The Summer I Realized Marketing Isn't About Your Budget—It's About Your Capacity

Summer's coming. So is the question every mom entrepreneur dreads: what's it going to cost you?

Not just camp fees. Not just screen time guilt. The real cost — in time, in energy, in your capacity to run your business and show up as a mom at the same time.

In this episode, Ruthie talks about the incomplete question every founder asks ("How much should I spend on marketing in the summer?") and the real conversation that actually matters. You'll learn why hiring help doesn't always solve the capacity problem, how to think about your marketing channels like team members (so you can actually decide which ones take vacation), and why the energy piece is what nobody's talking about.

Most importantly, you'll hear the honest truth about what it actually costs to be a mom entrepreneur — and why your capacity in July looks nothing like your capacity in May.

This episode is for the mom founder who's tired of white-knuckling it through the busy seasons. If you're juggling childcare, camp schedules, guilt about screen time, and a business that needs your attention, this one's for you.

In This Episode:

• Why summer hits your capacity harder than you expect (and how to account for it in your marketing)
• The three things most entrepreneurs do when capacity drops — and why three of them backfire
• The difference between "I don't have time" and "I don't have energy"
• How to think about your marketing channels strategically so you can make real decisions
• Why the long game (SEO, guesting, funnels) matters even when you're in survival mode
• What actually changes when you have a marketing partner in your corner

Ready to talk about your summer capacity? DM Ruthie on Instagram @ruthiesterrett or check out The Corner Office retainer — where you get a marketing director as your co-pilot so you're not carrying this alone.

Let's talk about what actually works for mom entrepreneurs.

Join the next Marketing Mixer, a virtual networking event for mom founders. 

Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode, and follow along over on Instagram!
@ruthie.sterrett
@theconsistencycorner

Transcript

Ruthie Sterrett (00:02.274)

Welcome back to the Consistency Corner podcast. It is officially my favorite season, summer. Actually, now that I live in Florida and it's like super hot here in the summer, maybe it's not my favorite season anymore. I don't know what my favorite season is. It used to be my favorite season, but it is summer. Post-memorial day, like summer is here. And whether you are in the craziness of the last week of school like we are, school has already wrapped for you or you're one of those people

that your school district goes into June and you're like longing for summer and it's not officially summer for you yet, it's summer. And the thing that I wanna talk about today is your marketing budget and what that looks like for the summer season. But I'm not talking about your marketing budget just in terms of how much should I spend on marketing in this season. Because that to me is the wrong question. Or at least,

It's an incomplete question because we're not just talking about money. We're talking about time, money, and energy. And nobody I know has unlimited amounts of any of those things. So today, the real spending conversation is what summer actually costs you and how to make the decisions when none of the answers are very easy and you don't have unlimited

time, money, energy. So let me tell you first what happens in my house during the summer. My kiddo goes to summer camp and because, I mean, I'm not a camp director and my nervous system is not ready for me to be a camp director and activities director 24 seven. Like in another life, I would have been a great cruise ship activities director, but that's not what season I'm in today. And so while I could plan a very fun camp like

environment for my son. It's not Amazonagenius right now, nor is it in my capacity. So we do sign up for summer camp every year. This year, every camp we signed up for happens to be only four days a week. So I already know on Fridays, he's home. Plus, during the school year, my son walks to school.

Ruthie Sterrett (02:27.884)

So the commute, the drop off, pickup for me doesn't happen during the school years. So then in camp season, I have the drive to camp for drop off and the drive home. And then I have the drive to camp for pickup and the drive home. And that could add anywhere from an hour total to my day in terms of time in the car to unfortunately up to four hours.

total for one of the camps that we're doing this summer because the only golf camp we could get into was almost an hour away and we really wanted to do it. So that's besides the point. So the real challenge is accounting for that in my own capacity. And the first summer I was an entrepreneur, I did not account for that. So lesson learned. And what I see happen

for people who do realize that they have a decreased capacity in the summer is like, okay, I don't have as much time to do all the things. So what am I gonna do? Well, when it comes to marketing things, I see entrepreneurs do one of three things. One is to like white knuckle it. You work evenings when you wanna be outside enjoying the long daylight.

try to cram as much as possible. You're like half working while you're on a call so that you can try to get things done. You're double booking yourself or similar to the like white knuckling, but you work weekends to catch up and you don't want that either. Like you want to enjoy the summer. You want to go to the pool. You want to take a road trip, do summer weekend things, not sit at your laptop or you stay up late.

and you white-knuckle it by sacrificing sleep. And so now your health is suffering. Or option four, you stop doing things. You take stuff off your plate, which is great. That is discernment. But then September rolls around and you launch something and you wonder, why is nobody paying attention? And it's because we weren't managing that runway for a launch in July and August.

