Promote Yourself to CEO | Small Business Strategy for Women Entrepreneurs

By Racheal Cook MBA: Small Business Owner, Entrepreneur, Business Growth StrategistBusiness Entrepreneurship Marketing Management

Promote Yourself to CEO | Small Business Strategy for Women Entrepreneurs episodes

October 08The Matriarchy Would Never Shut Down Your Critical Thinking
Robert Cialdini went undercover at used car lots, telemarketing rooms, and fundraising offices, taking notes on how compliance professionals move a person from no to yes, and he did it because he kept getting talked into buying things he did not want and wanted to know how it was being done to him. The book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion was the result. He wrote it as a self-defense manual for regular people against manipulative sales tactics.
It barely sold. Then marketers and salespeople found it.
An entire industry picked up a book written to protect buyers and turned it into the field guide for converting them, which is how reciprocity, social proof, authority, scarcity and the rest ended up in a sales training I sat through years ago, handed over as a set of tools with the promise that once you understood them you would never struggle to sell anything again. Nobody in that room mentioned where any of it came from or the original intent Chialdini had with his work.
Understanding these principles is important for small business owners because this is how people making buying decisions. It’s still important to share deadlines. It’s important to let people know when something is almost sold out. And we all use marketing to build that know, like, and trust with potential clients.
This episode is about where the line sits between that and the manipulative marketing tactics taught right alongside it, and about the one question I run on any tactic to work out which side of the line it is on. If you have ever sat in a training, been handed a script, and felt the ICK about a tactic, that was not a money block or a mindset issue. That was data. And by the end of this episode, you’l have more clarity on how you can use these principles in a more aligned, honest, and authentic way for your business.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode
→ The book that was originally written as a consumer protection guide to help regular foks protect themselves against manipulative sales and marketing tactics – that got used against us the moment marketing and sales professionals started using it as a playbook.
→ The #1 question I use to determine how to use a principle of persuasion in an ethical and honest way.
→ Why getting the ICK over a marketing or sales tactic isn’t a money block or mindset issue – it’s essential information about how you actually want to use these tactics.
→ Why manufactured authority can be dangerous and how just being ‘a couple steps ahead’ has launched an entire industry of fake experts.
→ How I think about using real, honest urgency and scarcity (including thinking about internal vs external urgency and scarcity) within my own sales and marketing.
→ Why I don’t just focus on testimonials and case studies that are the biggest revenue wins (in fact – focusing only on revenue misses so many other incredible wins and results that my clients experience).
→ Understanding what an honest approach to using the principles of persuasion costs you up front and the long-term benefits of putting PEOPLE and relationships over short term profits.
Key Concepts from the Episode
The Self-Defense Manual, Resold as a Weapon. Cialdini wrote Influence so that regular people could recognize persuasion tactics while they were being run on them. It sold badly until marketers and salespeople found it, at which point it became the bible of the exact thing it was written to defend against.
A book meant to hand people their power back got resold as the system for taking it.

Information or Interference. Every principle in the book can be run honestly or run to shut down critical thinking, and the tactic itself will never tell you which one is happening. The question does.
Is this giving me what I need to decide, or is it making it harder to think?

The Ick Is Information. A woman says a script does not feel right to her and gets told the feeling is a money block, a mindset issue, a lack of commitment. The feeling is reading something real about the tactic, and training her out of it is the point.
Your discomfort is the only thing in that sales training nobody is being paid to sell you.

Manufactured Authority. Looking three steps ahead of someone and calling it expertise, then creating a Mess to Success entrepreneur origin story is not real authority on the subject. True expertise requires deep work and study, education, and hands on experience.
Being just 2 steps ahead is not real expertise.

Who Absorbs the Cost of a Wrong Yes. When the tactics shut down critical thinking, the buyer carries the entire cost of the bad decision, the money and the time and a little more of her own self-trust. When they do not, the seller carries part of it, in the form of the sales she turned down on purpose.
The difference between a transaction and a relationship is who is holding the bill when the decision turns out wrong.

Resources Mentioned
The CEO Ceiling Assessment. Free live diagnostic on Tuesday, October 20 at 12pm ET, with a replay for anyone who cannot make it. Five areas where your capacity is quietly maxed out, scored green, yellow, or red, so you leave knowing which constraint is actually in your way. theceocollective.com/ceo-ceiling-assessment
Influence, by Robert Cialdini.The book at the center of this episode, written as a psychological self-defense manual for buyers and adopted by the people it was warning them about.
The principles of persuasion, explained in about ten minutes.The video Racheal promises on air as a plain-English walk through all seven.
The CEO Supper Club.Racheal’s quarterly restaurant takeover in Richmond, Virginia with a local chef, thirty women entrepreneurs, and conversation that goes further than “so what do you do?” The thirty two seats are the legitimate scarcity example in this episode.
The CEO Collective®. The membership where service-based, relational business owners install the 90 Day CEO Operating System® and learn to sell without borrowing anybody’s pressure tactics.
The Matriarchy Would Never: Assume You Are The Safety Net.Episode 1 of the series, on the invisible labor built into almost every piece of business advice in circulation.
The Matriarchy Would Never: Sell You Patriarchy in Pink. Episode 2, on who is selling to you and the personas engineered to make you trust them faster. This episode is the companion piece on how.
FTC Endorsement Guides. The federal rules on testimonials and typical results that Racheal references in the social proof section.

