When you’re the person who knows every school schedule, every appointment, every household routine, or every detail of how your business works, it can become very difficult to step away and create space for anything else.
In this episode, I share why and how it is possible for you to move some of the load off of your shoulders. You’ll hear a story from early in my coaching career about a client who finally took his first vacation after realizing how much he needed to step away from his business. He had prepared everything, delegated responsibilities, and felt ready to leave, but there was one problem: he was the only person who had the key to the warehouse. How often are you the only one holding the key in your family or business?
Tune in this week to hear how I’ve created “spare keys” in my own family, including how my husband and I prepared for me to be away from our kids when they were younger. You’ll hear why letting someone else do something differently than you would is part of creating real support, how to identify the keys you’re currently holding, and why building systems that allow other people to step in can give you the time and space to build your business, reconnect with yourself, or simply do more of the things that make you feel alive.
If you're looking for the right environment to start your networking journey, look no further than my group, the Mom Entrepreneur’s Circle. Sign up here for mutual support, advice sharing, and the tools you need for both you and your business to thrive.
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why being capable of doing everything doesn’t mean you need to be the only person who knows how.
Why creating spare keys can help you step away without everything falling apart.
How to start moving responsibilities to other people without handing over everything at once.
Why you may need to get comfortable with other people doing things differently than you would.
How creating systems and sharing responsibility can give you more time and space for your business, family, and yourself.
The small steps you can take to start creating more freedom in your life.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
What if one of the biggest things keeping you from building the business and life you want isn't a lack of time but the fact that you're holding all of the keys? The keys to your household, your kid's schedules, and all the things that keep your family running. And you're the only one who has them. Today I want to talk through a story, a client story from early in my coaching career that completely changed how I think about responsibility, delegation, and freedom in entrepreneurship. Just because you can do it all doesn't mean you should be the only one who can.
Welcome to How to Quit Your Job, the podcast for moms ready to ditch the nine-to-five and build a life and business they love. I’m your host, Jenna Rykiel. Let’s go.
Hi, mom friends. This is episode 130 of the How to Quit Your Job podcast. Just like all other episodes, you can find amazing notes and resources and the transcript at jenna.coach/130 or any of the 130 episodes you want to check out.
Today I want to talk about a story from early on in my coaching career that has come up a couple of times in more recent coaching sessions with my current clients. And whenever that happens, I'm like, of course, I'm going to share that on the podcast too. I want to share it because I think there are some really important business implications with the story and this analogy in general, but also really important implications that I'll talk through for our personal lives as moms and as the CEOs of our households.
This story is all about keys. How many keys are you holding and who else may hold those spare keys? Let me jump into the story. Prior to coaching moms to leave corporate and leave their traditional nine-to-five roles, I actually coached leaders in corporations to prevent burnout. Leaders in corporations, leaders in entrepreneurship, this was part of my own transition out of corporate. My contracts were generally with corporations, though the story I'll talk about was with an entrepreneur, and the goal was to help leaders feel better, to give them tools to take care of themselves, and ultimately, corporations were paying me to retain their top talent. From a wholehearted place, they wanted to have their employees and leaders feeling better, but also from a cost-saving and intellectual property-saving perspective, they wanted to retain that talent.
And that was the first form of coaching I did within my business. That's the first niche I had developed. And it was really born out of my background in counseling, my knowing about burnout, my having a master's in counseling, my experience in the mental health field. I'd spent also over a decade in the corporate world, so I understood the demands, I understood the behaviors that leaders often showed, the amount of self-care or lack of self-care in those positions. And maybe most importantly, at that point in time in my career, my entire network was within corporations. So I was privy to so many conversations about burnout. And I had a lot of people that I could reach out to when I started my business to connect with big decision-makers in companies.
So all of these pieces added up to my initial coaching offer, which was helping leaders prevent burnout. And I share all of this to give you a little bit of background in how my business has evolved because I'm always preaching, not that this is what this episode is about, but you have to give your business time to evolve. You have to try different things, work with different people, say yes to certain niches to eventually get to the place that you are meant to be.
So in that time in my business early on, I had corporate contracts, but I also had individuals coming to me who knew about my coaching, the results that I got people, and they wanted that support for themselves. I had one guy who came to me as an entrepreneur, feeling really burnt out, somebody in my personal network. And so I took him on as a client. And I helped him develop the tools to manage the high levels of stress, the pressure, the demands, all the things, really for him to be able to take control and control what he could control to not feel so burnt out.
This person had developed a product. He had a warehouse for this product. He had multiple employees he was responsible for. And in coaching this person, it became really clear that he liked having control of the business. And with that came almost an ignorance towards what could be delegated or just this feeling that he always had to be there in order for the operation to run. Which is exhausting.