Ruthie Sterrett (04:48.788)

Or maybe you don't even launch in September, but you realize things have slowed down in the fall and they're not picking back up the way you had hoped they would. Which brings me back to the spending question. When mom founders ask how much they should spend on marketing, we're not just talking about money. We're also talking about how much time to do the thing.

Whether that's your time or somebody else's time, which you're technically paying for, which leads us to money, what you're paying out, whether that's contractors, agency, ads, software, and energy. The thing that nobody talks about. DMing people on Instagram and having conversations and sending cold pitches to potential clients, that?

strength my energy big time. So while I may have the time to do that, don't have, I don't, it eats up so much energy, it's not worth the cost, right?

So regardless of what you're not spending in money, you're probably spending in time. time, kind of, there's two buckets of time. There's the time it takes to do the thing. And then there's also the time it takes for things to work, to happen, to harvest.

And whether you're doing it yourself or somebody else is doing it for you, there is energy being spent and sometimes money. mean, ads is a perfect example of that.

Ruthie Sterrett (06:40.268)

And even if you have all the time in the world to sit at your laptop, and if your kids are screaming in the background for a snack every five seconds, or they're parked in front of the TV for way too long, and now you're feeling the emotional weight of that guilt, hi, it's me, you feel like you have time, but you don't actually have the energy, because your energy is being split between being the mom, running the summer camp in your home, and the business owner sitting at your laptop.

And this one's big for us work from home moms because, okay, maybe not all of us, but me, like I expect myself to have the same capacity as when my son is home versus when he's not home. But the reality is that's not true. I get more focused work done when he's not home. And while yes, I can get work done when he's home, I have a 10 year old, he can entertain himself.

even if that means he's parked in front of the TV, that's eating at my capacity because of the guilt I'm feeling over that. And so that's an emotional drain. And so then that's pulling my creative capacity and my energy away from my work. So I can't tell you without knowing your specific situation how much to spend. But I can tell you that every choice is a trade

between time, money, and energy. And I have not figured out if there is a way to opt out of all three. When I do, I'll probably become a billionaire because if I can sell that solution, everybody will buy it. So the frame that I've been thinking about lately is thinking about your marketing channels like social media, email, podcast, blogs, ads, networking, SEO, thinking about them as

team members, which I always say, like, what is social media's job in your business? What is your podcast's job in your business? What happens when the person who has that job goes on vacation? What happens when somebody on your team goes on vacation? Well, either someone else absorbs the workload, the extra hours, the extra effort, or as the boss, you decide

Ruthie Sterrett (09:05.72)

that that work doesn't get done while they're out and there might be some catch up when they come back. And the same is true for your summer marketing channels or your marketing channels all the time. But as we talk about summer capacity, the same is true for your marketing channels. Maybe Instagram goes on vacation and maybe it's stories only. Maybe a nine grid or a three grid is running in the background, but there's not constant posting.

Maybe you step away from organic social and you run ads. Ads is taking up that job of visibility. Maybe you keep the newsletter or the blog or the podcast going because it's the channel that you know is pulling that nurture weight. And then the other platforms are taking a break and you're okay with that because you know then you can catch up or get caught up in the fall.

And I know that there's a lot of nuance to this, and again, everybody's business is different, but it does start with knowing what job you are asking each channel to do, and how much content does that channel need to produce to do its job. Because if we're asking it to do top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, it's gonna need a higher volume of content than you might think to do all three of those jobs. And if you decide to take a break or take a vacation,

From all of the channels that are doing top of funnel work for you or middle of funnel work for you, you've got to figure out what happens to that job. How do we get caught up? Is another channel able to pick it up?

or do we be okay with catching up? But the end of the day is like, we have to also remember that for some of these channels, it's important to note that there is a long game, right? The things that make it possible for you to be visible without being physically present are things like SEO, guest speaking, networking, automated funnels. Those things take time to build.

Ruthie Sterrett (11:19.542)

And just like a tree, when was the best time to plant a tree? Well, 10 years ago, maybe even three months ago, whenever in the past.

the best time to have started your visibility work was a while ago, but when's the next best time? Right now. But if you don't have the capacity to do some of that long-term planting right now, you need to acknowledge that with the channels you are using and the jobs you're asking them to do. And so if we have not done the visibility work,

or the foundational work to make some of those more evergreen channels work in the background for us, we've either got to start planting like right now. And even if it is June, start getting those projects on your to-do list. But no.

that if the channels you're running regularly take a break, there might not be something working in the background to pick up their slack. And as we layer in more and more channels and we do that evergreen work with things like SEO and guesting and funnel building, that that work will compound in the future. But it does take work upfront and it takes time to bloom.

