Raising Your Business: For Moms Growing Their Business and Raising Their Family

88. You’re the Bottleneck — But Not in the Way You Think

• Yael Bendahan

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I’m nursing my baby on my lap as I record and yes, it’s noisy—but it’s real life. This episode? It’s short, but it’s pivotal.

I’m walking through why you are the bottleneck in your business—even if it’s not because of your team or your systems. It’s because your energy is stretched thin. I used to do custom work, launch like crazy, and it all stopped when real life kicked in. My business needed me, and that’s the crux of the problem.

Spoiler: The fix isn’t hiring more people. It’s about pulling the plug on the belief that you must be “on” all the time.

What You’ll Learn:

  • The difference between being the bottleneck personally vs. systemically
  • How to build a business model that runs—even when you can't be “on”
  • Daily and weekly rhythms that power growth without burnout
  • How to design offers that don’t collapse when you step away
  • Evergreen funnels, automation, and layering offers for passive flow

Why this is a gamechanger:

You don’t need to burn it all down—you need to remodel. If you’re tired of feeling like you're spinning your wheels and ready to build something that sustains both your business and family life—this episode is your wake-up call.

Resources Mentioned:

LINKS
📈The CEO MOMS Growth Matrix - feeling stuck or plateaued at your current revenue? Snag your custom roadmap for sustainable growth from $0 to multi-6-figures in this FREE training! >>> yaelbendahan.com/matrix

🔥Join my FREE 3-Day Program, LEVERAGE - the process that’s creating multi 6 figure years working nap times and being a full time mama of 6. Claim your spot here >>> https://yaelbendahan.com/leveragepod

💰Offers in Your Pocket - 11 Offers You Can Pull Out of Your Pocket and Sell This Week! Only $9 - yaelbendahan.com/pocketoffers

✨Join the Collective
In the "building" stage of your business? Join the MOMentum Collective - my most accessible mentorship program for moms growing to $5-10K months.

💃 Apply for the CEO Mom Mastermind if you're ready to scale sustainably to $15-20K+ months. Read more about the mastermind here OR go straight to the application here.
Want to chat about the mastermind before you join? DM me on Instagram - instagram.com/theyaelbendahan