So we worked together through a lot of things that I still carry on and work with my own clients today on. Some of the same mind management tools, the time management tools, the same ones I use today, I used back when I was helping leaders to prevent burnout. They are really great tools for so many people in so many situations. And so me and this guy worked together on a lot of other pieces as well. And eventually, we got to a place where he finally felt capable of taking a vacation. He had never taken a vacation before. He had never stepped away from his business. He was always working. He just felt too much pressure.
He didn't have a family, and he didn't have a wife or any other relationships or things going on that took a lot of his time. So his business was everything. And he felt like it would completely fall apart if he stepped away even for a moment. And so he decided, finally, with my help, I'm going to take a vacation. I'm going to take a week off. I'm setting everybody up for success in the business. I'm going to delegate things. I'm going to let everyone know. I'm communicating properly, right? These are all kind of tools and skills we worked on together for him to feel comfortable taking that time off. And by the way, it took a lot of work for him to mentally get out of the habit of believing he could not step away from his work. It was so hard for him to give up control. He had very little trust that things would continue to operate smoothly without him.
But finally, the day came for this lovely human being to take his vacation. And he drove, I forget how far away, but he drove to some beautiful outdoor place in upstate New York, somewhere like the Adirondacks, where he could just relax, turn off his brain and recharge. He felt so good about finally, like setting himself up and his business up for success to do that. And the first morning of that vacation, he gets a call. And it's his warehouse manager. And the manager says, "Hey, where you at? I can't get into the warehouse. I don't have a key." My client was the only one in that company with a key to the warehouse. And this is such a powerful story, such a powerful analogy for the responsibility that we hold onto, for the amount that is on our plate that honestly no one else could do because we are the only ones with the key.
So unfortunately, my client had to get the key to his manager. I forget whether he sent it next-day shipping or whether he drove back however many hours to deliver it. But when he told me the story, I immediately knew it was one that I would need to keep in my back pocket for all of time. Because it's so powerful. You're not going to be able to recharge. You're not going to be able to delegate. You're not going to be able to get the help you deserve if there's only one key and you are the only one who holds that key.
This is super important in business, in the businesses that we are thinking about starting, actively starting, or have already started. It's also very important and relates to motherhood. So I want to talk about both. First, let's talk about business. As we're building a business, we're also developing systems and intellectual property and knowledge of those systems and back-end tools. We're learning every day. We're creating, we're rewiring our brain. We're developing our identity, our brand, our voice. And the further we get into that process, the more knowledge we're holding onto. The more we are developing this key that only we know how to use and only we hold onto.
If we aren't preparing to be able to pass some of that along to somebody else, whether that's somebody who helps with marketing or maybe a coach that we hire who works under us, like for my business, right, if I were to hire a second coach in my business, if we are not thinking about being able to pass responsibilities on, we can find ourselves in the exact same position as my client with the warehouse.
I have a client right now who has been developing and building her business for over 10 years, and she's finally in a place where she really wants to be able to pass it on to somebody else. She wants the legacy and the business itself to live on. It's such an amazing community and service for moms. But she's realizing that there's not enough in writing to be able to help someone else do the things she's doing. She's been holding all the keys to the business for 10 years. And now she's ready to sure things up and she's ready to pass it along so somebody else can take over, but there's just not enough documented. It's hard for her to even say how things work because after 10 years, it just comes so natural to her. It's really hard for somebody to step in and carry on to take that torch.
Now, this doesn't mean that we have to be super diligent, especially when we're starting a business about every single operating procedure and have everything written down from day one. There's plenty of things to worry about early on in your business. Please don't make that one of them. We don't have to worry about that piece the whole time, but we do want to make sure we're developing, where necessary, structures within our businesses that can be easily passed on.
A great example of this at the beginning of any business is that this might look like being able to pass a simple task to a VA. Something that you do every day, something that is easy for someone else to take over, or being able to pass a task to somebody who's helping with some element of the business, whether that be marketing or bookkeeping or sales, right, anything. It could just be that you think about the people that you want to hire and do I have systems in place to easily be able to update them on what the business is and how it operates and how we do things and what our values are.
That's one example of earlier on in the business, what you might be thinking about, not necessarily how does somebody else completely run my business, but how do I offload some of these things or how do I allow someone else to keep things running when I'm not here? Maybe you think about early on or maybe a year or two into your business hiring someone to do some of the lower-level tasks that you normally had to do so that you can step into a more strategic role.
It's really about making sure that as you build, you're not building something that can only function if you are there doing every single thing. Because just like my client all those years ago, sometimes it's literally about creating a spare key that other people can use to get into the warehouse. And then showing people how to open that warehouse and how to operate the warehouse without you, how to run things, how to do the work, so that you're not the only person who holds all of that knowledge.
Now, of course, if you're a solopreneur, like my business, I am the only coach in my business, right? So if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, there's no way that anybody else would be able to step in and support my clients in the way that I do. That's just not realistic in my company, in my business. And that's okay if that is the way that your business runs. But some of the examples I gave earlier are very real personal examples to me, places where I've struggled offloading things to a VA or to a marketing support person or even to my podcast team because there's not documentation or there's not ways to easily train people on how I operate.
