#636: From Burnout to CEO: Building a Business with Purpose and Balance

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Business can be a lonely game. But it doesn't have to be. Welcome to Boutique Chat where we explore community over competition and how to scale your company with the balance and the happiness that we all seek. We'll hear from product based businesses of all types, retailers, e commerce and wholesale brands, along with industry experts shaping the future of our industry. I'm your host Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat. Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast this week. I am so excited to nerd out on today's topic. Rachel, you are the woman for the job. I'm so glad that you're here on the podcast with me. Thanks for joining.

Thanks for having me, Ashley. This has just already been fun, so I know this is going to be a great conversation.

Well, before this even started, the recording even started, you guys have to know, like, we nerded out for a long time about the things you teach and the things I teach and just how much crossover we have. So we've got to like Squeeze Squirrel and get into all the nooks and crannies. For those first who have not met you yet, tell me just a little bit, how did you get into this journey? What led you to creating the CEO collective? How did this become a passion of yours?

This is a long and winding road, so I'll try to give the condensed version which is I am a typical type A overachiever. I finished my undergrad and my master's in business in entrepreneurship and small business by the time I was 21. And then I went right into the world of consulting because I, I love working with small businesses. Both of my parents were entrepreneurs, ran small businesses. We've had entrepreneurs in my family going back generations. Like, nobody works for other people. We've had factories, we've had grocery stores, we've had insurance agencies. We've had all sorts of businesses in my family. But I actually thought that I was gonna be the person behind the scenes. I never thought I was gonna be a CEO. My dad was in my mind, a typical entrepreneur. He's very extroverted. So much personality, kind of the mayor of the town we grew up in like walked in anywhere. Everybody knew John. Yeah, I'm the opposite. I'm very much a introvert, very much behind the scenes. I like to organize things. And so I went through business school thinking I'm going to be a really great like COO for somebody else. I'm going to make sure someone else's business runs really, really well. Well, what I discovered in the world of consulting is that I hated working 85 hour weeks. I got incredibly burned out and I ended up taking a medical leave of absence. I was on short term disability for about three months because I had a really big medical condition show up. I discovered I had several chronic illnesses that literally kept me from working those 80 hour weeks. I was actually afraid to drive myself to my clients. So I ended up on a yoga mat, as you do. Cried for about three straight months, became best friends with my yoga teacher. And she looked at me and she goes, rach, I don't think you want to go back to that. Do you think you could help? My yoga studio, it's been open for about a year and I'm really struggling. And so I put on my business hat and I'm like, let me see your P and L. What is your, you know, maximum number of people you can have per class? What's your break even per class? Like all these things started hitting me. And this was in 2008, and at this time, there were no people with my background and experience available to owner operated businesses. Yeah, if you were a small business, you were probably going to like a chamber of commerce, maybe you were going to a local score, you were trying to find on the Internet information. But there was just not very much that was accessible. And so that kind of kickstarted my journey working with women business owners. I realized there were so many really cool businesses that were doing incredible work and they didn't have the business background I had. They were starting their business not because they wanted to be, you know, the next Jeff Bezos, but because they really felt like their work was meaningful and important and they wanted to get it in front of more people. So that kickstarted my entire business. I just grew, starting with yoga business owners and holistic health practitioners because of course, those are the people I was going to as I was working through this chronic health challenge. And 15, some 16 years later, I don't know how many years later now, it's been a long time now. We have just continued to evolve and I've just become even more committed in working with women entrepreneurs because my journey mirrors a lot of theirs. I have chronic health issues. I'm a mom of three. I started my business and then six months later found out I was pregnant with twins. Don't recommend that timing. It was a little stressful, but it was the reality. Right. And. And then I have aging parents who are disabled and I'm also caring for them. So I have just gotten so committed to Working with women entrepreneurs, because for a lot of us, our business is a way to do meaningful work, but it's also a great way for us to live a meaningful, full life alongside of that in a way that maybe more traditional roles don't allow us to.