I'm trying to move into what I'm calling the One Call business model. I don't want more than one call a week two at most. At most. And that might mean not having a lot of spaces for VIP days or VIP intensive. Or having it very limited. Because with the way my life is right now, the way my business is right now, the way my family is right now I can only do really do calls in the evenings, and I need to be, I need to be present with them in the evenings. It's not, it's no longer negotiable. I need to be there to make sure everyone gets to bed, make sure everyone feels seen, to make sure everyone's doing their chores to make sure everything's happening. Welcome to the Raising Your Business Podcast. I'm your host, Al Behan, founder of CEO Mom Academy, mom of Six and Lifelong Reading addict. This podcast is here to empower moms to run their businesses and lives like the powerhouse CEO. They are. I want you to believe that you can have the business success you desire. And be present with your family and to give you my best tips and strategies for how to make that happen. I'll be sharing the honest reality of balancing business and motherhood biz models that work for you. Marketing simplicity, and the mindset of A CEO, mom. Now let's dive in. Hello. Hello. Welcome back to the podcast. And if this is the first time you're listening to this, I am, yeah. Al Behan, mama of Six, and I'm currently nursing my baby as I record this podcast. I don't, I generally try to not record podcast episodes while he's around because at his age he's turning one. Oh my God. He's turning one in about 10 days on the same day that I turned 35, which is crazy. And he is at this age where like he's just all over the place. He's so he's so mischievous and and I find that I have to keep interrupting myself. And I lost my little mic that I attached to my, like my lapel mic. And so once I find it, I might be able to do more easily recording while I'm running around after him. But currently I'm attached to my computer. And so I refuse to let this attachment to my laptop to record be a bottleneck in my production. And so here we are. I'm nursing him. He's looking at me like I'm crazy. He's like, why are you holding this mic? We never do this. And we'll see how long this lasts. So wish me luck that I actually managed to get through this. It's not gonna be a very long episode, but it's an important one. And. Serendipitously, we are talking about being the bottleneck. And spoiler alert is not your team. It's not even necessarily your strategy. The real bottleneck is something else. And it's not the way you think. Okay? So if this episode really just hits you in the gut and you are really ready to build something that's more sustainable for you in your business, my CEO my mastermind is currently open. I'm gonna be taking a little pause this summer for onboarding new clients, but it is open and you get a bonus month when you join throughout the summer. So if you join in July or August, you get a bonus month because I know that things are so crazy in the summer and you might feel like, oh, I wanna be able to use all the time that I have in the Mastermind, so you get an additional month as a gift from me to you, because Summer is crazy as a mama. Yes. Yes. No mommy. Mommy not dadda. Yeah. Oh gosh, he's so cute. But he does not say my name yet. He only says daddy. And which I'm a very big fan of. I love when kids want their daddies. It just gives me a break considering that he's still nursing multiple times a day. Dad, yeah. Okay, he's off my, he's off my lap and currently trying to wipe my nose with the tissue and maybe eating the tissue, so I don't know. I think I'm gonna let him figure out for himself that tissues aren't that great. Okay, so I remember this one week. Okay, there I had a launch going on. I I think a couple of my kids were homesick'cause it was in the winter. I was barely sleeping and suddenly like everything, a launch basically ground to a halt. And not because I didn't have support and not because I didn't have team. At the time I did have a team, but because the design of the business still relied on me being at capacity all the time, like a hundred percent all the time. And if we wanna be real here, whether you have a team or not, you probably don't have a team problem. You have a you problem, but not because you're necessarily doing it wrong, but it's because the way your business is structured or requires your full on energy to function. And as an overachieving, like very high energy person, people are like how do you do that? How do you put so much content? How do you launch all these offers? How do you do all this stuff? And. The problem is that you built your business to rely on you being like on a lot of the time. And then it feels like your business breaks when life happens. And that is not your fault. That is the model. Okay. And it took me time to go from being on on, especially as a service provider, we had to be constantly prospecting for clients and I was doing custom everything. So obviously that was a lot more work. I was not at the product. I pointed my business. It was a gradual shift for me to go from that to then productizing and systemizing a lot more to then really being able to build a business model that did not require me to be on the entire time in order to still be able to make money. Okay. And it was very fun. Like this summer, I was on a, on both of my maternity leaves, I was able to make money, bring in leads even when I was off because I had rebuilt and remodeled my business to a place. Where I could do this. And next week I'll be going even to even more depth about some things that I've noticed about myself and my business and how my energy is now, but the fact is. Hiring a VA is not necessarily going to fix it. Posting more is not going to fix it. What will fix it is designing a backend or designing a system that does not necessarily fall apart when you need to step away. So what does that mean for you? Okay. Okay, so the first thing I wanna think about is just having a system to make sure that you get your most important things done first. And, um, I actually share my system for making sure, like the revenue generating activities actually happen in my CEO Mom business blueprint. I will link it in the show notes. And it is really just four