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I used to get so frustrated when people told me to "work smarter, not harder." My parents were entrepreneurs who embraced the hustle, and I thought success meant being willing to work 80-100 hour weeks, doing anything and everything to grow your business.

But here's what I learned the hard way: there's a ceiling to how much harder you can work. When you hit it, you become the bottleneck in your own business.

I've built a multiple six-figure business working just 25 hours a week—not through some magical productivity hack, but by fundamentally shifting how I think about work itself. In this episode, I'm sharing the six strategies that allowed me to step out of the grind and into true CEO-level thinking.

This isn't about cramming more tasks into your day or finding the perfect time-blocking system. It's about questioning everything you've been taught about what it takes to succeed and discovering that the entrepreneurs who scale sustainably aren't the ones working the hardest—they're the ones working the smartest.

If you've hit that wall where working harder isn't the answer anymore, these six shifts will change how you approach every aspect of your business.

On this episode of Promote Yourself to CEO:

• Do less with more focus - I'll show you why having a signature offer and focused marketing strategy delivers exponentially higher returns than trying to be everywhere at once

• CEO doesn't mean Chief Everything Officer - I learned this lesson the hard way about letting go of control and building the support systems that freed me from day-to-day busy work

• What got you here won't get you there - I'll walk you through the critical pivot points every business faces and why your current strategies might be holding you back from the next level

• Embrace rinse and repeat - Find out why I had to overcome my creative nature to build reusable assets that prevent me from constantly recreating the wheel

• Create the money to invest back - How I shifted my mindset from "I can't afford this" to "I can create the money for this" and transformed how I view business investments

• Find mentors and masterminds - Why you can't Google your way to success and how having the right people in my corner accelerated my growth exponentially

Connect with Me:

• Instagram: @racheal.cook
• TikTok: @rachealcookmba
• LinkedIn: @rachealcook
• YouTube: @the_ceo_collective
• Website: The CEO Collective

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🎤 Thanks for listening! I'll see you next week!