Connect with Me:
Instagram: @racheal.cook
TikTok: @rachealcookmba
LinkedIn: @rachealcook
YouTube: @the_ceo_collective
Website: The CEO Collective
Subscribe & Review:
If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
🎤 Thanks for listening! I'll see you next week!
57 min
October 05The Matriarchy Would Never Sell You Patriarchy in Pink
Somebody handed me a notebook in a conference swag bag in 2014. Rose gold foil. GIRL BOSS on the cover.
I was thrilled. I was in my early thirties with four year old twins and a brand new baby, building a business from the ground up, and after years of apologizing for being ambitious I was watching a whole generation of women get handed permission to want things out loud. Charge money. Take up room. Want more. Call yourself the boss.
What none of us could see yet was that the thing being handed to us was the approach we already had, in pink script font. It was the same hustle with better branding, the same expectation of sacrificing time with your family, and the same promise that if you wanted it badly enough for long enough you might eventually get to be one of the ones who made it.
Girl boss culture changed the vocabulary. It did not change the mental load, or the childcare, or who you call when a kid spikes a fever at 10 a.m., or who gets paid and who does it for free.
I call it patriarchy in pink, and this is the episode where I stop being polite about it. I also learned this model before I unlearned it, which is why this is not an audit of you. It is an audit of the structure that has been keeping many of us trapped in businesses that were never designed to fully support us.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode
→ The reason the ‘girl-boss, boss-babe, boss-lady’ culture of the 2010s captured our attention and just as quickly fell apart.
→ How GenX and Elder Millenian women have watched entrepreneurship go from ‘I guess you just couldn’t get a real job’ to an aspirational title with visions of multi-million dollar valuations.
→ What a group of experienced women entrepreneurs hashed out during a peer-mastermind retreat that reshaped how every single one of us moved forward in our businesses.
→ How specific ‘celebrity entrepreneur’ archetypes have been carefully crafted to create a persona that is easy to trust and buy by short-cutting critical thinking and due dilegence.
→ If you’ve every raised a legit question and been answered with ‘just work on your mindset’, it’s a red-flag about the credibility and experience of the person who sold you the program.
Key Concepts from the Episode
Patriarchy in Pink. Using the language of feminism and female empowerment while selling the exact same structure underneath. Still hustle. Still extraction. Still one person at the top of a pyramid and a large number of people underneath holding it up. The fonts got better and the infrastructure stayed put.
A woman on top doesn’t equal a matriarchy.

Nobody Gets Platformed by Accident. Entrepreneurship went from shorthand for unemployed to a celebrity track inside about twenty years, and the people who rise fastest in it are the ones whose privileges already read as credible before anyone checks anything. Pretty privilege, whiteness, thinness. None of it is actual expertise but it shortcuts building that know, like, and trust.
A designer handbag and red-soled shoes were intentionally selected (literally rented) to carefully create an image of ‘success’ without asking further questions.

The Archetype Shortcut. The BFF next door runs on curated vulnerability. The woo woo crew runs on toxic positivity. The luxury lifestyler runs on status signals that nobody can verify. Using an archetype is not the problem. Engineering one so a buyer skips her own due diligence is.
Archetypes and personal branding are genuinely helpful as small business owners, but they can become harmful when used to craft an inauthentic persona to sell more to people.

Asset Protection Dressed as Coaching. When the carefully built image is the thing generating revenue, a client saying “this isn’t working for me” is not feedback, it is damage. So the answer comes back as raise your vibration, get out of your own way, you’re in scarcity.
Real questions should get real answers. If the first response is to work on your mindset, that’s a red flag 🚩.

Revenue Without the Rest of the Story. The number is the only thing on offer. Not the profit, not the payroll, not the team size, not what it costs to run a business at that volume, not whether the launch that looked enormous actually cleared anything.
Don’t get starry eyed over a supposed multi-million dollar business – it doesn’t tell you a thing about what’s actually happening behind the scenes.

