90. A Peek Into the CEO Moms Unofficial Group Chat

Ever feel like there’s a secret group chat where all the CEO moms are sharing the strategy secrets you somehow missed? Same. While that chat doesn’t actually exist (sadly), after interviewing dozens of powerhouse mom entrepreneurs for the Real Secrets of CEO Moms Summit, I can confirm: if there were one, these would be the messages.

In this episode, I’m sharing the 7 eerily consistent patterns I saw across every single interview—whether these moms were rebuilding from burnout, scaling to their first $100K year, or holding down multi-6 or 7-figure businesses with babies on their hips.

This isn’t just about strategy—it’s about sustainable strategy. It’s about running a business that respects your life, your energy, and your season. If your biz has felt chaotic, heavy, or just off lately? This is the episode you need.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• Why almost every CEO mom hits a breaking point before her biggest growth
• The real impact of simplifying your offers and systems (it’s more money, not less!)
• How to tell if your launches are out of alignment (and what to do about it)
• Why your nervous system is the loudest voice in the room
• The role of true community and mentorship in CEO mom success
• How motherhood doesn’t break your business—it refines it
• What sustainability really looks like when you’re building long-term

PLUS—I’m going live TOMORROW to spill my own real secrets: what’s been happening behind the scenes in my business (that I’ve never shared publicly before). The good. The messy. The full picture. 

But…you have to be signed up for the Real Secrets of CEO Moms Summit to get access: https://yaelbendahan.com/realsecrets

Summer Pass to the CEO Mom Mastermind: For a limited time, you can join the CEO Mom Mastermind for just two months—August and September—for only $1497. That’s over $900 off the regular investment. Come get fully supported with personalized coaching, strategic feedback, and a sisterhood that actually gets it. Apply here - https://yaelbendahan.com/cmmapply

