An honest reflection and practical strategies on juggling motherhood and business

Aug 27

What's this episode of the lionhearted ceo podcast about?

If you've ever felt like you're trying to spin plates while riding a unicycle when it comes to balancing motherhood and business - I can empathise! In this episode, I'm spilling the tea on how I (attempt to) run a thriving business while raising two daughters (and dealing with the occasional broken arm!).

Here's what I'm dishing up:

The game-changing book that transformed how my husband and I divide household tasks (hint: it's not about 50/50, it's about ownership!)
Why I've had to stop working with clients in the US (and how setting boundaries has saved my sanity)
The systems and automations that keep my business running smoother than a well-oiled tea trolley
How I've structured my work week to accommodate school runs, poorly kids, and everything in between

I'm no expert, but I'm sharing the practical strategies that have helped me to create a business that supports my life, not the other way around.

Whether you're a mum juggling toddlers and Zoom calls, have school age kids and are working with short days or older children who need endless taxiing around, this episode is packed with real-talk and actionable tips.

Ready to transform your work-life juggle from a chaotic circus act to a (mostly) graceful ballet? Grab your favourite biscuits, and let's dive in!

Hi! I’m your host Sophie Griffiths, a Meta ads expert and business growth strategist.

The LionHearted CEO podcast is designed for impatiently ambitious women who are ready to scale and often juggling motherhood alongside their thriving online businesses in coaching, course creation, or service-based business.

If you enjoy the podcast, here are some ways you can continue the conversation:

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Love Instagram? Click here to watch a video I made on the Warm audience trap (hint, it's something almost every client struggles with!)More of a LinkedIn fan? I'm there too! Come and follow me here: Sophie Griffiths

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Read the transcript:

NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool. Please forgive any typos or errors.

[00:00:00] Hello and a big welcome to Lionhearted CEO, the podcast for unapologetically, impatiently ambitious women who know they want to stop being the bottleneck in their business and become the Lionhearted CEO they know they are meant to be. I'm Sophie Griffiths, a tea enthusiast, marketing and Metis ad specialist and firm believer.

The chocolate should never be kept in the fridge. Join me every Tuesday and Thursday for bold, imperfect, fun approach to marketing and scaling your business without burning out every few months. We'll dive into practical strategies and have inspirational conversations that will support you to create a thriving, sustainable business that brings you joy as well as financial freedom.

Okay, let's jump in. 

Hello and welcome to this week's episode. Now today's a slightly different episode. I thought I might delve into the world of juggling motherhood. I am running a thriving business. It's actually stems from a conversation I was [00:01:00] having with a client. Who's also a friend. Earlier in the week

and we were talking about the. Ways we've had to adapt our businesses. 

It actually stemmed from the fact that I was in a group program, a three week. Low ticket group program. Actually all about mindset and stepping into energy. And I joined it. Not really looking too much into it as a person I've ever worked with before. They're great. Everyone in there is great. However, I would say, I don't think any of them are mothers. And the energy and the difference in how they manage their businesses and what their priorities are. Was just really stark to me. 

And it's not to say that it's better or worse. In fact, I have never run my own business when I haven't been a mother. That's in itself, obviously massively shaped how I've set up and grown my business. For those of you that don't know my backstory. I was made redundant while I was on maternity leave with my first child. 

So I started working for myself when I had one, a one year old. She just turned one. 

I have a seven, almost eight year old and [00:02:00] a just turned four year old. 

So I've navigated the last seven years. Working for myself. With all sorts of different phases of nursery and pregnancy and postnatal. My youngest is just about to start school. So I have absolutely no doubt, but it's going to bring a whole nother level to our lives, having to at school and not having those lovely long nursery hours. 

However, what I ended up talking about with my friend was actually, we have quite a lot of strategies in place that we use day to day that maybe. We hadn't really appreciated how amazing it was that we could have in our business, how great it was that we've put them into place and how much they help our lives. 

I thought, you know what? Maybe I'll just share it with you, even if it just sparks inspiration, solidarity. Just seeing what it's like. Because actually people always say to me like, oh my God, I don't know how you do it. 

I tell you to how you get so much done and. What part time? And you've got kids and you doing so much all the time. I mean, the reality is , my life . Is carnage often in the background, but there's often a resolve the fact that I have [00:03:00] ADHD. And we have a lot going on at home and I need a business really that supports that. 

I talk about it a lot and I know I harp on about it, but having a business that's powered by ads that has a team to support me that has systems and foundations in place. Has been a drive of mine for so long because I have so much going on at home. Just last week, my four year old broke her arm. My seven-year-old has huge anxiety. 

We think it's likely she has ADHD and probably autism as well. She's really struggling at the moment. She's about to start a new school. She doesn't know anybody at the new school. 

