74. The ‘Busy Mom’ Business Trap: Why You’re Always Working But Not Growing

Have you ever felt like you're working ALL day but somehow got nothing done? You know that feeling - coffee in hand, ready to be productive, but between your toddler's meltdown over the wrong color cup and falling into an Instagram scroll hole, suddenly it's bedtime and your to-do list is barely touched.

Can you relate to:

• Taking client calls while changing diapers?
• Working during nap time (if you're lucky enough to get one)?
• Constantly feeling busy but not seeing the revenue to match?

I get it, mama. I've been there too - trying to do #allthethings while juggling mom life, but watching your bank account stay the same despite your endless hustle.

In this episode, I'm pulling back the curtain on why so many of us get caught in this "busy trap" and - more importantly - exactly how to get out of it. And it might not be what you think... because working harder isn't the answer (thank goodness, right?).

This episode is perfect for you if:

• You're exhausted from being "consistent" but not seeing results
• Your client work is taking over your life
• You keep telling yourself you "just need to" do one more thing before you can really grow
• You're ready to make real money without sacrificing all your time

Episode Highlights:

• The truth about why being "busy" isn't making you money
• My personal framework for focusing on high-impact tasks
• The exact shift that took me from 2K to 20K months in 60 days
• What to do RIGHT NOW to get unstuck
• Plus: The real reason your perfect website isn't bringing in clients

Mentioned: Reel on how to use your client work to create high-converting content

🔥 FREE MASTERCLASS: Want the complete roadmap? Join me for Scale Like a Mother on Monday, February 17th at 1:30 PM EST. I'm teaching you how to attract premium clients and build a thriving business in just 20 hours a week or less.

Show up live and get my exact AI prompts for creating an evergreen nurture sequence that sells while you sleep!

👉 Save your spot: yaelbendahan.com/masterclass

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 (even if you’ve been stuck riiiiight at 6 figures for way too long) working nap times and being a full time mama. Claim your spot here >>> yaelbendahan.com/leverage