basic things that you do every day. Um, to make sure that those, that those parts of your business are taken care of. and I'm not gonna go into the four things. Um, I actually talk about this in the four things. I actually have an an episode all about this, right? The four things you need to do every single day in your business. And the truth is though, you can actually set some of these four things up to happen without doing them every single day, right? So if let's say one of the four things is putting out content, then you can batch your content at the beginning of the week. You can create a long form piece of content and repurpose it into smaller pieces of content, right? It doesn't necessarily have to happen. Every single day, but I recommend that you set aside the first hour of your day to those four things, and when you're done with that hour, you will know that you have really covered all your bases. You have. I've gotten to the place where where you know, like everything that is important in your business that needs to be like nurtured and cared for, is nurtured and cared for. And so that was just the first thing I wanna point out is that if you have a a, a process and a system and a plan for making sure the right things get done, then you are not gonna have to waste time in decision fatigue. You're not gonna have to waste time. Um, trying to figure out, okay, what do I do now? Right? Because you're gonna have your daily rhythm. You're gonna have your weekly rhythm. And I literally share this inside of the CEO Mom's business Blueprint Exactly. And how to structure your day the way that you need to in order to. Have consistent business growth and two different types of weekly rhythms that you can build your week around. And I literally will use AI for this. I have my weekly rhythm plugged into a project in Chatt PT and I'll be like, here's what I need to get done this week. Can you please help me plug things in? You know, day by day in this week based on my weekly rhythm, and it literally does it for me. Okay, so. There's no excuse really because Chacha BT can literally do the thinking for you when you have your list of stuff you need to do besides for your daily revenue routines. Um, you need to make sure that you are running your business in a rhythmic sort of way that allows you to make sure that the most important things get done. And I know that sounds very, very mysterious. But I literally did an entire podcast episode about this, so I'm going to link that in the show notes as well so you can actually listen to it more in depth. And if this sounds amazing to you, then get the CEO Mom Business Blueprint. It is literally the steps, exact steps I took to hit my first six figure and my first multi six figure year. Okay? So that's the first thing. Now, what else when it comes to your offers. That means offers that don't necessarily require live delivery every single time you sell them. That means systems that can deliver nurture and value without you having to be logged on all the time. That means automated touch points that still feel warm and personal with that, that leave space for you to be able to actually be personal and personalized from, a place of kind of like spaciousness and not feeling oh my God, I have to be checking in with everyone 24 7 all the time. And when people say you, you're the bottleneck, they often mean hire more people. And I'm wondering if maybe this a real solution is designing a business that needs less of you necessarily. Okay. And this really brings me back to when I was part of a program a while ago and they were saying about, team building and they're like, you wanna build a team for the$5 million business that you want to be? And people were literally hiring for the business they wanted to be at, but they weren't there yet and it broke their business. They could not sustain that financially. Holding that team. And they had to, a lot of people had these like big hirings and it was like, yes, I'm building for the multimillion dollar business. And then they had to mass fire a lot of people because they could not sustain it. Their business wasn't at that place. They couldn't sustain it. What are you doing? Oh, he's so cute playing on the floor. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna ignore him because I wanna teach him how to play a little more independently. We're really working on that now. What is he touching? Okay. It's fine. It's fine. It's just a toy. Okay. And what made me realize that was, sorry. Okay. Total a DH, adhd, like squirrel moment. What made me realize this was like, this is actually really terrible advice. Okay. And I remember even back another program I was part of, a membership I was part of. I remember like her, her like whole thing was like, create a webinar, invite everyone you know, to this webinar, sell your offer. Whether or not all those people that you know are or are not the target audience for this offer, sell your offer. You'll make some money. And then the first thing you do is hire a full-time employee and they will do all the work for you so that you can be more hands off and you can really focus on being in your zone of genius. And I was like. That is the worst advice I've ever heard in my entire life because first of all, a full-time employee is not going to be, unless you can find a unicorn, which is not common, they're not gonna be a unicorn. They cannot do everything right. I would rather hire people, contractors for part-time work in their own zones of genius so that I can actually make sure that everything in my business has done to. The best quality as possible, right? And and so very often people are like, oh, you're the bottleneck hire team. You're the bottleneck hire team. But really what that means is restructuring your business so that you can actually take the time off. And I remember speaking to my friend Adrian Dorson about this. When it comes to doing the clockwork business model, running your business like clockwork. And yes, it does require hiring team, it does require hiring team, but the very first part of it is restructuring the business model. That it actually can be delivered and run by the team. Just hiring people. Can I please have that tissue? Can I have that tissue please? No. Okay. Just hiring people, like being like, okay, I'm, the