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

💃 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

Transcript

0:01

If you've ever felt alone, like you're the only one who understands what it's like to wake up at 5:00 AM not because you're choosing to do to have quiet time to yourself, but because both of your little kids woke up at 5:00 AM and will not go back to sleep, right? You're just trying to grow your business. You wanna raise your kids at the same time. You don't wanna push off your business growth until after they grow up because you wanna give them the life that you feel they deserve. As they grow up. And you might be wondering like is there some sort of secret club or group chat? I'm not really invited to where everyone seems to be doing so well and they all have it down and I just am not clued into whatever that secret is so after interviewing a dozen powerhouse, CEO moms for the real secrets of CEO Moms Summit, and this is only one year, I've already done this twice before. So I've spoken to so many business moms and I can confidently say that you are not alone. This was not like a group Zoom call where everyone was like, oh my gosh. Yeah, me too. But a lot of the things they were saying was like, they were reading from the same playbook. And so today I wanna share the seven patterns that every single mom hit. Whether they were rebuilding from a place of burnout or they were just scaling to six figures for the first time or they were doing it, scaling to multi six figures or seven after getting their groove down. And I've got a takeaway for each one that you can apply right now. Alright, so let's get into it. 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. And what shocked me most was not how different each journey looked. And it was'cause everyone had their own unique path. Everyone had their own unique journey, but. What shocked me is how similar a lot of the patterns were. And these women did not talk each other. Although some of them do know each other. So the first one, the first pattern that I noticed was simplifying. This was probably the most, the biggest, most common pattern that I noticed. And Kay Hillman especially nailed this, although I really, everyone did. I, it's, this is so funny. So I'm gonna use examples from different, specific people, but. Honestly this is, these are the patterns that I've seen pretty much across the board in every single conversation. Kay Hillman was talking about how she went from juggling all these multiple different offers to committing to that one clear signature offering so that I realized that I was doing the most and it was not sustainable. And when she paired it all down and had that one offer, one funnel, one, lead generation strategy, one sales system. Her profits went up, not down. And that was not luck. That was clarity. And the thing is, business complexity often will masquerade as growth. And we think that adding more offers, more platforms, more content is gonna create momentum. What that actually creates for us is decision fatigue. It creates that context switching, especially if you have a DHD, this is gonna be a very big issue for you and it creates overwhelm, and what you need is not necessarily more, it's going to be more focus. So simplifying down does not actually mean shrinking your ambition. It means tightening your focus so your effort actually moves the needle. And almost every mom I interviewed reached this breaking point where their chaos had to stop before the business could truly scale. And me Laney talked about this too. Like she went from having multiple different offers, multiple different, price points, all these different things to just having her one group program. And she has different, she has a VIP tier, she has some one-to-one options people can upgrade to, but she's leading with her one program. And the truth is. As someone who loves having multiple offers and I, love selling all different kinds of things. When it comes down to it, looking back, my first multi six figure year was me with one signature offer. One offer. It was the six figure mom accelerator. It was, that was it. It was just very very clear. Everything that I created, every low ticket offer led back to that accelerator. Everything I did, all roads led to that, what I call the emerald city of of of my offers, right? It was just this one big offer that like I was trying to move everyone into. And right now, and I'm gonna be sharing more about this in my Real Secrets live open house where I'm gonna be just sharing what's been going on for me for the past two years. I have actually been really digging down and thinking into. How can I do this? How can I simplify? So I have one primary place that I'm moving everyone into and then having, wherever I need to move people, wherever people need to move into after that or, instead of that if they've already gone beyond that point what to do and how to do that kind of on the back end. One little takeaway. One mini move for you would be, what is that one offer that you actually want to sell? Like you're like, if everyone could end up inside this offer, I would be the happiest person in the world. Okay. So pause everything else for a month. Okay? Six weeks, and give it your full attention and see what shifts. Talk about it, sell it, go all in on it, see what shifts for you. Alright? That is the first one. It was simplifying the second one is alignment. Alignment is the entire game. So Magni, like I just mentioned, she talked about rebuilding her business post babies and how she had to redefine what alignment actually looked like, right? Because she said she couldn't just chase what had worked before, which a lot of things did. But she had to ask herself, what feels good now? And she found the most aligned launches weren't the ones that followed every rule or went according to the rule book, they were the ones that matched her current energy and truth. And she even said she'd run a launch exactly the way she'd run all these launches in the past. But it just, for her it failed. It did not hit her usual conversion rate. She did not make as many sales as she normally would make. Because she was not aligned with that offer. Alright? And so misalignment is not just a vibes thing. It shows up in how hard it feels to create or sell or deliver your offers. And if every launch feels like you're forcing it, your body might be telling you the truth before your brain catches on. Alignment brings. Ease and ease brings consistency. And if your marketing feels like a costume that you have to put on and take off, if your messaging makes you feel like cringe and oh my God, I feel like I've been talking about this for ages and I don't even wanna talk about this anymore. Or, do I even believe this anymore? Or if you feel exhausted by your own systems, it might be time to actually just pause and ask what you do if nobody was watching, right? If you're like, if no if I was like starting from scratch. If nobody knew me, right? If I could just talk about whatever I wanted, talk about, I said whatever I wanted to say. Would I be saying the same thing? And that is usually where your real aligned voice lives. So my mini move for you is if you had to pitch your offer to your best friend, what would you actually say? Okay, say it out loud, write it out like a voice note or actually voice. Note it out to yourself. And that is probably the version your audience needs to hear too. And I said I've talked to my friend about this. I've shared my offers with my friend and we'll go back and forth at bat, and I'm like all I'm doing in this offer is this, and this. She