Man, that's beautifully put. And you sum up so many people who are listening today and who are part of the boutique hub. You're right. Like being a small business owner, having an opportunity, opportunity to have your own career is your way to do meaningful work and just to serve so many people, you know, in your family and in your immediate circle. So I couldn't agree more. I'm curious. I think we are going to have so many things that are in alignment here, because I love talking about being a CEO versus being a hustling entrepreneur. I'm curious, as you start to speak to women for the first time, what are some of the biggest struggles that you see business owners having on their journey to kind of shifting and becoming a CEO versus becoming that entrepreneur?

Yeah, I think the first big one that I tackled pretty quickly was being willing to ask for and accept help. That is really, really challenging, especially for women entrepreneurs, because we've all been conditioned to be superwoman. Right. You can't just have a great career and be at the top of your game. You also have to be, like, the best mom and also have time to go work out and have a thriving social life. We're supposed to have it all, all the time. And that pressure, I think, is really starting to crumble in real time as we're all going through it in real life. And I think for me, because I had twins right away and I had a chronic illness, nothing will make you realize you have to ask for help faster than being handed two bab. Like, literally, you're outnumbered. And I see this a lot with my clients. I've had so many clients who've gone through, you know, having a business before having kids, and after having kids. When you start having kids, you learn how to prioritize real quick. You learn what is actually important versus what is, you know, not that important. And I think that's something a lot of women struggle with because we hold ourselves to these high standards that are kind of impossible. Yeah, it's kind of like one of the main things you'll hear new moms say is, I don't get enough help around the house. I don't like the way they fold the towels. I don't like the way they load the dishwasher. At some point, you realize it doesn't matter. There's clean towels, there's clean dishes. Right. Same for your business. There comes a point where it's like you can't do it all. And maybe your assistant doesn't do it all exactly the way you did it when you were answering the inbox. Or maybe they're, you know, not doing it exactly the way you would have made that graphic. But at the end of the day, it's done. And that's more important than being perfect. So I think that's one of the biggest ones is asking for and accepting help. It's.

It's almost like, you know, first time mom versus third time mom, right? You boil the pacifier or you just like, kind of dust the dirt off of it and you're good. It's so true in business. I love how you put that. So I'm assuming, you know, that's a huge issue. Asking for help. What are the biggest mindset shifts that also have to go along when you are kind of moving from that do it all mode to being a CEO? What big mindset shifts have to happen?

Perfectionism. Oh, my gosh. Perfectionism is. I honestly think this is one of the biggest things that are just. It's just holding women back in general. And this is why I'm such a huge advocate for us just showing up as we are, as imperfect as we are, and not getting so hung up on everything has to be a certain way before I start showing up. Perfectionism holds so many people back, and it holds them back in the very first baby steps. And the thing is, we're all afraid that if we don't do it perfectly, if we get that email saying you have a typo, like, if you let that make you crumble, then you're really going to struggle as that scales up, because you're going to get a lot more of those emails. And I'm here to tell you, if you send out an email with a broken link, you'll be fine. If you send out an email with a typo, you'll be fine. If you have to go back to a client and say, hey, I need to move this deadline around in order to actually. Do you know the level that I really want to do this at? Yeah, you'll be fine. And we're so worried about being perfect 247 that we forget we're all human and we need to allow space in our business for us to be human and a little messy. It doesn't mean you're not excellent at what you do. It doesn't mean you don't have like a high level of professionalism, but it does mean you're human and you're allowed to have human moments.

Yeah, it's kind of like that quote about like comparing your beginning to somebody else's middle. You know, it's, it's not about like starting out and having everything put together. Sometimes it's about starting out really messy. But your customers buying into that journey and being so committed to seeing you evolve over time and growing with you, like that's where the beauty and the fruit is, is letting them see, see you evolve. Not just all of a sudden feeling like you have to be perfect from the start.

I think this is one thing. If everyone who starts comparing themselves can do, take the person you're comparing yourself to and then get on their, whatever, social channel, whatever blog, whatever, whatever they're putting out, scroll back a few years and you will see that they also started messy. Yeah, they, they started messy. They launched things that weren't perfect. They had hiccups. You're going to go through that and the sooner you can realize that's just a rite of passage and take the stigma out of it and take the shame out of it and just be like, oh, that happened. Not the end of the world. The easier it'll be. It'll be less stressful. Cause you're like, you know what? I'm gonna make mistakes on the way and that's totally fine.

