Why Mom Founders Are the Bottleneck in Their Own Business

You're not behind on your marketing because you're lazy. You're behind because you're the one holding all of it — in your head, quietly, every single day.

In this episode, Ruthie gets real about the summer tension so many mom founders are living right now: the pull between wanting to actually be present for your life and knowing your marketing momentum matters. But more than that, she names what's actually underneath the struggle — and it's not a posting problem.

It's a mental load problem.

Using a personal story about a dropped appointment at home, Ruthie draws a straight line between the invisible labor of running a household and the invisible labor of holding your entire marketing strategy in your head. And she explains why hiring help doesn't always solve it — because you can get support and still be the bottleneck.

What you'll learn in this episode:

- Why white-knuckling your marketing through summer leads to burnout — and dropping it leads to a quiet September pipeline

- The real reason you're the bottleneck in your own marketing (and why it's not a character flaw)

- Why the catch-22 of doing it yourself keeps you from ever setting up the systems that would free you

- The difference between help that takes tasks off your plate and help that actually holds the thinking

- What it looks like to hand off your marketing without losing your voice or your strategy

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 (00:09.41)

Welcome back to the Consistency Corner podcast. If you're watching this on YouTube, you're gonna see that we are looking a little different today. instead of sitting in my office where you normally will find me, I'm in my living room because you know what? My energy today was like I just needed a different change of scenery. You needed to mix it up. And this podcast is gonna be a little bit different because I'm sharing a little bit more.

Behind the scenes and stories from real life, but I promise you it's gonna connect back to marketing. So let's dive in. Right now, as you're listening to this, it's the last week of June. You're packing the cooler for the pool, sunscreen, goldfish, towels, all the things. And somewhere in the back of your mind, if you're a founder running your own marketing, there's a caption you started writing three days ago that you still haven't posted.

There's a newsletter you meant to send. There's a podcast you meant to record. That's summer for a lot of us. And I heard this over and over in our last mixer mixer and in conversations that I've been having all month long. And the reality that I've been living, here's the tension. You want the summer. You want to go to the pool. You want the evening outside instead of catching up on captions. You want to go on vacation and leave the laptop at home.

But you also want your marketing to keep its momentum. And you get stuck between the two options that both cost you something. You either white knuckle it and keep trying to do everything. Push through, burn yourself out, and then resent that you didn't get the summer you wanted. Or you drop things, do less, let stuff go. Either feel guilty now because you know you're hurting your own momentum, or

You make peace with it and then kick yourself in September when the pipeline isn't full and your engagement has fallen off of a cliff. And to be totally honest, I'm living both realities right now. I've tried white knuckling it, trying to squeeze in my own marketing activities through client work, staying up late.

Ruthie (02:19.873)

Getting up early, working on the weekends, and also while white knuckling it, I'm dropping things, I'm letting things go. I skipped a newsletter. I barely posted on social media in all of June. And part of me was like, it's okay, it's okay. I'm at capacity. I cannot take in any more clients right now.

Ruthie (02:41.665)

But something to think about with your pipeline and your marketing funnel that we're gonna get into a little bit more today is it's not about the next client. It's about the seeds we're planting today for the harvest we're gonna have in three months, six months, even a year. And when we let the momentum drop.

In three months, we are kicking ourselves for the fact that we let it drop because the results you're getting today are not from what you did last week. It's from what you did three months ago and six months ago and how that compounded and how those actions grew. So

I really want to talk a little bit more about that September version of you. The one who has come back from summer to a quiet inbox or a cold audience and feels like you have to like dig out of this hole that maybe you put yourself in. That's a real cost. And it's the one that nobody warns you about while you're choosing to be present with your kids or even with yourself.

Neither option is a good trade, right? So I want to talk about today why you keep getting forced into that trade in the first place. Because the real reason might not be what you think. Listen, something happened in my own house earlier this month, and it gets to the heart of this. So let me start there. And again, stick with me because you might think this is not about marketing, but you will in a minute.

So we have a standing appointment for my son Noah every couple of weeks. Normally it's something that my husband and Greg and I attend together. Though the honest truth is that I always go and sometimes he comes when his work allows. It's a telehealth appointment. But it's on both of our calendars. And in his head, he's thinking, if I can make it, I'll make it. If I can't, Ruthie's got it. Because I've got it. I've always got it.