Resources Mentioned
The CEO Ceiling Assessment.Free live diagnostic on Tuesday, October 20 at 12pm ET. Fifty minutes walking the five places your capacity is quietly maxed out, scoring each one green, yellow, or red so you can see which constraint is actually in your way.
The Matriarchy Would Never: Assume You Are The Safety Net. Episode 1 of the series, on the invisible labor built into almost every piece of business advice in circulation.
Kelly Diels on the Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand.The writer who named the pattern of selling women a lifestyle in the language of empowerment. If you are ready for a rabbit-hole that will open your eyes to how women tend to sell to women, start here.
Duped, with Maggie Patterson and Dr. Michelle Mazur. Two highly experienced communication experts and entrepreneurs, Maggie and Michelle’s podcast goes deep into the problematic practices that have invaded the entrepreneurship space. This episode dives into ‘celebrity entrepreneur archetypes’.
Adam Grant on culture versus cult. “The difference between a culture and a cult is whether people have the freedom to question and challenge the way things are done.” From his podcast Rethinking – Is your organization a little culty?
Connect with Me:
Instagram: @racheal.cook
TikTok: @rachealcookmba
LinkedIn: @rachealcook
YouTube: @the_ceo_collective
Website: The CEO Collective
Subscribe & Review:
If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
🎤 Thanks for listening! I'll see you next week!
42 min
October 01The Matriarchy Would Never Assume You Are The Safety Net
When I first started my business, I remember being so frustrated that all the advice was ‘hustle harder’.
I was actively looking for my own coach in the summer of 2010, when my twins were about 6 months old, and I was trying to work out how to move a more traditional boots-on-the-ground, in-person local consulting practice to an online model using GoToMeeting and Skype (yep – we were in the early days of being able to work from home finally).
And so much of the advice I heard didn’t work because it wasn’t designed for me – a new mom, breastfeeding not just one but two babies, with a chronic illness, a spouse who also worked, and limited time, energy, and mental capacity.
Attending conferences for education and networking? I was exclusively breastfeeding twins. Literally my boobs could never.
Work 12 hour days? My chronic pain and fatigue maxed out at 3-4 hours of focused work before I needed a break.
Fill your calendar with either sales calls or client calls? My husband was working as a teacher and didn’t get home until after 3PM. I didn’t have reliable childcare until then.
Most of the business advice always had an underlying assumption that someone else was handling LIFE. Someone else was handing childcare, planning meals, keeping our life running.
That’s because most accepted ‘good business advice’ or ‘best practices’ were created by men, for me. Specifically – for men who had a full-time stay at home spouse who took care of all behind the scenes details. So when I set the personal goals to ramp up my business to replace my six-figure consulting salary while working 25 hours a week (based on my actual capacity with chronic illness and as a new mom), most people didn’t believe it was possible.
Over 16 years later, I’m here to share that it’s 100% possible when you deconstruct the systemic patriarchy and hyper-capitalism approach that only works when women are the unpaid labor and safety net.
This is the first in a series of 5 episodes called The Matriarchy Would Never. Over five weeks we are going to take the things we have all been told are just the way business works, name the assumption sitting underneath them, and redesign so you can not only build your business, but build a business that continues to work for you even when your plans get derailed by a sick kid or a parent in the hospital.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
→ The book helped me explain to my husband exactly what the mental load looked like for me and the reason why ‘just give me a list’ was absolutely infuriating
→ Why I only build business strategy and 90 day plans based on 70% of my capacity (and what I focus on when I do have extra time available).
→ The questions I make every woman at the CEO Retreat answer before she writes a single line of her 90 day plan
→ Why the reason women entrepreneurs feel like they are constantly the bottleneck in their business
→ The difference between a massage that is self-care and a massage that is maintenance, and why only one of them protects your plan
Key Concepts from the Episode
The Invisible Assumption. Almost all of the business advice in circulation was written by people who had someone at home handling the school forms, the pediatrician, the shoe sizes, and the pickup when somebody spiked a fever at 10 a.m. That person was rarely paid, and she was never written into the plan.
Every business plan has a person in it you cannot see. In most business advice, that person is you.

Patriarchy in Pink. There are plenty of women in this industry using the language of feminism and empowerment while keeping the exact same structure underneath, where resources and power still flow up to one person at the top. The words changed. The infrastructure did not.
A woman at the top of the pyramid isn’t matriarchy – it’s just patriarchy in pink.

A Design Flaw, Not a Discipline Problem. A plan that requires you at full availability, full energy, and full focus for forty hours a week will hold right up until something bigger than a cold moves through your house. Then it collapses, and you read the collapse as evidence about your character.
If your plan only survives your best weeks, you don’t have a plan. You have a streak.

Resourcing Yourself Instead of Being the Resource. At the last CEO Retreat, before anyone touched a 90 day plan, every woman in the room had to answer two questions: who do you want to be in this stage of your life and business, and what does she need in order to be her. What came back was local friends, a housekeeper, a backup list of pet sitters, and one uninterrupted evening with a spouse.
Nobody asks permission to set a revenue goal, but somehow women feel the need to ask permission to hire a housekeeper.

Maintenance, Not Self-Care. We’ve been sold ‘self-care’ as the answer to our collective exhaustion when what we really need is more proactive maintenance and recovery built into our plans and routine systems.
Waiting for self-care isn’t enough. We need to prioritize our regular maintenance!