bottleneck I need to hire is not going to be the key. The key is building in those backend systems beforehand. So what does that mean? What does the backend leverage mean? Okay. It means things like evergreen, nurture. These could be emails, these could be mini courses, these could be automations. These could be, nurturing kind of touchpoints or check-ins that happen on automation? It can be even just setting up your VA and again, your va I definitely recommend having a va. And it's so funny as I'm at the time of recording this, I I'm, I think, I don't dunno if I mentioned in last week's episode, I can't remember, but I just parted ways my, with my current va because she's just looking for more project based work and I had more like ongoing based work and. My first VA that I ever had reached out to me and like she has been like my standard. She has been the standard for my business. I've literally measured every other VA up against her. She really, by the time she left my business, she was more of like an OBM than a VA at, to be honest. And she's very much like an executive assistant slash project manager. She's the best. I see. I keep saying she was, she is. She still exists. She's amazing. And she reached out to me and was like, Hey, I'm just letting you know that I'm actually like looking for some work again. And I know you have everything sorted, but if you do need help in the future, let me know. And I was like, I actually don't have everything sorted. They just lost my IVA and now we're talking about working together again. And I have, I'm so excited about this because I do think having a good assistant and a good team member ideally like someone who's almost like a partner in your business really makes such a difference to, to your capacity and what you can accomplish and the mental load of your business, and. I'm so excited about this. So you're getting like my, like literally like 24 hours later reaction of oh my God, I miss you so much. I missed her so much. If you're listening to this, grace, I miss you. And I'm really excited because we just worked really well together and I think I really have not found someone since then that has been able to like mesh with me and the way my brain works in the same way. Like I have not. And so I'm very excited about this. So I'm, this is not for me to say, do not hire people or do not hire team members, because you of course should hire team members. If you have the financial capacity, if you have the the workload that, requires offloading, a hundred percent hire people. But very often. The bottleneck is not the people. It's actually your energy. Your energy is the bottleneck, and because your energy is the bottleneck, you are now in a place of not being able to scale past your energy capacity, and that is a problem. So how can we build a business that does not require your energy? Like I said, the evergreen nurture sequences on the backend, the evergreen emails, maybe courses, funnels, things like that offers that flow naturally into each other. So stacking, and I'm talk about this more in the Lazy Money Masterclass, right? Stacking can I please have that magazine? Thank you. You're getting. You are getting full on me. This is my life. So stacking offers so that you have all these different backend ways that people can find your other offers, right? So upselling, downselling, cross-selling putting invitations into your other offers into your existing ones. Having automated up upgrade opportunities, behind the scenes of your lower ticket offers and things like that. And thinking about your calendar, right? Does your calendar have built-in breathing room for you to just think right? And just reflect and wonder if maybe this is like the way you're running things is the way you wanna run things and I know, oh my gosh, trust me, I know that as am I a mom of six, I feel like I have no breathing room for anything.'cause even if I have breathing room for my business. I'm still a full-time full-time mother. My husband works full-time, so I am the, I'm the primary parent, primary caregiver and primary, house manager. And it's not really a thing here in Israel to have to hire like. Nannies or, full-time help in general. It's very it's not, it's very unusual, let's put it that way. It's a very unusual thing to do. It's not easy to find that kind of person. And I don't even know if I want that kind of help to be honest. But and I do get help Every once in a while. I do get help some cleaning help here and there when I can find it again. Cleaning up is very in demand here because most women work outta the house, right? So it's not easy to find. But my baby will be going to daycare for half a day, starting in September, which I think is gonna be really great for him. He'll actually be going with his cousin, with my nephew, my sister's baby. They're 10 days apart. And and I'm really excited because they'll just get to know each other a little better and get to spend every day together. And I'm really excited for them. Giving yourself whatever that looks like, trying to find yourself breathing room. And if you find that your business is taking up so much of your time, that you're just running back and forth between work and family and work and kids and work and laundry and you literally do not have a moment to think, I would challenge you to think is there a way you can rejig your schedule and maybe like remodel your business a little bit to make space, right? And I'm actually doing this right now. I've actually been brainstorming this in my journals and with my friends and. In my little mini peer mastermind and I think about how can I simplify things immensely. So I can only really take off one night a week from that. Duty, so to speak. And and because my husband does not have a reliable schedule, he's not, I don't know when he is gonna be home. We're not gonna be home. It needs to be me. I really had to think about, am I building a business model based on the one that worked for me in the past, or maybe my life was different, my kids were younger, things were different. Or am I building a business model for the person that I am now? For the energy that I have now, for the per, for the I've changed and I've evolved as a human being in the past two years, right? So much so much. And I'm gonna be talk