Ruthie (04:37.463)

Well, this particular appointment fell in the first week of summer, and it was one that Noah needed to actually be at with us. And it was right before the week he was supposed to leave for sleepaway camp. So it really mattered to me that that this appointment happened on that specific day. Like I could not reschedule it. Then I got a client call booked at the exact same time. One that I could not move. It was a strategy call with the client's entire team. We I couldn't move it.

So about two weeks out, I asked Greg, Hey, can you work from home that morning and get Noah on this appointment, be there to support him through it? And he's like, sure, no problem.

I tried, you know, I tried to move even the this appointment with our our family appointment, but there was no other availability. So Greg handling it became the plan, right? The day before I checked in and I said, Hey, you're here tomorrow morning for Noah's appointment, right? And he looked at me and he's like, What? No. I have two back-to-back meetings. And I said, is is it not on your calendar? And he's like, Yeah, I mean it is, but but I don't always have to go.

And I looked at him and I said, do you remember the conversation we had about why I can't be there? Because I have a client call and you are gonna handle it. And he's like, No, I don't remember that. Now, he's a human. He made a mistake. He forgot one thing. We're not roasting him at the stake for it. And that's not the point here. That's not what hurt. What hurt is this. I was holding it. All of it. The appointment.

The timing, why this day mattered, the whole situation with our kid. And he didn't have to hold any of it because I did. And nobody could see that I was holding it. When Greg mows the grass, everybody sees that the grass got mowed. That's a finished lawn. Thank you for mowing the grass. It's visible. But nobody sees me holding this. There's no finished lawn.

Ruthie (06:36.343)

There's a thing that didn't fall through the cracks because I kept it from falling in my head silently for two weeks. And the only moment it became visible to anyone is the moment that it almost got dropped.

So why am I telling you this on a marketing podcast? Because this is exactly what holding your own marketing feels like. Anyone can see whether the post went up, whether the newsletter went out. If your VA posts for you, everyone can see that it's there. It's the mode lawn. It's visible. It's done.

What nobody sees underneath it is that you mapped out the customer journey. You thought through the checkpoints in your funnel, you built the content calendar that supports that journey so that the post isn't random. It's leading towards something. All of that thinking is invisible. But somebody still has to hold it. And if you're the one holding it,

It's heavy. All those decisions, so that one little post that gets seen, those decisions are invisible, but they are real. And it's hard to put those decisions down because it doesn't live on a task list or a calendar. It lives in your brain. So right there, that's the bottleneck. The bottleneck was never just the post getting done, it's the thinking.

Underneath the post and who is carrying that thinking. So let me name this directly because I think a lot of us are living inside of it without ever seeing the shape. Especially for us high-achieving women, we run on a belief that it's easier, faster, better if I do it myself. And you know what? For a while, that's true. You are faster. You know it best. It's more efficient in the moment.

Ruthie (08:35.553)

But here's the catch 22, and it's a brutal one. By the way, what does that phrase even mean? I need to look that up. I don't know why we say catch 22. Anyway, back to the point. you never take the time to set up the systems and the processes that would let someone else hold part of this. So it stays true that doing it yourself is faster, which means you never make time to set up the systems, which keeps it true forever.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. You're fast at doing it alone, precisely because you've never been able to stop and teach anyone else to help. And here's the part of this that trips people up when they finally do get help. You can hire someone and still be the bottleneck.

If you hire a VA who doesn't know the tasks or how to do them or the questions to ask or the strategy underneath, then you're still holding all of that thinking. You got help, but you're still the bottleneck. You added manage the VA to your plate and kept the heavy part for yourself. The help that gets you out of the bottleneck is help that can hold the thinking.

not only the tasks, holding the thinking. And I'll be totally transparent. I am in the middle of this right now on the operation side of my business. As I scale and build out my team, I'm not looking for a VA to do tasks. I'm looking for someone who can hold the thinking. Someone who when I say we're running a landing page project for a lead magnet for a client already knows the steps. Who's going to do them?