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

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

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

Transcript

0:05

I cannot even tell you. The amount of people that I have Spoken to who are like I'm just working on building out this product They've been working on building out this product for the past year and a half that I've known them They still have yet to get the product out the door and I understand wanting to create a premium experience. For your clients, for your customers. I understand wanting to give them the best of you. That being said, I cannot tell you how much more valuable your offer is going to be when you create it as you go along, getting the real in like live feedback from the people who've already bought it. And when you pre sell and you deliver live, you already have that motivation. People have already paid you for it. Welcome to the Raising Your Business Podcast. I'm your host, Yael Ben Dahan, 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. Welcome back to the podcast. It's Yael again, and I. I'm so excited to talk about today's topic, which is something that might feel a little bit too real for you. Why you feel like you're always working, but your business still isn't really growing in conjunction with the amount of work you feel you're doing. So if you feel like you're doing all the things, you're posting, you're creating, you're engaging, you're working with clients, you're tweaking your website for the 20th time. But somehow your revenue just really isn't budging. It's not going up and your business still feels like a full time job. That's stressing you out. Even though the whole reason you started this was for more freedom today, I'm going to be breaking down exactly why that's happening and how to get unstuck. So if you are feeling exhausted and a little burnt out and still not really seeing the income or impact that you know you're capable of, this episode is for you. But before we dive in, I want to let you know that if today's episode hits home, you need to be in my upcoming all new free masterclass happening on February 17th. I am breaking down the exact shifts that helped me scale to six figures, working just three, four hours a day as a mom of six. I was a mom of four and a half at the time, but I literally went from a 2k month to a 20k month in 60 days without constantly launching all the time and burning out or feeling like I was winging it. If you feel so tired of working more, but you still feel stuck, go sign up at yaelbandan. com slash masterclass and I will see you there. All right, let's get into today's episode. So let me paint a picture for you. It's Monday morning. You're sitting down at your laptop, coffee in hand. You are so determined to be productive today. You set your kids up, you have a toddler at home. You set them up with Bluey or something and you're like, I am gonna get stuff done. But before you even open your laptop, Your toddler's already screaming because he wanted the blue cup, not the green one. You check your phone and you get sucked into Instagram, researching content ideas in quotes, but really just ending up doomscrolling and looking at everyone else's stuff and being like, why is their stuff so good? Why do they look like they're doing so well and I'm not? And by the time you actually open your laptop, You have 15 notifications, 3 client emails, and a slack message asking for a quick tweak on a project that already has had multiple quick tweaks that were way out of your scope. Fast forward a few hours, you're jiggling back and forth between your toddler and your work and eating and housework, and you feel like you've been working all day, but somehow you still feel behind. And you tell yourself, I was so busy today, so why do I feel like I got nothing done? And that is the busy trap. You are constantly busy, but not actually growing. So does that sound familiar? If that sounds familiar, please reach out to me on Instagram and let me know, because I know the feeling. And sometimes I will get into that feeling too. So just so you know, this is something that does not automatically go away. It's something that It has to be very intentional in order to move out of. Okay. And sometimes when we get just stuck in that day to day routine, we can fall into bad habits without realizing it. And I was stuck here for years and I used to think if I just worked harder, if I just showed up more, if I did all the things success would follow, but I was wrong. And the truth is, if your business is keeping you constantly busy, but you're not really making any real money, something is broken. So let's talk about what's actually happening here. Okay, there are three mistakes that I see I made and that I'll see my clients making that really can keep you stuck in this busy mom business trap that this episode is all about. So the first mistake is spending 80 percent of your time on low impact tasks. So an example is the I have to post everyday mindset. Okay, so you tell yourself I'm gonna be posting daily to stay relevant. I have to create reels, right? So you sit down to create content, but instead of writing Let me know if this is hitting home with you. You scroll for inspiration for 20 minutes You save a whole bunch of reels that are like, you know use this Trending audio and use this really easy real idea. Okay, awesome. You open up Canva, you tweak a design, you hate it, you start over, that takes you 30 minutes. You finally post, refresh Instagram, 10 times to see if anyone liked it, and you got 59 views and you're like, what the heck? I worked so hard. What is this post even doing for me? So what actually will move the needle? I highly recommend. I'm very clear on this. is planning your content in advance and creating content around the offer that you're trying to move them to. In other words, the CTA, you're trying to get them to move towards rather than just creating content for the sake of content. Now I'm not saying you cannot have some inspiration and post something. I'm not saying that. I think you should. Like I just right now jumped on this trending audio sorry, this trending idea where it was like I had coffee with my younger self, right? And. People loved it and I got some really nice feedback from it and I got people reaching out to me and being like, Oh my gosh, this really just hit home for me. So obviously I do think you should leave space for inspiration and a really awesome content idea. But overall, if you are trying to book out your services or book out your offers and you want content that's going to actually convert. Deciding what to post on the day and throwing it up is not going to do it for you, okay? You want to create high converting content that speaks directly to your ideal client and actually lead them towards an offer, okay? You want to work backwards. You want to take whatever offer or call to action you are trying to get them to take, right? Whatever that is, whether it's towards a free masterclass, whether it's towards a mastermind, or your signature service, or whatever it is. I like planning your I like planning my, and I teach my clients to plan their content around the call to action rather than just a random topic, okay? And I teach this in my Stand Down and Sell, right? When you use, when you have your signature framework, and your signature framework is, creates