Listen, I want to say something out loud that I'm sure you've heard, but needs to be said more often. As moms, we are expected by society to mother like we don't have work to do. And as business owners, we are expected, or maybe we expect ourself, to work like we don't have children to raise. Even as an entrepreneur who gets to make her own schedule, there is still real work to be done.

Ruthie Sterrett (13:16.302)

Childcare is challenging. Summer camp is expensive. A summer nanny is expensive. And even if you have the resources, is that what you want to spend them on? That is a real question. And if you don't have the resources, how do you make it all work? This is the whole rabbit hole. Do I work less and make less, but be more present? Or do I invest?

in the support so that I can keep building? Or do I keep working more?

but be okay with being less present? There's no right answer. It depends on your kid's temperament, their ages, your business stage, and your financial reality. But whether your kids are at camp or home with you, summer does impact your capacity. And the examples that we have of CEOs and founders in our culture are so often men with wives at home helping them. And let's be really honest, often men with

privilege, financial privilege, who can afford outside support. And as moms, even if we're the breadwinner, or even if we're in a dual income household, statistics show that we always, or like 99 % of the time, take on more of the caregiving.

And so that impacts our capacity as business owners. It just does. Quick personal note, I was talking to my husband about screen time. And fun fact, my husband does not listen to this podcast, so he doesn't know I'm sharing this with you. We were talking about my son's screen time. And I sort of called myself out and said that I was feeling a lot of shame around the amount of screen time my son.

Ruthie Sterrett (15:14.54)

was having and that it was my responsibility as the primary parent to monitor that. My husband was so offended that I called myself the primary parent. And I was like, dude, it's not an insult. It's reality. I'm home because I work from home. My job is in my house. I'm home with our child more than you are. So whether you want to call me the default parent or the primary parent,

It's reality. You have a job that requires you to work 60 plus hours a week outside of the home. This is the reality. And again, it's not an insult, but it's where we are. So just thought I'd show you, that little behind the scenes moment, because I thought it was very interesting that he was offended by me explaining the reality. So here's what I'm gonna get us back on track. Where the discernment piece really comes in.

We have to prioritize, we have to decide. And deciding is heavy. That is literally the part of the mental load of marketing, the deciding. But decide, not deciding, is deciding. Not deciding what to cut, what to prioritize, is often deciding to burn yourself out or to let things fall through the cracks.

or to half-ass everything and then wonder why nothing really works. So we do have to decide. And that decision is hard because there is no one right answer. It depends on your unique situation, your business goals, your marketing data, and your actual capacity. And those are conversations that as mom founders, I hope we have more of. I hope we have more transparent conversations with each other of how we make those decisions, how we discern.

and decide what we can cut, what to prioritize. Because listen, all the business coaches are going to tell you, well, you should do this, and you should do this, and you should do this, and you should do this, and yeah, you should, you could, but you can't do everything because you're one person. And even if you're one person with a team, your team's resources are also limited because there's only so much hours in a day and you can only pay for a team for so much unless you're

Ruthie Sterrett (17:36.472)

Jeff Bezos, which you're not. He's not listening to this podcast.

So this is why the corner office exists. Because the corner office is not just a done for you marketing service provider. Well, we will do marketing for you. That's literally what we do. We're a done for you agency. You get a marketing director in your corner helping you make these decisions, helping you decide what to prioritize. And you get a team to execute what we decided we should be doing.

And when competing priorities come up, you have someone to talk through, what do we drop? What do we downshift? What's worth investing in so that we can increase our capacity?

Ruthie Sterrett (18:31.116)

And so from the corner office side, you have a team to hand off to, and then you know that the engine is running, and your marketing director is kind of your co-pilot who's helping you decide what keeps running, even when you have to step away. So if you're listening to this and it hit, you're already doing the math of what summer is gonna cost you. And I would love to have that conversation with you. As mom founder to mom founder,

Send me a DM. Let's talk about what you can cut, how you decide. And if you're like, OK, this marketing director in the co-pilot seat helping me make these decisions and executing the decisions we make, like, yeah, that sounds great. I'm ready for that. Go ahead and book a consult call with me. The link is in the show notes. I would love to talk more with you about how the corner office can support you. But either way, know that I am cheering you on. I am already in your corner rooting for you.

and I appreciate you for being here on the podcast and we'll see you on the next episode.