Yeah, amen to that. As you see, like, if you think about your clients and your community and women starting to really take the shift to move into being more of a CEO, what other leadership traits or personality traits do you see emerge as they're making that shift?

So there's this quote I go back to all the time from Erica James, and she's the, the head of the Wharton Business School. And she did this interview with Brene Brown on her Dare to Lead podcast, which is one of my favorites. And she said, leadership is about managing the energy in yourself first before you manage the energy and others. And I think right now, what we are in real time witnessing in not just the world of small business, but the world of business, period, the world of work, period, is we're noticing a shift from a very old school, top down leadership style where it was very much like we are in control over you. We have power over what you do and say and how you do all the work that you're doing to now a more equitable model where everybody is valued and everybody has power. It's about Shared power. It's about power with, instead of power over the people who are working for you. And that change is massive. Because anybody who's ever been in a toxic job situation in a toxic environment, we all know what it's like to have somebody who is not managing their energy. They're usually explosive. They are very negative, they are very toxic to be around. They have a hard time keeping people on their team long term. They have very dysfunctional dynamics in their team. But if you see somebody who's done their inner work right, who's gone to therapy and work through their own stuff, they're showing up and they're grounded and they're able to receive feedback themselves. So there's an open communication that's not going to happen in that old school toxic environment. So I think a lot of leadership now when we say that entrepreneurship is the biggest personal growth journey you'll ever be on, this is what we're talking about. It's like you have to be willing to have conversations that are hard. And that could be you giving a hard conversation to someone on your team or having a hard conversation with, you know, a supplier or a contractor. That could also be, they need to have a hard conversation with you and you have to be able to handle that. You have to be able to sit with that and process that and, you know, not have that knee jerk reaction, but instead really be able to be thoughtful and be able to respond. That is a level of leadership, of self leadership that I'm really working on myself and with all of my clients. And a lot of it is doing the personal work, right? A lot of it is being willing to be like, okay, I'm not perfect, I'm listening to your feedback. I'm going to take some time to process this and feeling comfortable enough because you've built that comfort and safety for yourself that it's okay to have those conversations.

Yeah, it's such a great point because when I think about my own journey, or a lot of times the retailers, the journey, I hear from them. When it comes to being a CEO, hiring or outsourcing often is a part of that. But it's so intimidating because you feel like, who am I to lead someone? Who am I to hire someone? How do I know to tell them what to do went off and I don't know what I'm going to be doing day to day in my business. So what are some other strategies? Like if I'm new to leading and I'm new to building a team, what are some other great Strategies just to keep me organized and to understand what am I focusing on every day versus what am I asking them to focus on every day. Scorecards, metrics, systems, processes.