Resources Mentioned
The CEO Ceiling Assessment. Free live class on Tuesday, October 20 at noon, walking through the five places your capacity is quietly maxed out and scoring each one green, yellow, or red so you can see where the actual constraint is. Replay goes to everyone who registers.
The CEO Collective®. The membership where service-based, relational business owners install the 90 Day CEO Operating System® and build plans that account for the life they actually have.
Fair Play by Eve Rodsky.The book that gave Racheal and Jameson the language for making invisible labor visible, including the difference between conceiving of a task, planning it, and executing it.
Fuck Patriarchy, Build Matriarchy Series by Wan Wan Luve. The Instagram series that inspired Racheal to create her own to primarily focus on women and business.
Connect with Me:
Instagram: @racheal.cook
TikTok: @rachealcookmba
LinkedIn: @rachealcook
YouTube: @the_ceo_collective
Website: The CEO Collective
Subscribe & Review:
If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
🎤 Thanks for listening! I'll see you next week!
57 min
September 24Everyone Is Using AI Wrong with Gabi Day
"I need Spicy Rach."
Gabi Day said that to me on a call about ads, and I knew exactly who she meant. Spicy Rach is the version of me that shows up when I am fired up about something and want to see it change. She is also the version I have spent years keeping mostly off the internet.
Gabi does not have that problem. She shows up as 1000% herself all the time, and that is the whole reason her marketing works.
So when we both spent the last six months buried in building out AI for our businesses, we kept landing on the same question. How do you use a tool that averages the entire internet without sounding like the average of the entire internet?
Gabi's answer is that 99% of people are using it wrong. Not because the tool is bad, but because they are handing it a prompt instead of a point of view. She has one line about this that I have not stopped thinking about since we recorded, and you will know it when you hear it.
This is the last episode in the Human First series, and it is the one I would send to anyone who thinks AI is either a magic button or a moral failing.
Connect with Me:
Instagram: @racheal.cook
TikTok: @rachealcookmba
LinkedIn: @rachealcook
YouTube: @the_ceo_collective
Website: The CEO Collective
Subscribe & Review:
If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
🎤 Thanks for listening! I'll see you next week!
56 min
September 17Why Your AI Keeps Sounding Like Everybody Else
There was a three-ring binder in my dad's insurance agency and we called it the "office bible". That binder was a business brain about thirty years before anyone thought to sell you one.
A woman who worked for him built it. Every task she did had a checklist in that binder, so when she wasn't there, somebody else could sit in that front seat, answer the phone, and take a payment from whoever walked through the door. This was the nineties. Somebody had to be there.
I was in middle school and I had no idea I was watching a business get built to survive a person's absence. That binder is the reason I have never run a business without one place that holds the truth about how it works, and it is the reason I've been able to move as fast as I have with AI this year.
Every AI expert on the internet is suddenly very excited to teach you how to build a business brain. I laughed when I finally understood what they meant, because I've had one since 2008. It lives in my Google Drive and we just called it the business hub.
If you've ever handed marketing to a contractor and gotten back something that didn't sound like you, or opened a chat window and watched it produce copy so beige you closed the tab, the missing piece is almost never the prompt or the person. It's that everything they would need to know is still in your head. Three files fix that, and you can start one of them tonight.
Connect with Me:
Instagram: @racheal.cook
TikTok: @rachealcookmba
LinkedIn: @rachealcook
YouTube: @the_ceo_collective
Website: The CEO Collective
Subscribe & Review:
If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
🎤 Thanks for listening! I'll see you next week!
50 min
September 10You Can't Delegate Confusion to AI
Two overlapping circles on a piece of paper. Human only on the left, AI only on the right, and the overlap in the middle where almost nobody is spending any time at all.
That is the whole exercise. My cousin Kendall gave me the version of it that ended months of AI pushback inside her tech company, and I tell that story at the top of the episode. What matters here is what it does.
This is episode three of Human First: AI for High-Trust Businesses (you can catch up with episode 1: Human First AI Is a Decision Not a Vibe and episode 2: Where AI is Quietly Breaking Trust in Your Small Business). The first two made the case for deciding on purpose instead of by default. This one is the deciding, one workflow at a time, until you can say out loud what stays Human First and what you delegate to AI.
Most of us sorted this badly on the first pass. We asked for the sales strategy, the next offer, the campaign copy, got back something generic that could have been written for anybody, and concluded AI does not work for a business like this one. But a smart CEO doesn't start delegating the most strategic level work first - they start with the easiest work to train.
This episode and exercise is all about the practical steps required to intentionally integrate AI into your business systems.
What You'll Learn in This Episode
Why almost nobody hires a strategist as their first team member, and what that says about where you started with AI
The three columns and one afternoon that ended months of AI pushback inside a tech company
What stays on the human-only side of the Venn diagram permanently, no matter how good the tools get
The overlap almost nobody is working in, and what skipping it actually costs you
How the CEO Scorecard already told you what to hand off first, years before any of this showed up
The message from my first virtual assistant that named the real problem, and it was not her
What I am hiring for now that the tasks I used to hire for are handled
Key Concepts from the Episode
You Cannot Delegate Confusion. Handing something off does not make it clearer. Whatever is fuzzy in your head arrives fuzzy in the output, and it does not matter whether that output came from a person or a tool. Chaos does not get organized on its way out of your brain.
Start at the Bottom of the CEO Scorecard. The CEO Scorecard sorts your hours into $10, $100, $1,000, and $10,000 buckets. The $10 work is where AI belongs first, for the same reason it is where your first hire belonged. If you would not have handed it to a brand new assistant on day one, do not hand it to AI on day one.
The Overlap Is the Whole Job. Human only on one side. AI running unattended on the other. The middle is training, feedback, and correction, and nothing arrives on the right side without passing through it. Nothing starts in the automated column. Everything gets promoted into it.
Redefine Your Role as CEO or Stay in the Way. Every time you move work off your plate without rewriting what you own, you get pulled back in. My list narrowed down to three things: content, community, communication.
Somebody Absorbs the Efficiency. When AI collapses the hours a role used to take, the default move is to shrink the role. The other move is to hand that person harder work, more autonomy, and more pay. The hours you save have to land somewhere. Deciding where they land is a CEO decision, not an accident.
Resources Mentioned
The CEO Scorecard episode.The full breakdown of the four value buckets and how to calculate your goal CEO score.
The 90 Day CEO Planner.The CEO Scorecard is an essential tool built into our planning system.
Our AI statement. Where we stand on how AI gets used inside this business, and what we will not do with it.
Descript.The tool that now handles podcast transcription and editing in one place.
Connect with Me:
Instagram: @racheal.cook
TikTok: @rachealcookmba
LinkedIn: @rachealcook
YouTube: @the_ceo_collective
Website: The CEO Collective
Subscribe & Review:
If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
🎤 Thanks for listening! I'll see you next week!
44 min
September 07Where AI Is Quietly Breaking Trust With Your Clients & Community
A few months ago I made three photorealistic images of myself, put my logo on them, and posted them to Facebook.People laughed. They were supposed to. I had run my real photo shoot images through a meme generator with a 2,000 character summary of my business, and what came back was, in my head, cartoonish.
Obviously fake. A joke.
Then a couple of comments came in. This is kind of creepy. This isn’t you, right?
I went looking for those images this week to pull them for this episode, and that is when it hit me. They are not cartoonish. That is my office. That is my chair. Those are the plants behind me in the real photos. If you did not know me in person, you would think they came from the same shoot as everything else on my website.
That is the whole problem with using AI in a business built on relationships. You know what is real because you made it. Nobody else has that information. This is part two of the Human-First AI for High-Trust Business series, and it is about the trust you lose without ever finding out you lost it.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
→ The comment on my Facebook post that told me everything I needed to know about where the line is
→ Why the version of you that shows up online can be technically accurate and still cost you the client
→ What I said to a retoucher in 2016 that turned out to be the same rule I am writing about AI in 2026
→ Why the trust break never appears in your analytics, and what it looks like instead when it finally surfaces
→ The reason everyone in your industry suddenly sounds identical, and why it has almost nothing to do with the tools
→ How the AI content advice being sold right now is built for a business model that is not yours
→ What I am completely fine using AI for, said plainly, so you can steal the framework and draw your own line
Key Concepts from the Episode
The AI Generated Content Blind Spot. When you create something with AI you have information nobody else has. You know which parts came from a prompt, which room you were actually sitting in, and which facial expression you have never made in your life. Your audience sees only the output.
You are the only person who can see the seams, which is exactly what makes you the worst possible judge of whether they show.