again. I'll be going into that a lot more in my next episode'cause that's my birthday week episode and I'm talking about my reflections as I turn 35. But I wanted to consider that maybe you. I don't wanna say you're the problem. You're not the problem, but you are the linchpin. Your energy, your clarity, your presence is powering this entire thing. So let's figure out how we can bottle that energy and repackage that energy to run even when you can't. So an example is my client, Catherine, who just. Wrapped up her launch for her relaunch for her new signature program, the brand shoot styling blueprint. She helps brand photographers learn how to style their own sets so that they can have these amazing on-brand sets without having to hire a professional stylist like her. So if you think about it, the amount of people she's had to say no to the amount of people who had say no to her because they couldn't afford to bring her on as an onset stylist. She's now able to serve all those people in an extremely hands-off sort of way. Where she's created the curriculum, she's show, she's showing them the behind the scenes, she's giving them all the tools that they need, and she herself was like, I would love to show up, maybe once a month and do a behind the set, training or maybe like answer questions that is coming from her, that is coming from her. Her desire and not from a place of feeling constricted and constrained. And she's able now to scale her revenue beyond, the amount of trips she can take per month and take time away from her family. She has five kids. She can't be traveling all over the place all the time. She can't. So in order to limit her travel to what feels comfortable for her and her family. But still be able to make money in between. This is now her additional revenue stream that can literally run without her doing a single thing. She can bring people into her world. She can bring people into her course. She can sell it and the delivery happens in a completely hands-off way or in a way that she's already delivering anyway. She's showing up to, for a live call once a month for those client, for those students anyway, if she, that's what she chooses to do, right? So it's, it does not require her personal touches at all. And if she wants to, she can send a little gift, which she can definitely do, but it's minimal as compared to taking on a full on, new client, which she loves doing. But again, her time. On that is limited. So I want you to make sure that your energy is not going to be the bottleneck for your business growth. Okay? And if this episode made, you want to be like, oh my gosh, I gotta burn everything down and rebuild everything smarter. You probably don't need to burn everything down. You may need to remodel, you may need to change things. So I want to invite you to apply to the CEO Mom Mastermind. This is literally where we. Take what works, tweak what is working and maybe not working as well. Get rid of what doesn't, and really create a business model, a marketing model, a sales model, an offer model that really works for where you are right now that creates that leverage for you. If you are looking to scale beyond one-to-one client work, and you really wanna do it in a way that supports you without a cookie cutter, oh, all you need is a group program. All you need is a course. All you need is a membership. And really just finding that. Path that works for you based on your business and your model and your capacity and your personality. That's what we do in the CEO. I'm on Mastermind. This is not a scalable space. This is a highly custom place where we really like, it's really just one-to-one, a lot of one-to-one in a mastermind environment where you can also get that support from the other. Incredible moms in the Mastermind as well. And if you are like, I just wanna try this out, and I wonder what this is I wonder if I can learn from you. I wanna see exactly how your strategy works. The Lazy Money Masterclass is happening next week on Monday. And you can probably still buy it. If you click the link in the descrip, it'll be prerecorded. Or it'll be recorded. So you'll be able to get the replay and I'll be showing you the exact lazy funnel that I've built and that I'm now rebuilding to really attract the perfect clients for where I currently am at the lazy funnel that allows. Your energy to not be the bottleneck anymore because you'll be constantly bringing new people in the door with this funnel that, and that enables you to. Create a literally hands off lead generation, hands off delivery strategy so that you can just fill your higher ticket, your premium spaces without having to do a lot of heavy lifting and and leaving room for you to add those personal touches, like those DM conversations, like those loom videos, right? But making sure that you are able to do this in a way that honors your capacity and your life. That is what I'm gonna be teaching. The lazy funnel. We talk about a lot of things, right? The lazy funnel structure, the leverage layer, the lever I call the leverage, like layer a sundae where like the ice cream sundae, where you like layer different things on top of the other to add the most incredible selling systems into your business. And it is just gonna be so good. I cannot wait to share this stuff and I cannot wait for you to join me. So either you can join the Lazy Money Masterclass. Check it out. It's just$35 until it goes live. And then the price is gonna be going up'cause it is in honor of my 35th birthday. And if you are looking for more hands on support, then check out the CMA Mastermind. The link is gonna be in the description as well. Alright, have a wonderful rest of your week. I cannot wait to see you in the Lazy Money Masterclass and I'll see you next week. I can't thank you enough for listening to raising your business. I hope this episode has inspired you to take another step towards building a business and life that you love, and growing your income in a way that works for you and your family. If you enjoy this episode, please take a second to rate and review and let's connect that on Instagram screenshot and share it on Instagram Stories so we can get the word out to more mom business owners like you. Tag me at the El Behan and share your biggest breakthrough from today. See you next week.