Yeah, where do you go? This is where. I mean, I've built out an entire framework we call the 90 day CEO operating system for this reason, because I was coming into small businesses and supporting them in growth. But if you don't have a operating system, a way that your business is running right, then it becomes really confusing and overwhelming. It starts to feel like you're spinning a million plates. And the hardest part for your team with that is they never know what the priority is. Unless one of those plates is dropping on the floor and breaking or you're putting a new one up. And each time you give them something new, they think that means the priorities are changing. So the reason we came up with this growth framework is we know from research that the small businesses who do best are the ones that have a framework that runs our. Their entire business, that their team is on the same page about. It tells them what the priorities are. So we got to start with vision and values, right? You got to know what the priorities are, and everybody's got to look back at those. This is something I see small business owners struggle with because we tend to be idea people, we tend to be very creative. So it's like we love the idea of coming up with a vision and creating goals. January 1st, we're all out here with our gel pens and like, our sticky notes, and then where is those list of goals now? You know, we're the middle of the summer recording this. They don't know where that list of goals is. It's buried. It's in, you know, a notebook that they've already tossed. The reality is you have to be looking at them every week, every week. And your team needs to look at those every week. Everybody needs to know what the priority is, and they need to be reminded. So really is if you can't see it, it doesn't exist. You need to make it very, very clear and make it front and center so that everyone's on the same page along the same lines with that, if you're a creative idea generator, future thinking CEO, you need to protect your team from that side of you sometimes. And one of my favorite ways to do that is an idea parking lot. Ah. So this is. This is just one thing that I tell everybody to do. Because again, we get ideas all the time. But if we keep actioning, every new idea that pops in our head without the Context of here's our vision, here's where we're headed, here's what we already have, here's the resources that we have, the team we have. Then again, each time you throw a new idea, it is like throwing a dopamine bomb in your business. Yeah, you are coming up with ideas because it's fun for you. Guess what? Your team is trying to catch all these dopamine bombs and they are scrambling to keep up with you. So create a document. I call it an idea parking lot. And you just keep that document out. It can be a note on your phone, it can be a Google Doc wherever it is. And you have the great ideas. You just go in there and add it to your idea parking lot. And then you let it sit, you let it kind of marinate until the next quarterly planning session. And then you can pull out those, the idea parking lot and say, okay, do any of these ideas still sound good? Do any of these make sense in the context of our bigger vision? Do we have the resources? Do we have the team? Do we have the capital we need to do a good job with this idea? And some of those ideas are not meant to be actioned. You'll discover that if you wait a little bit, you'll see, oh, that was a cute idea. But it's not actually going to move the needle for me. And some ideas just need to wait until you have the resources to put them into place. So for example, I had an idea for a planner and it sat in my idea parking lot for like two years before I actually hired the designer. And I had the idea for the planner because I was teaching my 90 day process and I had my own little bullet journal. Cause I love a paper planner. But if you're a paper planner person, you've probably bought every planner on the market trying to find the perfect one. And so I got into bullet journaling because then I could make my own planner. Well, then I realized, oh, this is really great, I should turn it into a planner. But that idea sat there for two years before I had the bandwidth, before I had the designer, before I had the capital. Because of course creating a print product is expensive. You're going to have to mock it up and print a ton of mock ups and then shop around printers and all of those steps. I'm not a product designer. It was just like this random idea I had. So it takes time and that's okay. Like you can put things in that idea parking lot and it's going to protect your you from shiny objects because you're making them sit there and simmer and make sure they're actually worthwhile. But it's also going to protect your team from getting frustrated with the creative visionary CEO who can sometimes take people on a little bit of a ride with all those ideas.

My team can attest to this because in Slack we call our idea parking lot the Squirrel Rodeo. And we have a Squirrel Rodeo Slack channel. And I have a Squirrel Rodeo Trello board. And I'm telling you, it's a party in there and I love to add to that party. So well done. We all have those and it is really overwhelming. We think everybody thinks like us and they don't. Most of the time they don't. So.

And when you build a team, you will find that, yeah, not everybody thinks the way that you think. And so once you notice those differences, you really have to kind of put those little boundaries in place so that you're not messing with all the systems you've already built.

Yeah, absolutely. That's a huge thing. Hey, can we meet up in person? It is one of my favorite things to do here at the Boutique Hub. To get to meet you face to face to hear your personal business story and your journey and what you're working on, but also to put you in contact with and to build friendships with some of the most amazing business owners from around the world. Boutique owners, wholesale brands, industry service providers and experts. Experts. All of us together in one room. And that's what we do at our annual Boutique Summit event this year. I would love for you to come to Dallas, Texas of course, on June 8th and 9th for our annual Boutique Summit. Our theme this year is the summit and your business completely reimagined. And I think it's time for that theme to take effect. Right. We have been through some crazy highs and lows in this industry and I think going into 2025, we are all ready to reimagine what's possible in this industry and in your business personally. So get ready for detail, hands on workshops. Not just you listening to speakers, but you actually getting things done. Pulling out your Facebook ads account and building some ads together or planning out an entire quarter of content, maybe doing some social media audits with some of our most well listened to experts in the room along with fellow boutique owners. It's time to dig deeper into your business. And that's what we're going to do together at the Boutique Summit in Dallas, Texas, June 8th and 9th. I hope to see you there. It is our biggest and best and favorite event of the year and it's time to take your business to the next level. Let's do it together. The other thing that's really helped me with in, in that line of thinking, and I know you said it's your 90 day process. Our company's been going through EOS entrepreneurial operating system for the last, I think four years now. We've been on this journey and had a consultant and the whole thing. And for us, like that idea of 90 day sprints has been so impactful because it's easy, like you said, to create those goals at the beginning of the year and then go, oh, well, you know, now it's November now, what did we get there? But when you take the goal and you break it down into quarters and then you take it down into weeks and we can actually have scorecards and metrics and accountability, it makes a world of difference to me actually achieving those goals. So I'm curious, like, talk to me more about your 90 day process and if someone's listening, how can they just really narrow the focus to the next 90 day sprint?

