Promote Yourself to CEO | Small Business Strategy for Women Entrepreneurs

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...

"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...

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 paymen...

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...

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 i...

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 r...

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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 indu...

Send us Fan Mail 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. Peopl...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 ba...

Send us Fan Mail 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 comple...

Send us Fan Mail 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 o...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 wh...

Send us Fan Mail 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 sudde...

Send us Fan Mail 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. M...

Send us Fan Mail 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 p...

Send us Fan Mail 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 fi...

Send us Fan Mail 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'...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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, d...

Send us Fan Mail 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 demon...