The Invisible Unsubscribe. Nobody hits reply to tell you that something just seems off – a little less like the YOU they originally connected with – and that shows up as silent unsubscribes or tanking engagement while your dashboard shows you nothing at all. Months later you are staring at falling open rates trying to work out what changed.
Nobody tells you the moment they stopped trusting your content is the real you. That is what makes it expensive.

Two Pairs of Spanx. In 2016, after a $35,000 rebrand and a two-day shoot at the Quirk Hotel, the retoucher sent back a photo of a woman thinner (and with much perkier boobs) than I had been since before I had three kids. The feedback I wrote back drew a line that has held for a decade: smooth the dress, do not change the shape of my body.
The rule was never about the technology. It was about whether the woman on the website is the same woman who shows up on the Zoom call or in person at the live event.

Everything is Becoming Beige. AI can only synthesize what already exists. Hand it nothing of yours and it hands you back the average of your entire industry, which is why the newsletters, the captions, the color palettes, the layouts, and even the haircuts have become a copy-paste across so many industries.
Everyone bought into the same easy button and the result? Everyone looks like they hired the same designer, copywriter, stylist, and so much more.

Front of House vs Back of House (Internal Infrastructure). No one has ever asked me which CRM I run. Your internal systems are infrastructure and nobody needs a disclosure about them. Your face, your voice, and your point of view are a different category entirely.
The line is not whether AI touched the work. It is whether what people experience as you actually came from you.