Yeah, I love the EOS system and I would say the EOS system is really great if you already have a team with some leadership involved in it. Where I tend to find people who come to me and use our 90 day CEO operating system is they don't have an executive team. They're just in the earlier stages of building a team. So first we just need to give them a little bit of structure.

Yeah.

So when we're building out your 90 day plan, the first thing we want to do is make sure you have your client growth engine in place. And your client growth engine is really three systems that we need in place before you try to scale up anything. Because you can't hire a team to run any of these systems unless the system is there. Right. So you need a marketing system. And this means how are you getting in front of brand new people? How are you getting them to engage with your business or your brand and then how are you nurturing them? So what are the pieces of the puzzle there? What is your marketing system look like? You want that to be so dialed in that it's rinse and repeat that you know, every week, every month, every quarter, what you're doing for that area so that you don't end up in that feast or famine where you kind of get busy with delivery and then you kind of drop the on marketing. So that's really huge. And I think especially for if you're in that scale mode, you have to know that the biggest thing is you're scaling up, that you're going to scale is the front end is the marketing. In order to get the volume of sales you want, you have to really explode the volume of marketing that you do. And a lot of people don't realize how much more you're going to have to do, how much more visibility, how much more you're going to spend in ads, how much more you're going to care about making sure that those numbers are getting hit right. It's got to be really, really, really dialed in. The next system that you need to put in your client growth engine is your sales system. How does that look? What is the process people go through from being a potential customer to a paying customer and go through it, actually pay attention. Like I'm such an experienced nerd. I want to know each step of the process, what happens if I click through your ad and go to your page? Well, once I'm on your page, what happens next? Is it if I'm on mobile, what does that look like versus if I'm, you know, on my desktop, am I going to get a retargeting ad? If I don't buy right away because I happen to be on my phone and I can't do it right, Then you want to think through that whole sales process and think through it from every possible angle that your potential client is currently in and then finally deliver how are you delivering your product, program or service? So I tend to work with primarily service based businesses, so delivery is huge because they're doing services done for you, done with you, courses, consulting, coaching, etc. Even for product based businesses though, taking the time to think about what does that beginning experience look like from the moment I purchase your thing? Right. We would call that in the service space onboarding. But I would say even for a product based business, like there's nothing better than buying from a new company and they've taken time to do a little something that's like that surprise and delight. It could be as small as the welcome email has some personality and a gif in it. You know, like those things go a really far way. But what are you doing to surprise and delight? What are you doing once they become a client to retain them, to get them to purchase from you again? Are you, are you starting to share up like other things that you might be interested in? Are you letting them in on new releases? Are you letting them in on new sales coming up or a new line you've just added? How are you nurturing those people. And the beautiful thing about this whole process is if you do it really well, you build out that lifetime customer value where not only can you get bigger orders, but you're getting them again and again and again from your clients. So we need that client growth engine in place. And so when we do 90 day planning, we are checking through this because there's always an opportunity to improve in each of those areas. But you really want to get it down to a science so that you can hand it off to your team. And then you have someone else who's responsible for the marketing, someone else who's optimizing the sales process, someone else who's making sure that those, those clients, those customers now are getting invited to come back and repurchase, reorder, get on their subscription of their whatever it is that they purchased. We want to make sure that that all works together beautifully.

Yeah, I nerd out listening to you talk about this because I'm all about like the secret to business is not like all things you see on Instagram. It's not all the fancy, pretty, oh my reels look like this. It is about the nitty gritty systems and processes and very unsexy frameworks that actually fuel the business, that allow us to iterate and get better every single month when we're actually tracking something that means something.