She's really needs me emotionally. 

Which means that I have to make sure that stuff is going on in the business. But, you know, full disclosure, we need my income. It's not a case of being able to be like, okay, we've got a lot going on at home. So I was going to dial down the business. Financially. 

We need the income. And honestly, mentally I need to be running this business, but I need it to support me mentally, not drain me. For the last seven years I have had Fridays off, so I've always had Fridays with the girls.

First Eliza, my oldest and then hopefully my youngest. 

I've [00:04:00] never worked full time since I've worked for myself. I have worked various formations of one day, two days, three days. I now currently work four days. I have two long days and two short days, long days are when my husband works from home two days a week. I can work if I wanted to like eight till five ish. And then two short days where I do the drop-off and the pickups for the girls. 

It's about half nine till half, two ish. It was approximately about 28 hours a week. I work in terms of actual time. At my desk in the daytime. Now in the past, I have. Hugely lent on working in the evenings, working at the weekends. Because often that is genuinely not enough time and that's been a massive goal of mine. Is to bring in systems, team, et cetera. 

So I don't have to do that because I do find it hugely draining. To work beyond those hours with all the kind of additional motherhood stuff. The way I'm going to structure this podcast today is talk about what we have in place at home. What we have in place in the business in terms of organizing my time and then what I have in place in terms of automations and systems from like a really practical perspective. [00:05:00] The first thing I would highly recommend. If you have a partner that you have children with. It's to read the book fair play. It is. A really brilliant book that actually totally transformed my husband and I was relationship. In terms of how we organized, who does what and how we do it. 

So essentially the concept is. That mothers tend to be the default parents. We tend to carry, most of the unseen jobs. And on top of me working, I was doing, all the mental load. What encourages you to do it gives you quite a structure. I'd like lists and headings and all sorts, but essentially it encourages you to write down every single thing, every single piece of mental load of course your entire lives. Everything from the house to the kids to school, to. Exercise to food, shopping anything to do with pets holidays. The garden, literally everything. 

And you write everything down and it gives you loads and loads of prompts. But the concept is that every single thing that you have on that list has to be [00:06:00] allocated to somebody. And that person who is allocated it has to do the job and to end. For example, let's say I owned children's parties. The end to end job would be accepting the invites or going back to the parent and saying, we're going to go, we're checking if we can go going back and saying, we can. It would mean putting it in the calendar or the diary? 

It would mean buying the present. It would mean making sure my daughter had, dressed where it would mean getting out of there. Being there and then bringing her home. So the end to end thing. Of parties. Because there's so much mental load. Just even in that. 

Because actually your husband or partner. Taking the child to the party. Yes, it's helpful. But actually there's a huge amount of mental load. That's unseen there. So my husband and I got totally on board now, we don't do it perfectly as is life, but there are some fundamental things that I have literally nothing to do with. And we played to our strengths. 

So that's also part of the concept. What are you good at? So parties is my thing. I do [00:07:00] parties. And to end. What I don't do is washing. I have literally nothing to do with the washing. Other than putting it in the basket, my husband. Puts it on when it needs to go on, he hangs out, he collects it back in. 

He folds up, he puts it away. He does the entire thing end to end. The dishwasher. I very rarely touch. He loads it. He unloads it . But our finances and two end I manage. So I manage all of our finances. I manage our day to day accounts. I manage the bills. I manage our savings. I manage our pensions. My husband manages the garden and two end. 

I literally just enjoy it. I don't do anything related to the garden now the food it's probably one area that we split. He does the food shop every week because I just can't bear it. I just find it really tedious. 

And I stayed, I mean, there was put in. However, I'm the cook. So in the Burke the person who owns food owns doing the shop. Owns like planning the meals, getting in prepping the meals. And then tidying away afterwards. 

I feel like that has quite a lot. Actually it works better for us to split in [00:08:00] half. So my husband does all of the prepping and planning and then I do all the execution. So that make the kids' lunch boxes. I do our dinners. That's kind of my domain and I enjoy that. And he's really good at planning the meals and just telling me what to cook. Yeah, that is the book fair play, had a massive impact on us. 

And it's really, really allowed me to just let go of a lot of stuff. Like if I'm at home and I'm working and he does all the hoovering as well. I don't do any hoovering. I just said the other day. Oh, I think that needs hoovering. And he was like, do you even know where the Hoover is? 

I was like, I don't know, under the stairs. I can see that it needs hoovering, no way do I feel the need to Hoover. So it's really nice. It just allows us to let go. Have a lot of stuff. I don't need to hold on to knowing the other person has it in full. And then I think as well, just leading onto just letting go of a lot of stuff oh, house isn't perfect. 