And I always do tell my clients, like we could get hit by a bus today or tomorrow, and you want to be able to have the things continue on with your business if your business is set up like that. You want them to be able to keep going while you're on vacation or while you're on maternity leave. You want to be able to step away and have everything not fall apart. This is especially important for moms who are starting businesses because for so many of us, the whole reason we're building a business is to create more freedom and more flexibility, more ownership over our time. We want to be able to show up for our families in the ways that matter to us. And if we build a business where we're the only person who can do everything, where we're holding every single key, we are recreating the very thing that we're trying to get away from in our current nine-to-five.
So that's business, but the more I work with moms, the more I realize that this analogy is just as critical for how we run our households, the role we play within them. I was working with a client just the other day, one of the conversations that really inspired this episode, a client who has really been the head of her household in terms of every single kid's activity or appointment. She organizes everything, all the school stuff, getting the kids places. Her kids are a little bit older, middle school and high school. So she's been operating in this CEO role for a very long time. She makes sure everything is running smoothly for meals at the home, on weekends. She makes sure everyone gets where they need to go. She has been the project manager, the CEO, the everything for her family.
And she's done a really great job of it. But what we're finding out now is that as she wants to invite new meaning and purpose into her life by way of creating and building a business and tapping into pieces of herself that maybe have been dormant for a long time that she's ready to reignite, she's realizing that she holds all the keys. There are no spare keys in her family. And this can happen over time. We really develop the habit of just doing everything ourselves. And I want to be clear, 100%, we can do it faster, better, stronger, and more efficiently. Moms are the best, most capable ones to do all the things that we're doing.
I've said that before on this podcast, especially when talking about the mental load. Like we are superheroes and we are the best ones to handle all these things. We don't make as many mistakes. We do it efficiently. Our brains can hold these things. But just because we can do all the things and we are better at doing all the things, doesn't mean we should be the only ones who know how to do them. And it shouldn't take an emergency for us to realize that. It shouldn't take us getting hit by a bus or wanting a moment of reprieve or a weekend away, or even worse, needing to be somewhere for a family emergency, like maybe with our parents, and we have to leave our family for an unknown amount of time. And suddenly, we need to make it so that things don't fall apart before the need strikes. Everybody has a spare key before we need to use it, right? We have the spare key. It's under the mat so that when somebody's locked out, it's already there. They know how to get in.
Now, of course, this conversation about support for mothers is very dependent on your specific support systems. This is going to vary depending on how much support you have with your partner, what they're capable of, the support within your neighborhood, within your family network, your friends, the proximity of those people to you. But more importantly, we need to be thinking about creating spare keys for the people in our lives, the people who are potential helpers, so that they can operate when we're not there. So things don't completely fall apart when we aren't there.
I remember when my kids were younger, which is funny to say because they're only two and four, at the time. I think this was when Adly was not even one yet. I think he was like nine months old. And I was going to a conference in Texas, and it was my first time away from him. It was a long weekend. And as I was leaving, my husband and I looked at each other and we just said, "We've been training for this for nine months." It was such a relief for me as a mom leaving my nine-month-old to know that I didn't have to leave a list of what to do. I didn't have to send a bunch of reminders.
Of course, there was the occasional text message or reminder that I sent for certain things or questions that I answered. But my husband and I had been preparing, incidentally, for the household to operate in my absence. We had prepared for me leaving every single day for nine months. My husband knew all of the routines for the baby. He knew when to feed him, when he went down for a nap. It was something we had very much co-created together. And so when I left, there was really nothing that had to be discussed.
And that has carried on over the two or three years so that when I'm leaving, when I'm going on a trip, there's not a lot that has to be discussed about what needs to happen or how to take care of the kids or what to do and what not to do. There might be the occasional birthday party that I'll remind him about that's on the calendar or that he should reach out and make a plan for Saturday because it's going to be a long day and he should have a plan of an activity. But I don't have to make a spare key in that moment. My husband has the spare key. He knows how to get into the house. He knows how to operate everything. Obviously, he has a spare key to the house, but metaphorically, he knows how everything operates and works. And that has been something we've developed since day one.
I have made sure that my husband holds just as many keys as I hold. Now, that doesn't mean that everything is split perfectly evenly. There are still things that fall more into my responsibility, partly because my brain is structured to thrive with all of those responsibilities, whereas his struggles, his brain works different. And that doesn't mean also that when I go away, everything runs exactly how I would like it to run. In fact, quite the opposite, but everything doesn't fall apart.