goes that sounds really clear. That sounds really easy, right. And maybe that's, maybe I'm like, I'm not getting that across. I'm not in my marketing, but I'm like, maybe all I need to do is just say that exactly the way I said it to her. And you will feel it because it comes from a place of truth and it comes from a place of alignment. Alright, so that is the second part, is trying to figure out what alignment actually means for you and what actually feels a aligned with your current voice, your message, your beliefs, your value system, what you actually wanna sell, and what you actually wanna deliver on. Alright. The third thing is thinking about your nervous system. Okay? Your nervous system is going to be the loudest voice in the room. That is your body and your brain. Alright? Micha. Isaac said, and we and she was so right about this and she also has six children. And it's funny, we actually have. Our children are all born in the same years. We have our families look like age-wise look pretty much exactly the same. She has more girls than I do but but she said, if I'm burnt out, I'm gonna be useless to everyone. And she structures her visibility and her content and her offers around her capacity. Not pressure. She's not available for strategies that are gonna require 24 7 output because she does not have 24 7 output. And the fact is her business still grows and she does have a team. And she spent years building up that team. But she even said herself that, the year, this year when she had her baby home, a very her business did not grow. As much as it had in the past, and she's and that was okay. All right. That is okay because she needed her business to work with her nervous system. Burnout does not always look like a nervous breakdown where you're just like, in your bed and and hiding from the world and can't get outta bed or whatever. Sometimes it just looks like staring at your screen for hours and just getting nothing done, or it looks like you just dreading the thing that you still love, the thing that used to light you up, and now you don't wanna do it anymore. If your body is constantly tense and nervous and anxious, you do not need a new planner. You need new. Expectations. Okay. Your nervous system is gonna keep the score for you. And if you are frozen or reactive or avoiding your inbox for days, it is probably not a time management issue. It's gonna be a nervous system regulation issue, and the fix is not gonna be hustling more. It's going to be allowing yourself to heal. So my little mini move for you is what task makes you physically tense? When you think about it, you're like, oh my God, I have to do this, I have to do this question. Do I have to do it? Do I need to be the one to do it? Can you skip it? Can you simplify it? Can you outsource it to somebody else? Try giving yourself permission to do less, and that is leadership too. That is really being a leader in, in, in your space. And when you do this, you are going to show your clients that they are they are also allowed, you're giving them that permission slip to also let themselves rest and let themselves, figure out what what really just doesn't. Aligned again, alignment with their nervous system, with their capacity. Now leading into the next one, which is, which works so well, is support. Support is not optional. It is required. Alright. When I was talking to my friend Hailey in, in Hailey Schmidt in the Real Secrets, she was so real about the loneliness of it. She said, once I lean into mentorship and true community and not just like Instagram friends. I stopped feeling so behind. Her support didn't just give her strategy, but it gave her a regulated nervous system. It gave her a grounded plan. It gave her motivation that lasted longer than just the next launch. And being a CEO Mom is not just about workflows and systems, it's about feeling held right. The most successful women that I spoke to were not solo geniuses. They were women who had permission. To break down, to cry it out and still be seen as the brilliant mom and business owner that they were alright. And if you're like, I'm not ready for something high ticket. You don't need a huge high ticket mastermind. You need sisterhood. And there are different ways to find that, whether you have a peer led mastermind or a membership that you feel really comfortable in. Or even a, a mid-tier sort of thing where it's not like crazy, two, three KA month, but you feel held by the community. Real support does not just cheer you on, but it also challenges you when you are hiding, it reminds you of your why, and it will hold your vision for when you're ready to quit because there will always be those times. So my move for you, my challenge to you is to voice note a business friend or a mentor today, not with a polished update of oh, everything is doing so great. Everything's so great, right? Just, here's where I'm at, here's what I need, see what happens. Okay. I honestly would not have been able to get through without my coaches, without the mastermind that I've been in without my business besties. And I honestly like the past few years have been so hard for me emotionally, and I honestly could not have gotten through without them. I wouldn't have been able to do it. Find that friend, find that community, find those connections. Whether it's gonna be in a mastermind, whether it's gonna be again, in, just a business friend of yours or someone to connect with or get together with for coffee once a week. Whether that's virtual or in person is gonna make all the difference to you. The fifth commonality that I found was that motherhood doesn't necessarily break your business, but it does refine it. So when I was talking to Andrea Singletary, she said that she started building her business during nap times, and that is when she got really focused. So motherhood actually forced her to stop wasting time, and instead of fighting her capacity, she honored it and her offers got sharper and they got more aligned because she didn't literally did not have the time to waste on things that didn't serve her business, her profit, her alignment. Now there is this lie that motherhood and entrepreneurship are in conflict, but every mom that I talked to said the opposite. Motherhood actually forced clarity for them. It made them efficient, it made their values non-negotiable. And instead of make making space, despite being a mom, they were actually building smarter because they were moms. And again, I'm not going to say that it is as easy. Or simple to build a business as a mother than when you don't have children. Okay? Because it's going, there's gonna be more logistics. It is gonna be more complicated. That is the reality. But as you build you, if you allow yourself to, and you really see it through the lens of does this actually serve my long-term goal? And I'm gonna talk about this in a minute, but. You will see that it gives you so much clarity and just it forces you to refine. Motherhood has that way of revealing what actually matters to you and forcing you to cut the fluff, okay? It does not make you less capable. It'll just make whatever you're doing more potent, right? So what is one thing on your calendar? This week, this month, that does not respect your current season. Pull it out. That is gonna be your first realignment. Like I know, like my, what I'm trying to figure out now is my one call business system. I wanna try to knock it on more than one call a week, maybe two. I'm like giving, I'm giving myself up to two I at most, meaning one call, which is my mastermind, which that is like my non-negotiable and one other program