In what order they need to be done. So I'm not the one holding all 17 steps in my head. Because my zone of genius is not list the 17 steps and assignment and assign them. It's my zone of excellence, which if you've ever read The Big Leap, you know what I'm talking about here. A lot of us get stuck in our zone of excellence because we are we we're good at those things, we're good at a lot of things, but it's not actually my zone of genius. It's not where I'm the most valuable. I'm the most valuable.

Ruthie (10:49.335)

Having the strategic conversations, asking the right questions, doing the market research, mapping the big picture, knowing when to zoom in and when to zoom out. And the minute that I'm the one personally holding every single operational step, I become my own bottleneck in my business and for our clients. And that's exactly why my clients hire me to solve on their marketing side. Ultimately, they don't need a VA who

Hosts, they need a marketing director in their corner who holds the strategy so they can stop being the bottleneck and bottlenecking marketing in their own business, right? So if you're sitting in that summer tension from the top of the episode, white knuckling or dropping things, I want you to know that you are probably carrying more than one person was meant to carry while also as a mom holding the mental load of an entire family.

Being the bottleneck doesn't mean you're failing. It doesn't make you a control freak. I mean, maybe it does, but not always. It makes you the one person who is doing s the job of several. And all the thinking, living inside of one head, is starting to get full. There's only so much of you to go around. That's not a flaw in your character. That's math. Let's throw in also, you know, you're in your 40s and maybe your brain doesn't remember things the way it used to.

A lot of my friends and I are having conversations about perimenopause lately. I this is a side note, but you know, there's a lot of conversation about brain fog. And I was standing in my kitchen the other day and I was like, I don't have brain fog. I have brain confetti. Like I can see all the thoughts clearly. They don't feel foggy for me. They just feel like jumbled. Like there's a lot of them and they're just everywhere. Maybe that's perimenopause. I don't know. Maybe it's ADHD. I don't know. That's the point. But

What I'm saying is if your brain feels like that too, particularly around marketing your business, that's not a character flaw. It's math. And it's the whole reason that I do what I do, the whole reason that my brand is built around lightening the mental load of marketing is that the load is real even when it's invisible. Especially when it's invisible. So here's where I'll leave you. If you've been white knuckling,

Ruthie (13:17.793)

Your marketing through the start of summer, or you've been letting it slide and bracing for the September version of you who has to dig out. I want you to consider a third option that isn't what we've talked about already. What if you were not the one holding it? What if? What would that look like? That's the work we do inside the corner office. We become the marketing team that holds the thinking and the doing.

So you're not the bottleneck of your whole business. Strategy and execution sit under one roof carried by someone who is not you. And I'm not gonna pretend like this is the right fit for everyone listening. It might not be your season, and that's okay. But if some part of you exhaled a little bit at the words, what if you were not the one holding it? Then it's worth a deeper conversation. So book a call.

We don't have to do I'm not gonna give you a hard pitch, I promise. I just wanna have a real conversation about whether handing this off is the right step for your business right now and whether we're the right people to hand it to. Link is in the show notes to book a call with me. And I wanna celebrate you for getting to the point in your business that you're at capacity, that you have a lot of real work to do with your clients.

And your team, and I want to honor the fact that you have a lot going on in your brain to support your family and your household. So if it's time to stop being the marketing department, let's have a conversation. You don't have to spend the rest of your summer choosing between your momentum and your actual life. There is a version of you where you get to do both. So let's talk about this, whether or not it's now or in the fall, I'd love to have a conversation about helping you lighten the mental load of.

That's all I got for you today. I want you to go enjoy the pool, go enjoy your summer. I gotta go, you know, do some client work and then get the kiddo from camp and and all the things. But if this resonated, send me a DM on Instagram. I you know, I think it's important that we have conversations as female CEOs about this reality, this tension that we feel of holding all the things. Because when you're in your own head and you're in your own house and you're in your own office,

Ruthie (15:41.13)

It does feel like you're the only one doing it, but you're not, I promise. And if you want to have conversations with more women and not just me about the duality of being a mom and a CEO and balancing marketing and all the things, come to the next mixer. It's in August. The link is in the show notes to sign up. I'll see you soon. Chipper.