The difference is that even if I'm the one who normally manages something, I'm not necessarily the only one who knows how to do it. And that's what I want you to think about. If you're a mom who's starting a business or you're thinking about starting a business, you are going to need space for that. You're going to need time to think, to create, to learn, to try things, to make mistakes, to figure things out. And if you're the only one holding all the keys at home, it's going to be really hard to start creating true space for yourself. Maybe it's not even just starting a business. Maybe it's space for you to take a pottery class or get together with other moms and women.
I know this mom that I've been working with, she has the opportunity once a week, every other week, to go and join a women's group. And she's feeling really like she can't even do that because it's such a critical time where the kids need to eat and they need to be prepared for the next day, and it's bedtime, and she really feels like she cannot miss that because other people in her household just are not trained, let's say. They have not had to hold any of the keys. And so even with things that aren't necessarily our business, but things that we just want to do to feel more alive, we need to be able to depend on some other people so that we don't have to be there all the time.
We can talk about time management all day. We can talk about creating better schedules and being more productive all day to create space for your business. But if you're still the only person who knows how everything works, you're still going to be the one everybody comes to. And it's going to take up a lot of time and space. And I don't want that for you. I want you to be the mom you want to be. I want you to show up for your family, but also to have your own life, identity, and hobbies. I want you to have mental space and physical space to do things that light you up outside of motherhood. And those things happen because you've created systems where other people hold keys and can lean in and unlock the warehouse when you're not there.
And this isn't about handing over every responsibility tomorrow. It's not about making some big change overnight and telling your partner that all of a sudden they're responsible for everything. It's about starting to notice where am I holding the only key? Maybe it's knowing all the kids' schedules. Maybe it's the morning routine. Maybe it's meals or appointments or making sure everybody has what they need for the week. Maybe it's in your business where there's a task you do every single day that somebody else could eventually take over, but you're the only one who knows how it operates.
I want you to think about what is one key that I could make a copy of that I could start letting someone else in, making sure that they know how this works, they know what the phone numbers are, they know what drop-off looks like, they know what the morning routines look like. What's just one key that you can start creating a spare for so that somebody else can unlock the warehouse when you're not there? What would need to happen for somebody else to be able to use that key? Okay, maybe it's a conversation. Maybe it's writing something down. Maybe it's letting somebody else do something differently than you would. Maybe it's getting comfortable with the fact that they're not going to do it exactly the way you would.
I remember when we moved to Denver, I gave my husband the responsibility of finding the new pediatrician and he's also responsible for all the paperwork. And a few months into the school year, right after winter break, we got an email from the school that Adley wouldn't be able to come back to school from winter break until we submitted his vaccination paperwork. And it was the Friday before school was going to start again. And we were so ready to get him back into the school routine. And my husband hadn't connected with the pediatrician back in Maryland to get the paperwork.
And I brought this to his attention and he had missed the emails and he also knew the severity of the situation. Instead of stepping in or getting angry with him that this clearly wasn't done efficiently, and now there was this risk that Adley would be home with us for even longer after a long winter break, I told my husband to figure it out and if it didn't get done, he would have to step in for childcare for Adley since this was his responsibility. This was a ball that he had dropped. I was CC'd on all the emails, so I knew things were happening, but I spent very little time or energy worrying about it. He had the key. I had given him that key. It was his to own. And he was going to figure it out or deal with the consequences until he did.
He ended up getting the paperwork in and Adley returned to school on Monday, so all went well. And I didn't waste any time or energy on the matter. Was it done how I would do it? No. Was it done efficiently and optimally and in a timely manner? No. And you know what? That's okay. Chris, my husband, holds many keys and spare keys in our life. And I hold many keys and spare keys too. And I have to be okay with the keys he holds and how he does those things, otherwise, I'm creating a world where he never learns from his mistakes or truly understands how things operate.
When we as moms step in and take over because we can do it better, we are enabling the people we want to depend on to help us. We are enabling them to throw away their own spare keys and continue to lean on us for everything. At the end of the day, even though my client had done so much to prepare for his vacation, he still held the only key to the warehouse. I don't want you to build a business or a household that requires you to be available every single moment just to keep things running.
So this week, I want you to take a look at your life and your business or your potential business and ask yourself, how many keys am I holding? And who else has a spare if anyone? The goal isn't to become so good at holding everything together that nobody else can. The goal is to create a life and a business that gives you the freedom that you started this whole journey for in the first place. If you know you're holding onto all the keys and you are listening and thinking this is going to be impossible and so much work to create some spare keys for my partner or my in-laws or my kids, I want you to also check out episode five. It's called Creating Space in Your Schedule with These Four Simple Steps. It gives more strategies around this topic of really freeing ourselves from being the one who holds all the responsibility.
And trust me, building these systems in our business and household so that we have time and space for some of the things that make us feel alive is really hard work. Especially if your kids are older and you've spent their entire lives in charge of all the things. This is part of the work that we do in business coaching, figuring out how to make those spare keys, who to give them to, and how to set up your life and business so that you can spend time and energy on things for you. It's such important work in the grand scheme of building a life you love. It's often impossible to have time and energy for new things, starting and building a business or reconnecting with a past hobby or even consistently working out when everything falls apart without you. We have to create better systems so you can get space that you need for the things that will have you feeling alive again.