So yes, I love it and I think something that I'm just super passionate about that I think every small business owner needs to get on board with. 100% is client lifetime value.

Yeah.

This is something that is so easy to ignore. We get so focused on the front end of, you know, ads and bringing in new people. But if you look at what is your average client spend with you in their first order, if you can get them to their third or fourth, oh my gosh, they are a client for life that suddenly went from a one time order to somebody who's ordering from you all the time. You're the place they go to when they're thinking of that thing. And there's so many categories that I'm such a marketing nerd that I love good marketing. So there's a lot of subscriptions and things I buy from small businesses because they paid attention. They're like, oh, you ordered these gummies to go to sleep a month ago. It's time to order some more. You want to get a subscription? I'm like, sign me up. They worked great. Put me on auto ship.

Yes.

Make it easy for me to continue purchasing from you and I will. Absolutely. I'm the queen of automating everything in my life. So I will auto ship like that, I will subscribe like that. If you are paying attention to, you know, how long does it take for me to get the thing, use the thing, try the thing. If it works, yeah, sign me up.

I'm, I'm in there solving your problems. I mean really, that's the focus. And then on the marketing end, the things, if you're going to scale your business, it's simply what is my customer lifetime value and what is my customer acquisition cost? So how could I invest? You know, then I can ramp up all of my ad spend because I know my costs to achieve this value. Then you have a marketing machine, which you've demonstrated so, so helpful, which is.

Where a lot of us, you know, a lot of us get in our heads about this. And I think it's really easy to feel like it's complicated, but it's really not. Like once you get these systems in place, it really becomes about inputs and outputs. Yeah, right. And you can, once the system's in place, it's not about radically changing the system. Right. Once you find what works, it's about doubling down on what works, optimizing what works. And I think as long as you're paying attention to your customer the whole time and listening to them, you'll see where you can optimize, where you can, you know, make them so excited about your brand and your products that they will want to come buy more from you.

I love it. Awesome. All right, Rachel, I've got a couple of lightning round questions for you. Are you ready?

Okay, sure.

First one, I give you two hours back in your day to work on income generating activities. What do you do and why?

Mm, two hours back in my day. Well, I don't work that much in general. I usually only work four hours a day. So if you gave me two hours out of that four hours back, I mean honestly, I would probably be doing this right here. Doing interviews is one of my favorite income generating activities. It helps me get in front of other communities where there's like minded people and I do a ton of them. I probably do about, about 50 to 60 interviews a year in some way, shape or form. Yeah, I, it's, it's my go to all the time and we do other marketing activities, but I definitely know for my business when I can show up and have conversations, when I can have like longer form content, that's where I see the magic happen. So interviews and my own podcast, I would do more of that so good.

All right. What is the unsexiest process in your business that drives the most impact?

Ooh, the unsexiest process in my business. I mean, none of the processes in my business are very sexy. I mean, honestly, I think boring businesses are the best businesses. We spend a ton of time on our client experience and we really take a lot of time when it comes to onboarding all of our clients inside of the CEO collective. And a huge part of that for me is just getting to know everybody. So my clients know that if they come to work with me, I'm showing up on your email list. I'm going to be on all over your social. I've looked through every page on your website. They, they know that I'm going to be watching. And for me, it does take a lot of time. It's not sexy to do like that research on your clients, but if that's my role is to help them grow their business, then I got to be up in their business. So that's what it looks like.

So good. I love it. All right, so you mentioned that you work four hours. I love it. Old Tim Ferriss, right, he'll get us at the four hour work week. So what is the best way that you've learned to set boundaries so that you can take care of yourself, your family and your business?