It's chaotic. At the time we have too much stuff. Our house isn't quite big enough for what we need. We're kind of a short of a room. , in my office often we're drying, washing. Often the dog's bed is in here with me and we often have washing that hasn't been put away yet here, but, I just have to let it [00:09:00] go. 

Like we used to get really stressed about it and, try and keep on top of it. We've actually just let it go and said actually in the evenings, like our rest is more important 

and we do have a cleaner once a week as well. So it's like clean, but often it's not overly tidy and we've had to just let that go. Childcare wise I work best in the mornings, so we organized childcare while the girls were at school, they will go in early. The goal is to kind of get them in, ideally, at least three or four days a week into school by 7 45, 8 o'clock whenever their breakfast clubs start. 

And then we pick them up at normal time because they often get tired and they're much better when they can come home at normal time after school. We do pay for additional childcare in the week.

So that's going to come in from September when Both of them are at school. And so I get a mix of longer days and shorter days, which really helps out. As I said earlier, when my husband's at home. I can then just crack on and kind of know that I've got longer day. Then in terms of how I organize my time within the business. 

Every month I have one week of no calls. Which the goal is in that week is to prep the next month's [00:10:00] marketing content as much as possible now, full disclosure. I used to do this really religiously. And it was amazing. And then I got really slack and I ended up just having meetings all the time I'm putting the boundary back in. 

And in fact, when this comes out, this will be my first week of no calls. Since I've restarted again in August. It's in the diary now until the end of the year. And I'm going to really, really dry my best to stick to it and really batch. As much content as I can in that week so that I'm not doing it week on week because otherwise I just find I'm recording a podcast every week. 

I'm doing social media every week. I'm writing emails every week and agents is a lot when I've also got. Clients, everything. It also allows me to be a lot more flexible with my schedule that week have no calls. It means if I need to book an appointment and for the kids, or if they need to do something after school, I know that week is a little more flexible on my won't be on calls and it won't be stressful. And then also, probably the other biggest thing I have in place is I really organize my diary to make sure I don't have calls. 

It doesn't matter what time I'm picking them up. I don't [00:11:00] have calls. Before 10:00 AM and I don't have calls. That finish after. 2:00 PM. Unless it's a real exception so between 10 and 2:00 PM, am I call hours? On the days I do calls so that I don't come up for call, I have to run and get them from school, or I have to drop them off at school and like run home. 

I. Didn't use to do this and. That'd be on the way back from school, I'm feeling really, really stressed that there was traffic and I was going to get back in time, racing up the stairs, not having time to have a tea or check my emails. Just find it really stressful. So I have that boundary in my diary is blocked out as a recurring meeting every single day. From eight till 10 and then from two til five. So that I can make sure I don't have meetings in there by accident. And then finally, I don't currently work with us clients. 

So clients from America. It's something I did to try and do. My instinct was it wouldn't work. And I was right. I just found it really stressful, them coming online at like three o'clock and that's when I really need to stop. So I never really got a chance to chat to them on slack or check [00:12:00] in with them or. Be online at the same time. 

There are days where I can do later calls, however for me. It was too stressful I don't currently work with clients in the us. Because it just doesn't work. A boundary I've put in that. Isn't necessarily ideal for the business, but works really well for me. 

Being a mother I'm wanting to stop in school hours and not working evenings. And then finally, automations and systems that help me , if you know me you'll know. I love a system, a systems. I won't love language. I love trying a new system. 

I've tried any kind of system that's going to save me, time is where I'm at. And I did a lot of systems work and automations work before I started building a team. Because I was convinced that most of the work could actually be done by automations and systems. And that's true to a point. 

We have core systems in the business so that I'm not checking multiple places. Like I need one, a place of truth so that I know where to go really quickly. And I'm not fucking about looking in loads of systems for the information I need. So our core system is [00:13:00] click up, like that's our one place of truth. 

That's where all tasks goes. That's where everything is allocated. Everything has a date. I know exactly what's on all of my to-do lists. My teams do list it saves me so much time, not having to check in with them and saying like, oh, have you done that yet? Oh, I thought we could do this today. 

You know, et cetera, et cetera. One core system for us is click up and then my course communication system is slack. Over the last six months or so I've moved all my clients and my team into slack before then we were across Trello and Voxer and slack and Facebook groups. 

It was a bit of a nightmare. So at bar one course, which is finishing soon. Everything else is in slack. I have a team channels. I have client channels. Everything is in that and it works really, really well. And then I guess our other core system is Google. So we use Google email, Google calendars 

Everything's Google-based so these are our core systems. I really love workflows that do things for me so things like when a client is onboarded [00:14:00] they come in, they pay through thrive card, they get their contract in dub Sada. They then book there. Kickoff call with me in my calendar. 