If you're eager for more of that space for yourself, especially if you want to start that business and maybe leave your nine-to-five, or start a business so that as a stay-at-home mom when the kiddos are in school and you have more time, you'll have a foundation for creating income but still have the flexibility, I want you to go to the show notes, jenna.coach/130, check out my work, schedule a consultation to see if coaching is the best option for support for you. At the very least, do yourself a favor and follow the podcast so that every week you are getting more insights and tips on how to create a business and life you love. I am here for you.
Okay, mom friends, I will see you next week.
Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of How to Quit Your Job: A Mom’s Guide to Creating a Life and Business You Love. If you want to learn more about how I can help you stop making excuses and start making moves, head on over to www.jenna.coach. I’ll see you next week.
Welcome to How to Quit Your Job, the podcast for moms ready to ditch the nine-to-five and build a life and business they love. I’m your host, Jenna Rykiel. Let’s go.
Hi, mom friends. This is episode 130 of the How to Quit Your Job podcast. Just like all other episodes, you can find amazing notes and resources and the transcript at jenna.coach/130 or any of the 130 episodes you want to check out.
Today I want to talk about a story from early on in my coaching career that has come up a couple of times in more recent coaching sessions with my current clients. And whenever that happens, I'm like, of course, I'm going to share that on the podcast too. I want to share it because I think there are some really important business implications with the story and this analogy in general, but also really important implications that I'll talk through for our personal lives as moms and as the CEOs of our households.
This story is all about keys. How many keys are you holding and who else may hold those spare keys? Let me jump into the story. Prior to coaching moms to leave corporate and leave their traditional nine-to-five roles, I actually coached leaders in corporations to prevent burnout. Leaders in corporations, leaders in entrepreneurship, this was part of my own transition out of corporate. My contracts were generally with corporations, though the story I'll talk about was with an entrepreneur, and the goal was to help leaders feel better, to give them tools to take care of themselves, and ultimately, corporations were paying me to retain their top talent. From a wholehearted place, they wanted to have their employees and leaders feeling better, but also from a cost-saving and intellectual property-saving perspective, they wanted to retain that talent.
And that was the first form of coaching I did within my business. That's the first niche I had developed. And it was really born out of my background in counseling, my knowing about burnout, my having a master's in counseling, my experience in the mental health field. I'd spent also over a decade in the corporate world, so I understood the demands, I understood the behaviors that leaders often showed, the amount of self-care or lack of self-care in those positions. And maybe most importantly, at that point in time in my career, my entire network was within corporations. So I was privy to so many conversations about burnout. And I had a lot of people that I could reach out to when I started my business to connect with big decision-makers in companies.
So all of these pieces added up to my initial coaching offer, which was helping leaders prevent burnout. And I share all of this to give you a little bit of background in how my business has evolved because I'm always preaching, not that this is what this episode is about, but you have to give your business time to evolve. You have to try different things, work with different people, say yes to certain niches to eventually get to the place that you are meant to be.
So in that time in my business early on, I had corporate contracts, but I also had individuals coming to me who knew about my coaching, the results that I got people, and they wanted that support for themselves. I had one guy who came to me as an entrepreneur, feeling really burnt out, somebody in my personal network. And so I took him on as a client. And I helped him develop the tools to manage the high levels of stress, the pressure, the demands, all the things, really for him to be able to take control and control what he could control to not feel so burnt out.
This person had developed a product. He had a warehouse for this product. He had multiple employees he was responsible for. And in coaching this person, it became really clear that he liked having control of the business. And with that came almost an ignorance towards what could be delegated or just this feeling that he always had to be there in order for the operation to run. Which is exhausting.
So we worked together through a lot of things that I still carry on and work with my own clients today on. Some of the same mind management tools, the time management tools, the same ones I use today, I used back when I was helping leaders to prevent burnout. They are really great tools for so many people in so many situations. And so me and this guy worked together on a lot of other pieces as well. And eventually, we got to a place where he finally felt capable of taking a vacation. He had never taken a vacation before. He had never stepped away from his business. He was always working. He just felt too much pressure.
He didn't have a family, and he didn't have a wife or any other relationships or things going on that took a lot of his time. So his business was everything. And he felt like it would completely fall apart if he stepped away even for a moment. And so he decided, finally, with my help, I'm going to take a vacation. I'm going to take a week off. I'm setting everybody up for success in the business. I'm going to delegate things. I'm going to let everyone know. I'm communicating properly, right? These are all kind of tools and skills we worked on together for him to feel comfortable taking that time off. And by the way, it took a lot of work for him to mentally get out of the habit of believing he could not step away from his work. It was so hard for him to give up control. He had very little trust that things would continue to operate smoothly without him.