Yeah, I generally work about four days a week, probably about 20, 25 hours a week at this point. And it's honestly been that way for quite a while. I keep a very strict calendar. I have a calendar SOP that is organized to the nth degree. I teach it to all of my clients because I have learned that if I don't run my calendar incredibly strictly, then I will say yes to everything because I want to be nice to everybody. So I have to protect myself from myself. So Mondays are CEO day. All I do is my CEO date, checking in with my 90 day plan, setting myself up for success that week, checking in with my team. We have my team call, making sure that everybody on my team has everything they need for the week. That happens on Monday. Nothing else happens on Monday. Tuesdays and Thursdays tend to be more client facing. So on Tuesdays I'll do one on ones with clients. And then on Thursdays, it's all CEO, collective, group, nothing else usually unless there's like an interview that got stuck in there somewhere. And then Wednesdays are content only. So Wednesdays are no call days for me. So I'm a big fan of having no call days. A lot of People are kind of shocked when I say that I have days on my calendar that you cannot get on. And it's because I know I need to prioritize getting the other things done. So, yeah, that's what my week ends up looking like. And if. If I had more time back in it, I mean, I don't know what I'd be doing because I've got it down to a science now.

I love that. All right, what is one metric you live and die by in business?

Stress to dollar ratio. So this is a metric I came up with because I'm like everybody else. I'm someone who has new ideas all the time. I'm always coming up with things I want to do. But I have to really ask myself, especially as someone with chronic health challenges, is this stress to dollar ratio work for me? So there are a lot of things I could do that would be incredibly lucrative, that would be incredibly profitable. But maybe they take up too much time, maybe they take up too much energy. Maybe it means I'm having to do a lot of output in order to get that. I want things that are the least amount of stress and the highest amount of profits. And sometimes that means you have to say no to a couple things. So I'm always looking at that stress to dollar ratio as a way to evaluate what programs I want running. If we're looking at things inside of our programming, I'll often go through and be like, okay, what part of this delivering this is getting stressful? How can we simplify that? Because I want it all to be low stress and high profit.

I think we all need to listen to that a little bit more often. That's so helpful.

All right.

This has been so incredibly helpful, all of this conversation. So before we wrap up, I guess just last lightning round question. What's the best business advice you've received that just always sticks with you?

Hmm. The best business advice, honestly, this is one from my dad that always comes back to me, is that business grows at the speed of relationships. And as I shared earlier, my whole family is small business owners. And I'll share a quick story. It'll just be real quick. In 1987, my mom was in a car accident. A tractor trailer hit the side of our minivan, and she was in a coma for three months and in the hospital for two years after that. At the time, my dad was only a year and a half into his insurance business. And it was the business community that showed up and surrounded my family that made sure my dad's business would Survive. My mom's business didn't survive. She was the only one running it. She was no longer able to go do the work. But my dad was an insurance agent, and all the agents who had gone to the insurance school, they had all started at the same time. They would literally pass around his agent number every week so that they would credit my dad commissions for different sales they were making so that he could take care of my mom while she was in the hospital for so long. And that has always stuck with me. It's just who he is as a person and who all those amazing people were. I've shared this story on my own platform, but I'm on this mission to make business human again and make relationships important again. And I think this is why, because you'd never know when someone's going to need help. How do we actually show up and build community? It's by being the person who starts the meal train or, you know, meets you at the hospital when something's happening, or who picks up your kids from school. Like, we have to really build the village again for a lot of us, and as small business owners, I think it's more important than ever before. So business grows at the speed of relationships. The more you build those relationships, whether they're with your clients, your team, colleagues, peers, the faster your business will grow and the more fulfilling and rewarding it'll be along the way.

Wow, Rachel, I feel so lucky to have had the chance to talk to you and to get to know you, that is. It gives me goosebumps to hear that story about your dad. And I couldn't agree more. We need more of that. I feel like, you know, post Covid in this world, there was just so much isolation. And I think we all realize just how lonely we all really are. And to me, I think you're right. Being a small business owner and just building a community around your small business solves that for a lot of people and makes people feel a whole lot less alone. So thank you for sharing your wisdom. Thank you for all the work that you're doing in your community, but this has just been a real honor to get to know you. Thanks for being on the podcast today.

Thanks so much, Ashley. It has been so much fun to talk today.

Thanks for listening, guys. I hope you took away all kinds of nuggets and new ideas from this week's episode. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a rating and review. We love to hear your feedback and give you a chance to be featured on the show each and every week. For more information on our spirit of community over competition and to access guest downloads and bonuses and all the resources we talked about on the show. Head on over to the boutiquehub.com and join the community. We'll see you next week.