And then Zapier does like a load of amazing tasks. It sets them up their private slack channel. It creates that Google folder for them, then puts in the key documents that they need it does so many amazing things. It sends them a welcome email. It triggers a load of tasks in click ups that creates their task list. 

There's so many things. You can do with Zapier honesty is my favorite thing. Managing my emails in Google, I assign emails attack. And then it automatically then puts them into click up for a task for me to do or for my team to do so I can allocate who that goes to. 

That's when my inbox is always well managed as well, that never gets out of control because everything goes into click up. And then just from a more marketing perspective, obviously I'm running ads. . But also I use many chat. It's one of my favorite ways to automate, not having to go back to people and manually respond to messages when they have requested [00:15:00] something that's easy to repeat. 

Like. Lead magnet or a link to something linked to the podcast, linked to a masterclass or that sort of stuff. And then , my AI tool of choice is called. If you haven't come across, Claude, it's like chat GPT in some areas it's not quite as good. But in other areas like writing copy. Eat sounds way less AIE if you know what I mean, chat DBT. No matter how many prompts I use, how well I trained it, how much time invested in it? 

It still sounded not like me, Claude. However, is incredible. It also, you can create these projects. Let's say, my podcast, it could be a project and you can upload knowledge into it, which is Either text based or PDF. So you can just copy and paste, a lot of text from the website. 

I can upload transcripts. I can upload. Anything really related to the podcast, you put it in the knowledge and then every chat that you have within that project can use the knowledge base. Honestly, it's just so clever I will link to it below because honestly it's incredible. I also use mailer light as [00:16:00] well as my own email system to do automations. Once someone is in my world. And then the last thing I'll mention, honestly, this is not even half of my systems, but the other system I absolutely love is descript. And it's my podcast editing tool. 

When I was, I taught right now, it is creating a transcript. And then if I want to edit it, I literally have the transcript in front of me. I just delete words if I want to take it out. It's incredible. It saves so much time and I also can edit any kind of video. I edited all my videos for my audience builder course in there. I edit social media videos 

you can also do video as well as just audio. It's really, really good. And then the last thing I think is , I have a team I would say I was quite slow in starting to build my team really, really struggled to find the right kind of people to support me. 

I didn't really know I wanted, which meant it was really hard for them to support me. But I have then grown the team quite rapidly. And it's at that slightly stretchy point, if I'm really honest, where my team bill at the moment is higher than I wanted to be really compared to the [00:17:00] revenue I have coming in. 

But the goal is obviously now I've got the team support that. Is a, to allow me to really work on growing the business it's to bring you more revenue, but also to bring more space into my life as well. And create a business that doesn't run on my energy. 

The goal really for me, it's to create a marketing and sales system. That is powered by ants and then a operations and delivery system that is powered by incredible team members. And then I am there to create strategy and then work directly with clients and , just do all the amazing stuff. 

I love like writing copy and. Thinking up incredible ad strategies and marketing plans, all the stuff I love doing. Speaking on stages, like going to in-person events. I'm in the process of building this at the moment and I'm starting to see the fruition of it. 

And it's just, it's really joyful. I'm really, really enjoying it. There you go. I mean, it's not perfect. And a lot of the time I'm thrown curve balls and the kids were off sick or they can't go to their holiday club. 

Their childcare doesn't [00:18:00] work out as it should. Or my husband has to go into the office on a days, meant to be at home, which means. I have a shorter working day and it does cause frustration and it's never easy, but these things I have in place that I have kind of grown into over the years, massively help. 

I think the underlying principle is really just about asking for what you want and what you need. I really, really struggled with that to begin with. Both with my team, with my husband, with my mum who does some of the childcare support, my mother-in-law I always felt like I couldn't really ask for exactly what I needed. 

I just had to wait for people to offer or just accept whatever they offered. And actually I think I've realized that if I want to go to the business. I need the space and the time and the energy to do that. And as a family, we've agreed, I I'm going to do this. And this is important to me. 

And it's important. The family. So we need to work our way. That makes it feel like practical and sustainable and not like I'm doing . All the mental load and heavy lifting at home and then trying to run the business as well. That's where we're at with it I'd love to know if this has resonated [00:19:00] or if there's anything else you do. 

Let's start just the discussion about this. What else is it that you do That helps you juggle motherhood and running a business. Is there anything in here that, you're going to go away and think about or implement? 

I'd love to know. Come over to Instagram. My handle is below. If you don't already follow me, I am Safie Griffis co over on Instagram, and I would love to chat to you then. Have a great day and I will speak to you next time.

Thank you so much for listening today. Before you go, if this episode struck record with you, I'd be over the moon. If you could take a moment to rate, subscribe, and leave a review, your words not only brighten up my day, but they are also the magic that helps others discover this lion hearted community.

Again, thank you so much and I will see you next week.