But finally, the day came for this lovely human being to take his vacation. And he drove, I forget how far away, but he drove to some beautiful outdoor place in upstate New York, somewhere like the Adirondacks, where he could just relax, turn off his brain and recharge. He felt so good about finally, like setting himself up and his business up for success to do that. And the first morning of that vacation, he gets a call. And it's his warehouse manager. And the manager says, "Hey, where you at? I can't get into the warehouse. I don't have a key." My client was the only one in that company with a key to the warehouse. And this is such a powerful story, such a powerful analogy for the responsibility that we hold onto, for the amount that is on our plate that honestly no one else could do because we are the only ones with the key.
So unfortunately, my client had to get the key to his manager. I forget whether he sent it next-day shipping or whether he drove back however many hours to deliver it. But when he told me the story, I immediately knew it was one that I would need to keep in my back pocket for all of time. Because it's so powerful. You're not going to be able to recharge. You're not going to be able to delegate. You're not going to be able to get the help you deserve if there's only one key and you are the only one who holds that key.
This is super important in business, in the businesses that we are thinking about starting, actively starting, or have already started. It's also very important and relates to motherhood. So I want to talk about both. First, let's talk about business. As we're building a business, we're also developing systems and intellectual property and knowledge of those systems and back-end tools. We're learning every day. We're creating, we're rewiring our brain. We're developing our identity, our brand, our voice. And the further we get into that process, the more knowledge we're holding onto. The more we are developing this key that only we know how to use and only we hold onto.
If we aren't preparing to be able to pass some of that along to somebody else, whether that's somebody who helps with marketing or maybe a coach that we hire who works under us, like for my business, right, if I were to hire a second coach in my business, if we are not thinking about being able to pass responsibilities on, we can find ourselves in the exact same position as my client with the warehouse.
I have a client right now who has been developing and building her business for over 10 years, and she's finally in a place where she really wants to be able to pass it on to somebody else. She wants the legacy and the business itself to live on. It's such an amazing community and service for moms. But she's realizing that there's not enough in writing to be able to help someone else do the things she's doing. She's been holding all the keys to the business for 10 years. And now she's ready to sure things up and she's ready to pass it along so somebody else can take over, but there's just not enough documented. It's hard for her to even say how things work because after 10 years, it just comes so natural to her. It's really hard for somebody to step in and carry on to take that torch.
Now, this doesn't mean that we have to be super diligent, especially when we're starting a business about every single operating procedure and have everything written down from day one. There's plenty of things to worry about early on in your business. Please don't make that one of them. We don't have to worry about that piece the whole time, but we do want to make sure we're developing, where necessary, structures within our businesses that can be easily passed on.
A great example of this at the beginning of any business is that this might look like being able to pass a simple task to a VA. Something that you do every day, something that is easy for someone else to take over, or being able to pass a task to somebody who's helping with some element of the business, whether that be marketing or bookkeeping or sales, right, anything. It could just be that you think about the people that you want to hire and do I have systems in place to easily be able to update them on what the business is and how it operates and how we do things and what our values are.
That's one example of earlier on in the business, what you might be thinking about, not necessarily how does somebody else completely run my business, but how do I offload some of these things or how do I allow someone else to keep things running when I'm not here? Maybe you think about early on or maybe a year or two into your business hiring someone to do some of the lower-level tasks that you normally had to do so that you can step into a more strategic role.
It's really about making sure that as you build, you're not building something that can only function if you are there doing every single thing. Because just like my client all those years ago, sometimes it's literally about creating a spare key that other people can use to get into the warehouse. And then showing people how to open that warehouse and how to operate the warehouse without you, how to run things, how to do the work, so that you're not the only person who holds all of that knowledge.
Now, of course, if you're a solopreneur, like my business, I am the only coach in my business, right? So if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, there's no way that anybody else would be able to step in and support my clients in the way that I do. That's just not realistic in my company, in my business. And that's okay if that is the way that your business runs. But some of the examples I gave earlier are very real personal examples to me, places where I've struggled offloading things to a VA or to a marketing support person or even to my podcast team because there's not documentation or there's not ways to easily train people on how I operate.
And I always do tell my clients, like we could get hit by a bus today or tomorrow, and you want to be able to have the things continue on with your business if your business is set up like that. You want them to be able to keep going while you're on vacation or while you're on maternity leave. You want to be able to step away and have everything not fall apart. This is especially important for moms who are starting businesses because for so many of us, the whole reason we're building a business is to create more freedom and more flexibility, more ownership over our time. We want to be able to show up for our families in the ways that matter to us. And if we build a business where we're the only person who can do everything, where we're holding every single key, we are recreating the very thing that we're trying to get away from in our current nine-to-five.
