The Business Rules You Should Break If You're a Mom

I love rules. I’m a Capricorn. I like structure. I like knowing what I’m supposed to do and then doing it. But after 11 years of entrepreneurship, I’ve learned something really important: some business rules are meant to be broken. Especially when you’re a mother building a business.

Because there is no shortage of people on the internet telling us exactly what we should be doing. Post every day. Show up on Stories. Batch your content on Sundays. Launch four times a year. Build an evergreen funnel. Wake up at 5 a.m. Do your deep work before the kids wake up.

Never work weekends. Be consistent. Get on video. Niche down. Scale up. Hire before you’re ready—but definitely don’t hire before you can afford it.

Are you tired yet? Because I am. And the problem isn’t just that there are approximately 4,000 rules we’re supposed to follow at any given time. It’s that half of them contradict each other.

 

 

We hear a successful person tell us what worked for them and somewhere along the way, their strategy becomes a rule. Then we try to follow it, and when it doesn’t work, we assume we’re the problem. I’m not disciplined enough. I’m not consistent enough. Everyone else can manage this—why can’t I?

But here’s what I want you to consider: almost every business rule you’re exhausting yourself trying to follow was created for somebody with a different life, a different season, a different bank account and, very often, a completely different business model. Maybe “post every day” worked beautifully for someone whose entire business was their personal brand and who had hours every day to create content. Maybe a 5 a.m. morning routine works for someone who isn’t responsible for getting kids out the door. Maybe launching four times a year is perfect for someone selling a digital course to a cold audience.

That doesn’t make their strategy bad. It just might make it wrong for you. So before you blindly follow another piece of business advice, I want you to put it through a little test.

 

 

This is the first question I ask myself. Look at the person giving you the advice and look at the context around it. Does their life look anything like yours? Do they have kids? A team? A partner? A completely different business model? A giant audience? Twenty hours a week more childcare than you do? Context matters.

I once sat in a mastermind where a couple talked about the 45-minute gratitude walks they took together twice a day and encouraged the rest of us to do the same. I remember leaning over to the person beside me and asking, “Do they have kids?” Nope. Okay. Suddenly this makes a lot more sense.

Again, their routine wasn’t wrong. But a rule optimized for a life that isn’t yours isn’t a standard you’re failing to meet. It’s just a mismatch. And I think that distinction matters, especially for founder moms who are often trying to fit business strategies built around a level of availability we simply don’t have into already very full lives.

 

 

This is probably my favourite question because it’s where we get to stop blindly following rules and start thinking like CEOs. Underneath most business advice is a principle that probably makes sense. The specific strategy someone is teaching you is simply one way of honouring that principle.

Take the advice to post on social media every day. Why does that rule exist? Because businesses need to stay top of mind with potential buyers. That’s the principle. But is posting every single day the only way to accomplish it? Of course not. Maybe you send one really good email every week. Maybe you have a podcast. Maybe you build relationships in the DMs. Maybe you host an incredible monthly event.

The same goes for launching four times a year. The principle behind that rule might be creating predictable revenue and urgency. Great. Could you create predictable revenue through retainers? An always-open application? A waitlist? One big annual launch and an evergreen offer the rest of the year? Absolutely.

Once you understand what a rule is trying to protect, you can ask a much better question: What’s another way I could accomplish the same thing that actually works for my life? This is something I’ve done throughout my career. I consider myself an excellent modifier, and learning how to modify the “rules” without losing what they’re intended to accomplish has created so much more ease in my business.

 

 

Every strategy has a cost, and I think we forget to calculate that cost when we’re following advice simply because we’ve been told it’s what we’re supposed to do. Let’s say posting every day takes you an hour. That’s five to seven hours a week—basically an entire workday.

What else could you do with that time? Could you spend it having sales conversations? Serving your clients? Improving your offer? Creating something that actually generates revenue? Or—and stay with me here—could you do nothing? Maybe you’re running on fumes and getting one afternoon back every week is the thing that keeps you from burning your entire business to the ground.

That’s a legitimate business consideration too. Being a CEO means looking at the trade-off, understanding that every decision has a cost, and deciding whether the return is actually worth it. Breaking a rule may come with a downside, but following it has a cost too.

 

 

There’s one important caveat here: strategic rule-breaking needs a replacement. Saying, “I’m not posting every day anymore. Instead, I’m sending one email every Thursday and publishing a podcast every week,” is a strategy. Saying, “I’m sick of Instagram, so I’m disappearing,” isn’t.

You don’t get to hide in business and then wonder why no one is buying. If social media isn’t where you want to build visibility, that’s completely fine, but you still need somewhere to create authority, build relationships and give people an opportunity to know you. Your business still needs you to do the things that allow you to be seen, make sales and grow—they just don’t have to be done in the exact way somebody else prescribed.

That’s really the distinction I want you to make: keep the principle, break the rule, and replace it with something that works better.

 

 

Here’s what I want you to do this week. Write down all the rules you’re currently following in your business—the things you’ve decided you have to do because someone, somewhere, told you that’s how successful businesses operate. Don’t edit the list. Just get them all out.

Then find the one you resent the most. There’s a pretty good chance it’s also costing you the most. Run it through the three questions: Who wrote it and for what life? What is it actually protecting? What is it costing me?

Then figure out how you could protect the same principle in a way that works better for you, and break the original rule for 30 days. See what happens. I’m willing to bet your business doesn’t collapse. In fact, you might discover that the rule you’ve been working so hard to follow was never yours in the first place.

Being a mother isn’t something you have to work around while you build your business. It’s a constraint that can actually force you to find a better way to build it. We don’t need to follow somebody else’s playbook. We get to rewrite the rules so they work for us.