Promote Yourself to CEO | Small Business Strategy for Women Entrepreneurs

You are the one everyone calls when something goes wrong, and you’re also the one who’s supposed to be growing this company. This is the full CEO Ceiling Assessment, recorded live on October 20th.

Score yourself green, yellow, or red across the five places capacity breaks in a service-based, relational business.

Grab a piece of paper before you press play. You’ll score:
 → Calendar & Buffer
 → Your Business HQ
 → Your Out-of-Office Plan
 → Feedback Loops
 → Marketing Strability

You’ll leave knowing which one is holding your ceiling in place, why your reds ar...

There’s a continuing education course in financial services where advisors get reminded to talk to both people sitting across the table from them. As in, actually have a conversation with the wife. That one reminder tells you a lot about the client experience women have been handed when it comes to their own money.

My friend and client Cris Caruso (who first joined me on the podcast here) came up in that industry, and she watched what happened on the back end of it. When a woman who never had a relationship with the advisor was wi...

A CPA once looked at how I run my business and said, “You spend way more per client than most other people running these types of businesses.” And I said, “Yep, I’m fine with that.” That one exchange is what a values-driven business looks like on a spreadsheet.

After four episodes of The Matriarchy Would Never taking apart the standard playbook (the safety net we’re all expected to be, patriarchy in pink, the persuasion tactics, and leaving yourself out of your own plan), you’ve probably been thinking, “Okay, Rach, what do I actually do with this inform...

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...

Robert Cialdini went undercover at used car lots, telemarketing rooms, and fundraising offices, taking notes on how compliance professionals move a person from no to yes, and he did it because he kept getting talked into buying things he did not want and wanted to know how it was being done to him. The book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion was the result. He wrote it as a self-defense manual for regular people against manipulative sales tactics.

It barely sold. Then marketers and salespeople found it.

An entire industry picked up a book written to...

Somebody handed me a notebook in a conference swag bag in 2014. Rose gold foil. GIRL BOSS on the cover.

I was thrilled. I was in my early thirties with four year old twins and a brand new baby, building a business from the ground up, and after years of apologizing for being ambitious I was watching a whole generation of women get handed permission to want things out loud. Charge money. Take up room. Want more. Call yourself the boss.

What none of us could see yet was that the thing being handed to us...

When I first started my business, I remember being so frustrated that all the advice was ‘hustle harder’.

I was actively looking for my own coach in the summer of 2010, when my twins were about 6 months old, and I was trying to work out how to move a more traditional boots-on-the-ground, in-person local consulting practice to an online model using GoToMeeting and Skype (yep – we were in the early days of being able to work from home finally).

And so much of the advice I heard didn’t work because it wasn’t designed for me – a new...

"I need Spicy Rach."

Gabi Day said that to me on a call about ads, and I knew exactly who she meant. Spicy Rach is the version of me that shows up when I am fired up about something and want to see it change. She is also the version I have spent years keeping mostly off the internet.

Gabi does not have that problem. She shows up as 1000% herself all the time, and that is the whole reason her marketing works.

So when we both spent the last six months buried in...

There was a three-ring binder in my dad's insurance agency and we called it the "office bible". That binder was a business brain about thirty years before anyone thought to sell you one.

A woman who worked for him built it. Every task she did had a checklist in that binder, so when she wasn't there, somebody else could sit in that front seat, answer the phone, and take a payment from whoever walked through the door. This was the nineties. Somebody had to be there.

I was in middle school and I had no...

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 AI...

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 that is whe...

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 until I had a aligned AI position I would be...

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, I went to...

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 for years she came back from the CEO...

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 episode of Promote Yourself to CEO, Adrienne Loker shares how she rebuilt...

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 wheel for a month. Cl...

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 wi...

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 sinc...

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, head bar...

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...

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 exact mid-year review I'm...

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 longtime CEO Collective member Angela Foster –...

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 running low on all four at once.

If you’v...

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 business surv...

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 making great money. Their offers are selling. But they’ve beco...

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's the reason my business kept running when I ha...

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 questions I ask every CEO at the beginning of every re...

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 comes down to one critical shift: moving away from project-based...

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 never built for most of us...

Most business advice assumes you're operating at full capacity. But what happens when life doesn't cooperate — not for a week, not for a month, but for the better part of an entire year?

In 2025, I went from working 25 hours a week to about five. My parents needed more care than they could safely manage at home. My mom moved into memory care. There were hospital stays, doctor visits, Social Security calls, house sales — and ultimately, her passing in December. It was, without question, the hardest year of my life.

And yet, my business stayed intact. We k...

From hiding behind NDAs to leading a thriving book writing business, Amanda Edgar's journey proves that embracing visibility can transform your entrepreneurial path. In this candid conversation, the ex-professor shares how she escaped the constraints of third-party platforms, built a strong team, and developed a unique framework for helping others write books. Her story demonstrates how the right business systems and community support can help you scale while staying true to your values. Amanda's evolution from reluctant expert to confident CEO offers a refreshing perspective on building a business that thrives even through personal challenges.

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