your offers, basically. Whether you have your entire signature framework within one offer, or you pull out pieces of your signature framework to turn into smaller offers, when you use your signature framework as kind of content topic pillars then And you can very easily just decide, okay, what's the topic I'm speaking on this week and what offer is it leading back to? It's very simple. It becomes very simple, okay? So when you are creating a content plan that actually leads towards your offers, you are going to be able to create content in a much more efficient way. And that is income generating. That is going to be higher impact because the content is very targeted towards your goal. A is creating high converting content that actually speaks directly to your ideal client and speaks to the offer you're trying to sell them instead of just throwing stuff at the wall and like expecting it to stick. And actually looking at what are the actual high impact tasks in your business. What actually makes you money. So you want to be spending more time on sales generating activities like nurturing leads and making offers instead of just being consistent for the sake of consistency. Okay? So if you fall into that prey of you gotta post every day or sell every day. Yes, I do think you should be selling every day in some capacity, but it's not necessarily mean just throwing up a post because people need to see that you did not miss a single day on your feed. Okay. Now that is that is the first mistake. The second one is mistaking client work for business growth.. So if you're ever saying I'm too busy with clients to work on my business, This is a cycle that so many people fall into if you're booked out with custom projects and one to one clients. That sounds great, right? But behind the scenes it looks like constant back and forth emails Redoing work because the client changed their mind for the seventh time no time left to actually market yourself So when those clients finish you're back to square one, you're like, oh great I have to fill up my roster again. What will actually move the needle for you? Now number one I definitely do feel that delivering a premium experience to your clients is going to actually make you more money, because that will generate more referrals. You can actually take the client work that you're doing and turn it into content. And I actually have an Instagram post. I'll link it in the description. I have an Instagram post that teaches you exactly how to take what you're already doing and turn it into content. So that's going to be a really good one, and I highly recommend looking at it and writing down some ideas. But I also feel like you need to think about what you're selling and where you can put more boundaries in place. So what will actually move the needle for you? What will actually get you out of this busy mom business trap? The first thing is creating a productized premium offer that doesn't require cons and customization. Very clear processes so that You don't need to be going back and forth because everything is already built into the plan. You already know exactly how many reviews you're doing. You don't need to do back and forth emails because expectations are set at the beginning, from the get go, and you're not going to require that constant explanation. I cannot tell you the amount of times. I have saved creating SOPs or explanatory videos for my clients that I would just send to them at the beginning so they did not even need to ask me questions because the questions were already answered. I already saw the questions that came up with previous clients, turned it into kind of onboarding assets for my clients to consume so that they were able to come into my world and know exactly what we're going to do together without having to ask me all kinds of questions that had already been asked before. The second part is setting boundaries and systems that you're not spending hours on admin work that doesn't actually make you more money. So again, Having set amounts of reviews. When you productize your service, you also create much more systems that you can outsource to AVA so that you don't need to be doing that all that back and forth and admin piece. Having systems for when your client payments come in, so it's not depending on milestones and rather on dates. So it's very automated and does not require chasing them up for for the next payment because they feel like, oh, I just need a couple more tweaks before I pay you for the next stage. So that I really think is, Something we get really stuck in. And I want you to assign yourself a day or a few hours a week. You are your client and you do your CEO work. You take those income generating activities and you implement them in your business. You create the content that is going to lead towards your offers. Whether, even if you're booked out, having a wait list to get people onto or having a lower ticket front end offer to move people towards to nurture them so that they are ready and waiting to join your client roster when you have spots open. Okay, so if you're like, but if I'm all booked out, why would I market? Because you have to stay top of mind. You must stay top of mind. And so that is actually a great place to create content from because you don't actually need the clients. So you can actually create it from a place of abundance and why you'd be so lucky for me to work with you because I am busy and I have a lot on my plate. I have a lot of clients. I'm totally booked out. So therefore, if you do have the chance to work with me. Here's why you want to work with me and here's what we can do together. That is an amazing place to create content from. So if you have that problem, then pat yourself on the back. That's a great problem to have. Okay. But again, if you are in that feast and famine cycle because you're working really hard with your clients and you've realized that you haven't really marketed yourself. So now you're back on Oh my gosh, let me go find a client. Let me go reach out to people. That is where you want to make sure you are prioritizing your services as much as possible. You're setting boundaries and systems, and you are making yourself one of your clients. You're giving yourself that CEO time to take action. And the third mistake that I see, and I am guilty of this. I'm guilty of this, I admit, okay? And I have to catch myself all the time doing this. You are in the, I just need to trap, okay? You tell yourself, Oh, I just need to tweak my website before I start selling. I just need better branding before I raise my prices. I just need to organize my ClickUp before I can take on more clients. I just need to, I don't know, fix my entire team hub before I bring on a new a new team member. Reality check. Your website, your logo, your backend systems are not what's holding you back from making more money. All right? What actually moves the needle? Selling before you feel 100 percent ready. Pre selling something with, the first Module ready or the first step stage ready so that you can refine as you go All right, getting visible and making offers consistently. That is what brings in the revenue It is not waiting until everything is perfect It is not if I cannot even tell you the amount of people that I have Spoken to who are like I'm just working on building out this product They've been working on building out this product for