So that's business, but the more I work with moms, the more I realize that this analogy is just as critical for how we run our households, the role we play within them. I was working with a client just the other day, one of the conversations that really inspired this episode, a client who has really been the head of her household in terms of every single kid's activity or appointment. She organizes everything, all the school stuff, getting the kids places. Her kids are a little bit older, middle school and high school. So she's been operating in this CEO role for a very long time. She makes sure everything is running smoothly for meals at the home, on weekends. She makes sure everyone gets where they need to go. She has been the project manager, the CEO, the everything for her family.
And she's done a really great job of it. But what we're finding out now is that as she wants to invite new meaning and purpose into her life by way of creating and building a business and tapping into pieces of herself that maybe have been dormant for a long time that she's ready to reignite, she's realizing that she holds all the keys. There are no spare keys in her family. And this can happen over time. We really develop the habit of just doing everything ourselves. And I want to be clear, 100%, we can do it faster, better, stronger, and more efficiently. Moms are the best, most capable ones to do all the things that we're doing.
I've said that before on this podcast, especially when talking about the mental load. Like we are superheroes and we are the best ones to handle all these things. We don't make as many mistakes. We do it efficiently. Our brains can hold these things. But just because we can do all the things and we are better at doing all the things, doesn't mean we should be the only ones who know how to do them. And it shouldn't take an emergency for us to realize that. It shouldn't take us getting hit by a bus or wanting a moment of reprieve or a weekend away, or even worse, needing to be somewhere for a family emergency, like maybe with our parents, and we have to leave our family for an unknown amount of time. And suddenly, we need to make it so that things don't fall apart before the need strikes. Everybody has a spare key before we need to use it, right? We have the spare key. It's under the mat so that when somebody's locked out, it's already there. They know how to get in.
Now, of course, this conversation about support for mothers is very dependent on your specific support systems. This is going to vary depending on how much support you have with your partner, what they're capable of, the support within your neighborhood, within your family network, your friends, the proximity of those people to you. But more importantly, we need to be thinking about creating spare keys for the people in our lives, the people who are potential helpers, so that they can operate when we're not there. So things don't completely fall apart when we aren't there.
I remember when my kids were younger, which is funny to say because they're only two and four, at the time. I think this was when Adly was not even one yet. I think he was like nine months old. And I was going to a conference in Texas, and it was my first time away from him. It was a long weekend. And as I was leaving, my husband and I looked at each other and we just said, "We've been training for this for nine months." It was such a relief for me as a mom leaving my nine-month-old to know that I didn't have to leave a list of what to do. I didn't have to send a bunch of reminders.
Of course, there was the occasional text message or reminder that I sent for certain things or questions that I answered. But my husband and I had been preparing, incidentally, for the household to operate in my absence. We had prepared for me leaving every single day for nine months. My husband knew all of the routines for the baby. He knew when to feed him, when he went down for a nap. It was something we had very much co-created together. And so when I left, there was really nothing that had to be discussed.
And that has carried on over the two or three years so that when I'm leaving, when I'm going on a trip, there's not a lot that has to be discussed about what needs to happen or how to take care of the kids or what to do and what not to do. There might be the occasional birthday party that I'll remind him about that's on the calendar or that he should reach out and make a plan for Saturday because it's going to be a long day and he should have a plan of an activity. But I don't have to make a spare key in that moment. My husband has the spare key. He knows how to get into the house. He knows how to operate everything. Obviously, he has a spare key to the house, but metaphorically, he knows how everything operates and works. And that has been something we've developed since day one.
I have made sure that my husband holds just as many keys as I hold. Now, that doesn't mean that everything is split perfectly evenly. There are still things that fall more into my responsibility, partly because my brain is structured to thrive with all of those responsibilities, whereas his struggles, his brain works different. And that doesn't mean also that when I go away, everything runs exactly how I would like it to run. In fact, quite the opposite, but everything doesn't fall apart.
The difference is that even if I'm the one who normally manages something, I'm not necessarily the only one who knows how to do it. And that's what I want you to think about. If you're a mom who's starting a business or you're thinking about starting a business, you are going to need space for that. You're going to need time to think, to create, to learn, to try things, to make mistakes, to figure things out. And if you're the only one holding all the keys at home, it's going to be really hard to start creating true space for yourself. Maybe it's not even just starting a business. Maybe it's space for you to take a pottery class or get together with other moms and women.
I know this mom that I've been working with, she has the opportunity once a week, every other week, to go and join a women's group. And she's feeling really like she can't even do that because it's such a critical time where the kids need to eat and they need to be prepared for the next day, and it's bedtime, and she really feels like she cannot miss that because other people in her household just are not trained, let's say. They have not had to hold any of the keys. And so even with things that aren't necessarily our business, but things that we just want to do to feel more alive, we need to be able to depend on some other people so that we don't have to be there all the time.