or intensive. Okay. So whether it's a program or an intensive I do not wanna have to get on more than one to two calls a week. And that to me is my non-negotiable right now with the children that I have, the ages that they, that I have. That is my most important thing. And so everything I'm doing right now is thinking towards, okay, does this serve my one call a week? Two call a week goal or not? And that is how I'm thinking about my business, going forward. The sixth piece is the sustainability over momentum. So Melanie Albert said, and I love this, but she said, if I'm building something that requires me to be on all the time, that I'm not building a business. I'm just building a job that I can't clock out of. And so she shifted the systems at automation and evergreen content, not to scale faster, but to stay sane and to scale smarter. Alright, fast growth can be really stuc and it's fun. Okay? It's fun, but it can often be unstable if you're not building a good foundation with it. Now, I'm not saying you do, you go in on a launch, you go all in it, you're creating content that can be reused. You launch smart, it takes you a good six to eight weeks to launch your offer, and then you have a hundred K cash infusion. That is amazing. All right? But having a hundred K cash infusion from, I don't know, 10 to one-to-one clients that you now can't really deliver on is gonna be very different than that, right? If your a business needs you to be online every day to survive, that is not gonna be freedom. It's just gonna lead you to digital burnout. And I have been there. Okay? Sustainability is not slow. It is smart. And so it's gonna let you step us away without losing income and without losing your identity as the present mom that you wanna be. So you wanna build your business to last. Okay. You're, I'm assuming you for listening to this, you wanna build your business to last. You don't wanna believe your business just to impress people. It's about knowing that your income does not dip the second your kid gets sick. That is gonna be the freedom that you actually want. So my mini move for you is to open your last testimonial and ask, how can I turn this result into something evergreen or recurring? So maybe turn it into an evergreen email that goes into that goes into your welcome sequence, right? Or into a sales sequence. So like thinking about, okay, yes, someone gave me this amazing, I interviewed a client on my podcast, for example. Great. I did that. I posted the podcast. Now, what am I gonna do with this podcast? Am I gonna incorporate into an evergreen sales sequence? Am I going to send people to it? I'm gonna create a special highlight with client testimonials and link to that podcast. Am I going to maybe I'll use it as. I'll put the video, like what I did was when I interviewed clients on video, I put those videos in my kind of testimonial stack on my application page for my offers because, one thing you do, one testimonial, you get one client interview one piece of content that really did well can be used over and over again. So I wanted you to think about how you can take the last testimonial you got and use it as something that will make you money, not just now, but also down the line. And the last pattern that I talk about this a lot, but this is a pattern that I noticed a lot was. The long knowing that the long game is the only game. Alright so many of these women echo this sentiment that fast wins will feel good, right? But long-term thinking is what is really building their legacies, the offers that they refine, the content that they batched, the systems that they put in place. Focusing on, on, on client retention rather than just new client acquisition. None of that paid off overnight necessarily, but it did pay off. They're not just building for this next month's launch. They're building for the life that they actually wanna live in three years, five years, 10 years. They're building it for their capacity now and their capacity later for the future self that they want to be. And so I would ask yourself like, sit down and just think this out. What do I want my life to look like in five years? What do I want my business to look like in five years? You can even use chat GT to help you brainstorm this together.'cause chat. If you've been using a lot of chat, then it might know you pretty well. And I'd be like it seems that what you really want is this. And I've actually had some interesting stuff where it's you're saying you want this, but actually based on the stuff you've been telling me, you want this other thing. And I'm like, oh, you're right. It's true. I do want this other thing. But literally just sit on and journal, what do I want my business to look like? Five years from now, 10 years from now, and then ask yourself, if I was playing the long game, what would I build differently today? What would I stop rushing? What would I work towards? What projects would I be focused on? Rather than, just showing up and selling, day by day. And that is just something that, I really think is going to make a very big difference for you. As you implement your marketing plan, your sales plan, because it's not just, again, it's not just about right now and the sales right now, it's about. Everything down the line for you, okay? The business that you want, the team that you want the income that you want, the offer stack that you want, all that is gonna make such a big difference for you. So every one of these lessons okay, could change the way you run your business in the next 90 days, right? And I'm really curious about which one hit hardest for you. Because I think that, every, each one's gonna lend differently with different people, and everyone's gonna be like, oh my God, I feel so cold out by this one or the other one. So I'm really curious if you could tell me which one really landed for you. And if you want to really hear the conversations that inspired these takeaways and hear all the other takeaways that we had together then sign up for the real secrets of CEO EO Moms. The link is in the description, and if you want a chance to see what it's like to be fully supported as a CEO Mom, I have a special summer pass that is open for you to join the CEO Mom Mastermind for two months. So for August and September, I'm opening it up for the rest of July. You can join for just two months for 1497, which is really like a bananas. It's over$900 off what the investment normally would be for two months, but you get to join and just kinda see what it's like in there. See what it's like to get fully supported, to have someone looking at your content, looking at, your sales plan, looking at your offers, giving you the critique and the feedback. Having the moms who are cheering you on and really being that support and that sisterhood. If you want to find out what that's then just click the link, grab your spot. There are only limited spots available for these summer passes, and when they're gone. And again, sign up for the real secrets of CEO moms. You're gonna want to listen to these conversations and once you sign up, you get the interviews for life. Yeah, I'm not taking them away from you. So this is your chance to sign up and join now, and you can listen to them at your leisure for the rest of the summer. So the real secret, okay, the real secret of CEO moms, when it comes down to it, is not just, one funnel or whatever it is the strategy that's going to respect the life that you are building. So talk soon. I'll see you next time and I cannot wait to hear your biggest takeaways from this episode. 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.