the past year and a half that I've known them They still have yet to get the product out the door and I understand wanting to create a premium experience for your clients, for your customers. I understand wanting to give them the best of you. That being said, I cannot tell you how much more valuable your offer is going to be when you create it as you go along, getting the real in like live feedback from the people who've already bought it. And when you pre sell and you deliver live, you already have that motivation. People have already paid you for it. My client, Catherine, right now, she launched her beta course in December. She gave herself the rest of the summer off because it was the holidays and she'd had an amazing launch. She almost one and a half X'd her actual goal and now she is delivering the course and when we got on a mastermind call together I actually helped her kind of make a plan for how to make sure she's getting that feedback in real time from her existing that she can really create the best course possible. So when she relaunches, she will have very little, she will basically no work to do on the actual course. All she has to do is focus on collecting all those amazing testimonials from her first customers, from her first students, and just marketing the heck out of her course, right? So she was able to pre sell, she was able to deliver it on her own time. She's able to get that live feedback from her students and Now she is creating so much of a better product because she's seeing what questions they have, and she's answering it in her modules, in her lessons, and it is just an amazing thing to see. And I'm in the back end of her course. I see what she's creating. She is doing a fantastic job because she is doing it. She sold before she felt ready. Now she's so motivated to create it because she already got paid for the course, and now she is creating literally the best, most high quality course possible. If you take nothing else away from this episode, I want you to remember this. Number one, being busy does not equal making money. Working harder, right? Working more does not mean you're going to make more money. You don't need to work more. You need to work on the right things. And success comes from focusing on the high impact tasks that actually move your business forward. Right now, I just brought on a new team member, a new VA. I've had some difficulties with hiring in the past and I was a little nervous to do that. So I currently have a team hub that I'm trying to build out pulling together. Since I've had my last VA, things have been updated, I have new offers, I have new ways of doing things. And so I have to create new SOPs, I have to create new stuff, I'm refilling in all my products, all the offers that I have. And I was like, do I wait and do this or do I hire the person first? I hired her first and now I am so freaking motivated to finish. I can actually get her to look through my offers and fill them in for me, right? There's so many things she can actually do for me that I don't need to be doing because she can do that work. Okay. And when she's doing that work, she will actually get to know my offers better, which is amazing. Okay. So I want you to think about what can I do to just take action? right? But take action in a strategic way. Not just take action throwing spaghetti at the wall, taking action from a place of intention. What is this going to do for me? So here is my little challenge for you this week. Number one, look at where you're spending your time. What is actually driving revenue and what is just keeping you busy? Where do you keep getting distracted? Okay, are you making a to do list? Okay, I want to get these three things done today. And then you're doing seven other things that were not even on your list. If that is the case, you are probably caught in this trap, okay? So look at where you're spending your time. If you can, track your time. If you can have some sort of automatic time tracker like toggle that will literally track based on what window you're in and what website you're on, that's ideal because I find I forget to track my time very often. So if you can estimate those automatically, even better. And so look at where you're spending your time. and what you're actually getting done. And look at it. Is this actually driving revenue or is it just keeping you busy and not really moving the needle for you? And I want you to make one shift. One. Whether it's spending more time selling. Whether you're sitting and mapping out your content for the week focused on one offer rather than just throwing up random content pieces. Maybe it's cutting out a task that's no longer serving you or that somebody else could do or that you could outsource, right? Creating something that's going to leverage your time more. That is what I want you to do. think of one small shift you can make one small tweak you can make to get out of that busy trap and into those high impact income generating activities. What can you do? What's one shift you can make to move into that place. And if you want the full roadmap to simplify and scale your business in 2025, I want you to make sure that you sign up for my free masterclass happening this upcoming. Monday, it's on February 17th. You can go to yaelbendan. com slash masterclass and join me. It is going to be so good. It is all new material. It is so freaking excellent. I can't even tell you how amazing it is. And it is literally the exact thing I personally did to. Go from making 100k in 12 months to 110k in 7 months, working literally half the time, okay? And going from a 2k month to a 20k month in 60 days, having my biggest year ever, making multiple six figures, working two to four hours a day. Okay, this is exactly the method that I used. Okay I'm not gatekeeping. I'm pulling back the curtain. So sign up for the masterclass at yaelbendahan. com slash masterclass And then I want you to DM me on Instagram at the yaelbendahan and tell me what is one busy task that you're dropping this week? What's one thing that you're dropping that is not really moving the needle for you? So thanks for tuning in mama I'll see you next week and I cannot wait to Show up and give the best masterclass possible because it is so good and I really want you there now spots are limited My zoom room is capped at a certain amount of people So make sure you save your seat and make sure you show up live because I'm gonna be giving a gift Training to everyone who shows up live. I'm gonna be giving you the exact prompts that I'm using to take my existing content and offers and courses and turn them into an evergreen nurture series that is going to give value to my list, whether or not I'm showing up, whether or not I'm busy, whether or not my baby's sick, whether or not I'm actively selling. So it's going to help you nurture and Also, soft sell to your list and I'm giving you the training and the exact chat GPT slash Claude prompt that I'm using to do this. So if you show up, you stay till the end, you're going to get this gift. Okay. So I cannot wait to see you at the masterclass and I'll see you next time. 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 enjoyed this episode, please take a second to rate and review and let's connect 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 theelbendahan and share your biggest breakthrough from today. See you next week.