Promote Yourself to CEO | Small Business Strategy for Women Entrepreneurs

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 stepping into your role as CEO of your business, the hard lessons learned along the way, and practical, profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout. Listen in to the latest show and connect with Racheal at http://www.theceocollective.com or on Instagram @racheal.cook to continue the conversation!

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  Promote Yourself to CEO | Small Business Strategy for Women Entrepreneurs

  You Can't Delegate Confusion to AI

  Sep 10, 202644 min

  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!

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  Promote Yourself to CEO | Small Business Strategy for Women Entrepreneurs

  Where AI Is Quietly Breaking Trust With Your Clients & Community

  Sep 7, 202633 min

  Send us Fan Mail 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!

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  Promote Yourself to CEO | Small Business Strategy for Women Entrepreneurs

  Human First AI Is a Decision Not a Vibe

  Sep 2, 202658 min

  Send us Fan Mail 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!

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  Promote Yourself to CEO | Small Business Strategy for Women Entrepreneurs

  My 90 Day Plan Did Not Survive July

  Aug 26, 202637 min

  Send us Fan Mail 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!

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  Promote Yourself to CEO | Small Business Strategy for Women Entrepreneurs

  Why Your Right Hand Person Belongs in the Planning Room with Elise Arsenault and Priscilla Leonard

  Jul 9, 202626 min

  Send us Fan Mail 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!

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