Resources Mentioned
My AI Statement. The full public statement on how The CEO Collective® uses AI, sitting on the site right next to the privacy policy and the terms.
Human-First AI for High-Trust Business, Episode 1. Where I landed on AI after six months of using it, and why I wrote the statement at all.
Descript. What I use to record and edit the podcast, and a clean example of the behind-the-scenes category I have no problem using day to day without breaking trust with my community
Want to Learn AI From the Same Program I Did?
Callan Faulkner’s AI Employee Bootcamp is where I built the AI infrastructure now running behind my marketing, my client delivery, my finance reporting, and the tech stack that holds it all together. I came in with the systems and SOPs I had already built through my 90 Day CEO Operating System®, and we built the automation layer on top of them. I am going through it again because there is still more I want to implement.
Register through my affiliate link and you get a bonus bootcamp debrief group call with me, to translate what Callan teaches into a high-trust, relationship-based business. That translation is the part most AI training skips entirely.
Register for the bootcamp through my affiliate link.
I earn a commission when you register through that link. I was sending people to Callan long before there was a commission attached, and I am currently a student in her program.
Connect with Me:
Instagram: @racheal.cook
TikTok: @rachealcookmba
LinkedIn: @rachealcook
YouTube: @the_ceo_collective
Website: The CEO Collective
Subscribe & Review:
If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
🎤 Thanks for listening! I'll see you next week!
33 min
September 02Human First AI Is a Decision Not a Vibe
Most of the conversation about AI is happening at two extremes. Founders bragging publicly about the payroll they cut, and founders refusing to touch any of it. Both are missing the point, and neither one leaves you with an answer you can actually run a business on.
So I spent six months deep diving into AI so I could form my own thoughts. Three programs, an intensive, and a lot of building. Not reading about it. Not collecting other people’s opinions. Actually using it inside this business until I had a aligned AI position I would be willing to defend out loud.
This is the first episode of Human First: The AI Series for High-Trust Businesses, and I am starting where I always start, which is values. I go into what I am genuinely worried about, and that list is long. There are parts of this business I will never hand over, and I name every one of them. Then I get to the question almost nobody is asking alongside me, which is not whether you should use AI but who gets the upside when you do.
I also published our full AI policy this week and added an AI statement to our values page. Nobody expects a business my size to do that. I did it anyway, and I will tell you exactly why.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
Why the two loudest positions on AI are both wrong, and where I landed after six months of building with it instead of arguing about it
The moment two different AI models answered the exact same question about my anxiety medication in two completely different ways, and what that difference actually proves
What I am genuinely worried about, including the data centers going up around me in Virginia and the conversation my own kids are already living through
The question I asked my cousin about how AI was being rolled out at her company that nobody in the room had an answer for
Why a deliverable that used to be a $10,000 engagement is now built into my client work, and the decision I made about the savings
The one filter I used to decide who to learn from, and the three people who passed it
What I will never automate in this business, and why I want you to write your own version of that list this week
Key Concepts from the Episode
Consider the Source. My parents’ rule for who to take advice from, applied to a technology conversation full of people whose proudest result is a spreadsheet with fewer humans on it. I went looking for teachers who were talking about impact instead of headcount reduction.
If somebody’s biggest flex is the thing that turns your stomach, they are not your teacher.
Sitting Out Is Not the Neutral Position. Abstaining from AI does not protect you from what AI does to your industry. It only removes you from the rooms where it is getting built, priced, and regulated.
Opting out does not stop the thing from being built. It just guarantees you were not in the room when it was.
Whoever Builds It Decides Who It Works For. Safiya Noble made this argument about search engines in 2018 and it lands harder now. The results a system hands back are shaped by who built it and what they were optimizing for.
The two models did not disagree by accident. Somebody sat in a room and decided where the line was.
Who Gets the Upside. Productivity has been climbing for a century while wages sat still. AI can widen that gap faster than anything before it, or it can close it, and that is a choice each of us makes inside our own business.
If AI made you more profitable and nobody else in the business felt it, that is not efficiency. That is the old model with better tools.
Going Beige. Dabbling is the worst available position. Half-using AI is how a business built on relationships ends up sounding exactly like every other business in its category.
The people who barely touch it are the ones who will sound the most like everyone else.
Want to Learn AI From the Same Program I Did?
Callan Faulkner’s AI Employee Bootcamp is where I built the AI infrastructure now running behind my marketing, my client delivery, my finance reporting, and the tech stack that holds it all together. I came in with the systems and SOPs I had already built through my 90 Day CEO Operating System®, and we built the automation layer on top of them. I am going through it again because there is still more I want to implement.
Register through my affiliate link and you get a bonus bootcamp debrief group call with me, to translate what Callan teaches into a high-trust, relationship-based business. That translation is the part most AI training skips entirely.
Register for the bootcamp through my affiliate link.
I earn a commission when you register through that link. I was sending people to Callan long before there was a commission attached, and I am currently a student in her program.
Resources Mentioned
Our AI Use Statement. Exactly which tools we use, what happens to the call recordings inside my programs, and what we will never do with your information. Specific enough that you can hold me to it.
Our Values. Human first, always, plus the rest of what this business stands on.
Staying Focused is Your Political Resistance Right Now. The episode where I made the case that your business is your political resistance.
AI Business Lab. Michael Hyatt’s program, where I first saw what AI could do to a workflow.
Codified in the City. Maria-Ines Fuenmayor, who built the dashboard that pulled my reporting out of five different places and into one.
Rachel Rodgers on Substack. Her writing on why opting out does not protect you is where a lot of my thinking landed.
Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble. The 2018 book about search engines that explains most of what is happening with AI right now.
Connect with Me:
Instagram: @racheal.cook
TikTok: @rachealcookmba
LinkedIn: @rachealcook
YouTube: @the_ceo_collective
Website: The CEO Collective
Subscribe & Review:
If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
🎤 Thanks for listening! I'll see you next week!
59 min
August 26My 90 Day Plan Did Not Survive July
There is still a block sitting on my calendar from the second week of July that says “Record new podcast episodes.”
I never moved it. I sat down in front of it most mornings, pushed it to the next day, then to the next week, and eventually I stopped pretending and just let it sit there being wrong.
My granny died while my family was in Italy – just 6 months after my mom passed away.
So instead of returning home and jumping right into my Q3 90 Day Plan that I’d created before traveling, I went to another funeral and pressed pause on everything else.
When your plan falls apart, the useful question is not how to get back on track → it’s what do I actually have the capacity for, right now?
In this episode, we’re catching up a bit on what’s been happening behind the scenes, including what I let go during this summer, what continued to run without me, and (a little teaser of what’s coming up this fall) how I spent a lot of that extra time researching and forming my own opinions around AI for small business.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
What it actually looks like to run a business when navigating a tidal wave of grief (again)
The triage questions I ran my Q3 90 Day Plan through when I only had a fraction of my usual capacity
How I followed my curiosity (and yes – the dopamine hit) learning about AI for small business
The single prompt that took me from AI-curious to AI-serious in about half an hour
What that research told me about my own positioning that I did not want to hear
Why every plug-and-play AI promise I tested came back generic, and what has to happen first
What is inside Human First, the AI series for high-trust businesses, starting September 3
Key Concepts from the Episode
Your business should not fall apart when you fall apart. My ads kept running, the private podcast series went out, my team kept the operations moving, and I limited myself to the work only I could do. None of that was luck. It was infrastructure built before I needed it.
You are allowed to fall apart. Your business is not.
Must-Do versus Nice-To-Do. When my capacity dropped, I went back to the 90-Day Plan and asked one question about every line on it. Client-facing work got fiercely protected. Everything else became optional, including the newsletter and this podcast.
A plan that only works at full capacity is a plan built for your best days.
The murky middle. I watched people I respect go hard pro-AI and I watched the comments section go hard against it. What if you could see both sides? The position I landed on came from Randi Buckley’s language: context, nuance, and discernment.
All or nothing is often a way to avoid making a decision.
50 Hours of market research in under 30 Minutes. I have given clients a 100 Conversations Challenge for years, and the honest math on that is around 50 hours of work most people never do for their business. Then I found and tweaked a research prompt that truly impressed me with research that was fully cited with linked results and references, including industry research that would have taken even more hours to go through. It quickly assessed where my business was stuck in the ‘sea of sameness’ plus messaging that I could uniquely own.
When your differentiator starts showing up in everybody else’s copy, it stopped being a differentiator.
The Unicorn Assistant Problem. For years, I’ve watched people struggle to build a team because they are hoping for a magical unicorn assistant who can not only do everything – organize their calendar, respond to emails, create social media content, handle the bookkeeping – but can do it all on Day 1 of working together. Now I’m watching people treat AI the exact same way. That’s not how this works! You’ve got to create the foundational infrustructure first!
AI can’t support your business well if everything is still trapped in your head! You still have to take the time to build the foundational systems.
Resources Mentioned
Marketing for High-Trust Businesses. The private podcast series built for the businesses where you know your clients’ names, plus the assessment that names the gap in your marketing. Free. theceocollective.com/high-trust-marketing
Randi Buckley, Healthy Boundaries for Kind People. The source of the context, nuance, and discernment language I use throughout this episode. https://www.randibuckley.com/
Michael Hyatt’s AI program. One of the first paid programs I tested. https://aibusinesslab.ai/
Maria-Ines Fuenmayor, Codified in the City. The day we spent in Florence building my dashboard and mapping which internal tools were worth building. https://codifiedinthecity.com/
Callan Faulkner, A2A. Automate to Accelerate. Her early stance that AI is here to amplify human work is most of why I joined. https://theuncommonbusiness.co/
Gabi Day, Hype-Ma’am. Runs the ads for The CEO Collective®, 90 Day CEO Certified Professional®, and my guest for the final episode of the series. https://hypemaam.com/home
Connect with Me:
Instagram: @racheal.cook
TikTok: @rachealcookmba
LinkedIn: @rachealcook
YouTube: @the_ceo_collective
Website: The CEO Collective
Subscribe & Review:
If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
🎤 Thanks for listening! I'll see you next week!
37 min
July 09Why Your Right Hand Person Belongs in the Planning Room with Elise Arsenault and Priscilla Leonard
You come home from a planning day lit up. Six hours of clarity, a wall of Post-its, a quarter that finally makes sense. Then you sit down with your team, and somewhere between your head and their inbox the whole thing flattens into a to-do list nobody has the context for.
Elise Arsenault knows that exact moment. She built The Global Actor into a training program the audiobook industry has come to trust, with ten of her graduates nominated at this year's Audies and several of them winning. And for years she came back from the CEO Retreat® alone, carrying a quarter's worth of decisions she then had to translate, explain, and hope landed. She called it instant overwhelm. She was not wrong.
This episode is the before and after of what changes when the operator is in the room. Priscilla Leonard runs operations for The Global Actor, and she and Elise have built that business together for years without ever meeting in person. When Elise started bringing Priscilla to the retreats, the handoff stopped being a handoff. It became a real conversation about why, not just what.
We get into how the 90 Day CEO Operating System® becomes the bridge between a visionary who sees the whole horizon and the right hand who makes it actually happen, what shifts when your team owns their goals instead of receiving them, and why Elise no longer believes the whole thing could fall apart if she stopped working for a week.
If you have a right hand and you have been carrying the plan alone, this one shows you what the other version looks like.