We can talk about time management all day. We can talk about creating better schedules and being more productive all day to create space for your business. But if you're still the only person who knows how everything works, you're still going to be the one everybody comes to. And it's going to take up a lot of time and space. And I don't want that for you. I want you to be the mom you want to be. I want you to show up for your family, but also to have your own life, identity, and hobbies. I want you to have mental space and physical space to do things that light you up outside of motherhood. And those things happen because you've created systems where other people hold keys and can lean in and unlock the warehouse when you're not there.
And this isn't about handing over every responsibility tomorrow. It's not about making some big change overnight and telling your partner that all of a sudden they're responsible for everything. It's about starting to notice where am I holding the only key? Maybe it's knowing all the kids' schedules. Maybe it's the morning routine. Maybe it's meals or appointments or making sure everybody has what they need for the week. Maybe it's in your business where there's a task you do every single day that somebody else could eventually take over, but you're the only one who knows how it operates.
I want you to think about what is one key that I could make a copy of that I could start letting someone else in, making sure that they know how this works, they know what the phone numbers are, they know what drop-off looks like, they know what the morning routines look like. What's just one key that you can start creating a spare for so that somebody else can unlock the warehouse when you're not there? What would need to happen for somebody else to be able to use that key? Okay, maybe it's a conversation. Maybe it's writing something down. Maybe it's letting somebody else do something differently than you would. Maybe it's getting comfortable with the fact that they're not going to do it exactly the way you would.
I remember when we moved to Denver, I gave my husband the responsibility of finding the new pediatrician and he's also responsible for all the paperwork. And a few months into the school year, right after winter break, we got an email from the school that Adley wouldn't be able to come back to school from winter break until we submitted his vaccination paperwork. And it was the Friday before school was going to start again. And we were so ready to get him back into the school routine. And my husband hadn't connected with the pediatrician back in Maryland to get the paperwork.
And I brought this to his attention and he had missed the emails and he also knew the severity of the situation. Instead of stepping in or getting angry with him that this clearly wasn't done efficiently, and now there was this risk that Adley would be home with us for even longer after a long winter break, I told my husband to figure it out and if it didn't get done, he would have to step in for childcare for Adley since this was his responsibility. This was a ball that he had dropped. I was CC'd on all the emails, so I knew things were happening, but I spent very little time or energy worrying about it. He had the key. I had given him that key. It was his to own. And he was going to figure it out or deal with the consequences until he did.
He ended up getting the paperwork in and Adley returned to school on Monday, so all went well. And I didn't waste any time or energy on the matter. Was it done how I would do it? No. Was it done efficiently and optimally and in a timely manner? No. And you know what? That's okay. Chris, my husband, holds many keys and spare keys in our life. And I hold many keys and spare keys too. And I have to be okay with the keys he holds and how he does those things, otherwise, I'm creating a world where he never learns from his mistakes or truly understands how things operate.
When we as moms step in and take over because we can do it better, we are enabling the people we want to depend on to help us. We are enabling them to throw away their own spare keys and continue to lean on us for everything. At the end of the day, even though my client had done so much to prepare for his vacation, he still held the only key to the warehouse. I don't want you to build a business or a household that requires you to be available every single moment just to keep things running.
So this week, I want you to take a look at your life and your business or your potential business and ask yourself, how many keys am I holding? And who else has a spare if anyone? The goal isn't to become so good at holding everything together that nobody else can. The goal is to create a life and a business that gives you the freedom that you started this whole journey for in the first place. If you know you're holding onto all the keys and you are listening and thinking this is going to be impossible and so much work to create some spare keys for my partner or my in-laws or my kids, I want you to also check out episode five. It's called Creating Space in Your Schedule with These Four Simple Steps. It gives more strategies around this topic of really freeing ourselves from being the one who holds all the responsibility.
And trust me, building these systems in our business and household so that we have time and space for some of the things that make us feel alive is really hard work. Especially if your kids are older and you've spent their entire lives in charge of all the things. This is part of the work that we do in business coaching, figuring out how to make those spare keys, who to give them to, and how to set up your life and business so that you can spend time and energy on things for you. It's such important work in the grand scheme of building a life you love. It's often impossible to have time and energy for new things, starting and building a business or reconnecting with a past hobby or even consistently working out when everything falls apart without you. We have to create better systems so you can get space that you need for the things that will have you feeling alive again.
If you're eager for more of that space for yourself, especially if you want to start that business and maybe leave your nine-to-five, or start a business so that as a stay-at-home mom when the kiddos are in school and you have more time, you'll have a foundation for creating income but still have the flexibility, I want you to go to the show notes, jenna.coach/130, check out my work, schedule a consultation to see if coaching is the best option for support for you. At the very least, do yourself a favor and follow the podcast so that every week you are getting more insights and tips on how to create a business and life you love. I am here for you.
Okay, mom friends, I will see you next week.
Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of How to Quit Your Job: A Mom’s Guide to Creating a Life and Business You Love. If you want to learn more about how I can help you stop making excuses and start making moves, head on over to www.jenna.coach. I’ll see you next week.
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