewhere between your head and their inbox the whole thing flattens into a to-do list nobody has the context for. Elise Arsenault knows that exact moment. She built The Global Actor into a training program the audiobook industry has come to trust, with ten of her graduates nominated at this year's Audies and several of them winning. And...
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  Why Hiring a Team Won't Fix Your Capacity Problem 02.07.2026 35мин

  Adrienne Loker was certain her group therapy practice needed more marketing. Her numbers said otherwise. Here is what actually turned her business around. Most therapists believe the path to growth is hiring a team and handing off clients. Adrienne did exactly that, and the plan that looked perfect on paper came apart the moment real people and real life entered the picture. People got licensed and left with their caseloads. The loyalty she thought she had earned was not for sale. In this e...
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  How I Took a Full Month Off in Italy (While My Business Runs Without Me) 25.06.2026 41мин

  Right now, as you hear this, I am probably lounging by a pool in a villa in Tuscany, watching my kids and their cousins splash around while I have my full Under the Tuscan Sun moment. There is a family wedding tomorrow, a welcome dinner tonight, and still another 2 weeks of exploring Florence and Rome ahead. What I am not doing is refreshing my inbox in a panic, wondering whether everything is quietly falling apart back home. I already know it isn’t. My business can run without me at the whee...
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  Pre-Sell Your Fall to Beat the Summer Cash Dip 18.06.2026 30мин

  There is a specific kind of quiet that gets under your skin in July, and it has nothing to do with a slow, lazy afternoon. It is the quiet of your bank account. Clients are off on vacation, nobody is starting anything new, and you can feel the revenue dip coming the way you feel a storm before it lands. I used to brace for that quiet too. Now I don’t, because of one strategic move I make almost every summer. It is the same reason I can spend a month in Italy with my family without watching my...
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  How to Take Summer Hours Without Losing Clients 11.06.2026 26мин

  I grew up in the river realm of Virginia, where everyone either had a boat or knew someone who did, and summer meant Friday afternoons out on the water before the weekend even started. The reason my family got to do that was simple. My dad ran summer hours in his business, and by noon on Friday the office was empty and everyone was gone. I didn’t clock it as a business decision back then. I just knew we were a little different. But I’ve run summer hours in my own business every single year si...
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  Why Fall Chaos Is a Summer Planning Problem 04.06.2026 33мин

  My three teenagers are home for the summer, the calendar cleared out the last week of May, and like a lot of business owners I could feel the pull to write the next two months off and call it a season. I’m not doing that, and I don’t want you to either. After almost 20 years of running this business, here’s what I’ve watched happen every single year. The women who disappear completely in June and July are the same ones scrambling in September, marketing dried up, no clients in the pipeline, h...
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  Notes to Future Me: A Simple Habit to Protect Your Capacity 28.05.2026 47мин

  There is a note blocking off the last week of May in my calendar, and it is yelling at me. Last week of school. Do not plan anything. All caps. Too many exclamation points. When I open it, past me has left the longer version: be nice to yourself, Racheal, there will be concerts and awards and kid stuff, the twins get out by one most days. I wrote that a year ago, for the version of me who would forget. And she always forgets. Here is the thing nobody tells you about capacity. The reason you k...
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  The Mid-Year Review That Resets Your Second Half of 2026 21.05.2026 37мин

  If the plan you wrote down in January no longer matches the year you're actually living, you're not behind. You're just due for a review. This is the time of year where I see most women entrepreneurs do one of two things. They abandon the plan entirely and start running on default, or they white-knuckle a plan that stopped fitting their reality months ago. Both end the same way: a Q3 where nothing feels like it's working and you can't tell why. So in this episode I'm walking you through the e...
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  The Invisible Ceiling Holding You Back from Your Next Opportunity with Angela Foster 13.05.2026 45мин

  Most women don’t realize they’ve built a ceiling around their next opportunity until they’re standing right in front of it. It looks like turning down a speaking opportunity because you have nothing to wear. It looks like saying no to the podcast interview because your hair needs to be colored. It looks like quietly opting out of visibility because the version of you that needs to show up doesn’t feel like the version of you that exists right now. In this episode, Racheal sits down with longt...
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  The CEO Ceiling Assessment 22.04.2026 59мин

  Most women entrepreneurs hit a ceiling in their business somewhere in the $100K–$1M range – and most generic advice will tell them the fix is more revenue, a new funnel, or a mindset shift. That advice is wrong. Or at best, it’s treating a symptom. In this live assessment, Racheal walks through the five areas where the real ceiling lives and why most business owners misdiagnose where they’re actually stuck. Capacity isn’t just about time. There are four different kinds, and most women are run...
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  If You Are The System, Then You Are Also The Ceiling 15.04.2026 26мин

  Ever wake up in the middle of the night with a line that feels like it downloaded straight from the universe? That happened to me a few weeks ago. I sat straight up, grabbed my phone, and emailed myself these words: If you are the system, you are the ceiling. The next morning I Googled it. Searched my inbox. Ran it through Claude and ChatGPT. Nothing. It was just… there. And suddenly I couldn’t unsee what it meant. For months, people have been asking me the same question: How did your busines...
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  Why Successful CEOs Build for Seventy Percent 13.04.2026 33мин

  You know that feeling when your business is growing, but somehow you feel more trapped than ever? More clients, more revenue, more team members… and somehow less freedom than when you started. Here’s the truth nobody tells you: growth doesn’t automatically create capacity. In fact, if you don’t redesign how you operate, growth will squeeze you harder than startup mode ever did. Most women entrepreneurs I work with hit a ceiling around the same point. They’ve built something real. They’re maki...
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  I Don’t Build My Business for My Best Days 09.04.2026 33мин

  Here's the thing nobody in the business world wants to admit: you are not going to be at 100% every day. Not this month, not this year, not ever. And if your business only works when you're fully charged and firing on all cylinders, you don't have a sustainable business — you have a liability. I learned this early, growing up with a disabled parent. You don't plan for the good days. You plan for the hard ones. That lesson has shaped everything about how I've built The CEO Collective — and it'...
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  Before You Set Q2 Goals, Ask Yourself This First 26.03.2026 26мин

  Most Q2 plans are built for a version of you that doesn't exist. The version with unlimited energy, zero personal obligations, and no curveballs. And then April hits, and you're already behind, already overwhelmed, already wondering what went wrong. Before you open a planning doc or write a single goal for the next quarter, there's one question worth sitting with first: What do I actually have the capacity to sustain right now? This episode is a bridge into Q2 — and it starts with the two que...
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  You Don't Need a New Strategy. You Need a Planning Rhythm. 19.03.2026 29мин

  If you set big goals in January and you're already feeling behind, I want to be honest with you: the problem is not your discipline. It's not your motivation. It's not your mindset or your willpower. It's that the goal-setting approach most of us were taught was never designed for the stage of business you're actually in right now. In this episode, I'm breaking down the real reason so many service-based business owners end up in a cycle of setting goals, falling behind, and starting over. It ...
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  Staying Focused Is Your Political Resistance Right Now 12.03.2026 45мин

  If you've opened the news lately and felt your stomach drop, you already know how hard it is to justify sitting down to work on your business. The guilt is real. The distraction is real. And if you've been quietly wondering whether it's okay to keep going, this episode gives you a completely different way to think about it. This is not an episode about ignoring what's happening. What I'm making the case for today is that what we are watching unfold is the death throes of a system that was nev...