About Elise Arsenault and Priscilla Leonard
Elise Arsenault is an actor, coach, and the founder of The Global Actor, the training program behind the Great Audiobook Adventure. She has spent the last decade building a body of work the audiobook narration industry has come to trust, with casting directors who recognize her course by name and ten of her graduates earning Audie nominations this year.
Priscilla Leonard is her right hand and runs operations for the business, a role she grew into after coordinating The Global Actor's first thousand-attendee summit and eventually coming on full time.
Elise has been part of The CEO Collective® for years and plans each quarter at the CEO Retreat®. When the membership added its team tier, she started bringing Priscilla into the retreats with her, and the two of them now run their quarterly planning through the 90 Day CEO Operating System® as a team. They have built The Global Actor together across a virtual team for years, and they have still never met in person.

What You'll Learn in This Episode
Why coming home from a planning day fired up can quietly create more overwhelm, not less
What actually changes when your operator sits in the planning room instead of getting the recap afterward
How the 90 Day CEO Operating System® becomes a translator between a visionary and her right hand
The shift that lets a CEO stop believing the whole business could collapse if she stepped away for a week
What it looks like when every person on the team owns their own quarterly goals instead of inheriting a list
How Elise reclaimed time for her own craft once operations had a clear owner
Why you do not have to fix everything at once, including the email address that has been wrong for ten years

Key Concepts from the Episode
The Bridge Between Vision and Logistics. The 90 Day CEO Operating System® gives a big-picture CEO and a detail-driven operator a shared language, so the plan stops getting lost in translation between the two of them. A visionary who sees the whole horizon still needs the person who knows where every step actually lands.
The Right Hand Belongs in the Room. When Priscilla started attending retreats instead of receiving the six-hour download afterward, she stopped getting a to-do list and started getting the reasoning behind it. Your team can execute a plan they were handed. They commit to a plan they helped build.
Calm Is Capacity. For years Elise believed the business would fall apart if she stopped working for a single day. With the systems and clear ownership in place, that fear quieted. The proof a system is working is that you can step away from it and nothing falls.
Own the Goal, Don't Inherit It. Every team member now carries their own quarterly goals in Asana, set together in a co-working session rather than assigned from on high. Ownership is not something you delegate. It is something you let people take.
You Don't Have to Fix It All Today. The company rebranded to The Global Actor years ago and still runs on a ten-year-old email address that does not match the name, and that is fine. Permission to leave the small broken thing alone is what lets you finish the big right thing.

Resources Mentioned
The CEO Collective®. The membership where established service-based, relational business owners install the systems and leadership to grow without sacrificing the life the business is supposed to support. The Scaling CEO tier brings your right hand into the room with you.
CEO Retreat®. The quarterly planning experience where Elise and Priscilla map their next 90 days together. Available in On-Demand, Live Virtual, and Live In-Person Richmond formats.
The Global Actor. Elise's training program for actors and creatives building careers in audiobook narration.

Connect with Elise Arsenault and Priscilla Leonard
Website: The Global Actor
The Great Audiobook Adventure
Connect with Me:
Instagram: @racheal.cook
TikTok: @rachealcookmba
LinkedIn: @rachealcook
YouTube: @the_ceo_collective
Website: The CEO Collective
Subscribe & Review:
If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts!
🎤 Thanks for listening! I'll see you next week!
26 min

About Promote Yourself to CEO | Small Business Strategy for Women Entrepreneurs

From the publisher's feed

If you're fed up with the non-stop solopreneur grind… I'm so glad you've found The Promote Yourself to CEO Show!

Each week, join host Racheal Cook MBA for candid conversations about…