There was a Tuesday morning, not long ago, when I sat in a parking lot outside one of our properties in Utah and cried. Not because something had gone terribly wrong. Because everything was going, all at once, and I had no idea where I ended and where all of it began.
I had just gotten off a call with a contractor, fielded three texts from a team member, and mentally drafted a response to a lease dispute, all before 9 a.m. My phone had a calendar reminder blinking: school pickup. My Bible was sitting on the passenger seat, unopened for the third day in a row. And somewhere under the noise, a quiet voice I recognized said: you know you can stop.
I did not stop. But I did get still for a moment. And that moment changed how I run every single thing I build.
If you are a woman trying to hold faith, family, and a serious business in the same two hands, this piece is for you. Not the version of you that has it figured out. The version sitting in the parking lot.
The Myth of Balance Is Costing You Something Real
I want to be direct with you: balance, in the way we talk about it, does not exist. Not for entrepreneurs. Not for mothers. Certainly not for women who are also trying to walk a life of faith.
The image we are sold is a woman who prays at 5 a.m., has a green smoothie ready at 6, leads a team by 8, homeschools three children, attends every recital, and closes a deal by noon. She is rested. She is glowing. She is a lie.
What actually exists is something more honest and, I think, more sustainable: rhythm, not balance. Some seasons, the business demands more of you. Some seasons, your children do. Some seasons, your body does. Some seasons, God strips everything else away and asks you to just be still.
The damage happens when we try to force every season to look the same. When we measure a hard growth quarter against the peaceful Sabbath week and decide we have failed at one or the other.
I stopped chasing balance years ago. I started chasing alignment, which is a different thing entirely. Alignment means my decisions, from how I spend my mornings to what I say yes to, reflect what I actually believe matters. That is not about equal time. It is about honest priorities.
Building on Values, Not Just Goals
Every company I have built started with a values question, not a financial projection. That surprises people. They expect a CEO to start with market research or revenue targets. I do get to those. But they come second.
The first question is always: what am I willing to be known for? And what am I unwilling to compromise to get there?
For Wasatch Cleaners, that meant building a local company with real relationships, real accountability, and care for the people doing the work. For Akovex, it meant building operator tools that give time back to real business owners instead of extracting more of it. For Ekot Group as a whole, it meant that every entity we structure reflects a long view, not a quick win.
Faith shapes those values. I am not shy about that. My belief that people have inherent dignity, that stewardship matters, that I will one day account for what I did with what I was given, these beliefs are not decorations on my business plan. They are load-bearing walls.
When you build on values, your decisions get cleaner. You do not have to re-litigate every grey area from scratch. You already know what you stand for, so you know what you will not stand for. That clarity protects your family too, because the version of you that shows up at the dinner table is not a different woman than the one who signed the contract.
Guilt and Grace: What No One Tells You About Running a Company as a Mother
I am going to say the thing out loud: I have felt guilty. I feel it when I miss a bedtime because a deal is closing. I feel it when I am physically present at a soccer game but mentally inside a spreadsheet. I feel it when I say “just a minute” and mean twenty.
Guilt is not always wrong. Sometimes it is your conscience doing its job, pointing at something that genuinely needs correcting. But guilt that lives permanently in your chest is not conviction. It is a trap. And a lot of ambitious women of faith have been trained to feel that trap as righteousness, as if suffering for your choices makes them more legitimate somehow.
Grace says something different. Grace says: you are a whole person, not a collection of roles competing for the top spot. The same God who called you to love your children also gave you these gifts, this drive, this capacity to build. He is not confused about who you are.
What I had to learn, slowly and imperfectly, is to receive grace for the hard tradeoffs without using grace as an excuse to avoid making better choices. Both things are true. You are not a bad mother because you have a board meeting. And you are responsible for making sure your family actually knows they come before any company.
That means being honest with them, not performing availability. My children know what I do and why. They have been inside our properties. They have heard me on the podcast. They understand that the work is connected to something real, to providing for them, to building legacy, to serving people. That understanding does not make every missed bedtime fine. But it means the missing is not a mystery to them.
Rhythms and Boundaries That Actually Hold
Here is what works in practice, for us, in this season.
The morning is non-negotiable. Before I am CEO of anything, I have a conversation with God. Some mornings that is thirty minutes with my Bible open. Some mornings it is three minutes in the car before I walk into the office. The length is less important than the fact that it happens. It resets who is actually in charge of my day.
Sundays are protected. I am imperfect at this. There are Sundays where a crisis breaks through. But the intention is real: that day belongs to rest, worship, and my family. No investor calls. No team messages. No strategy sessions. My team knows it. Our systems are built around it.
Family is involved, not shielded. I used to think protecting my family meant keeping business away from them. I have since learned that keeping them in the dark about what I actually do creates a gap between my two worlds that slowly widens. Now they are part of the story, not outside of it. My husband understands our entities, our goals, our pressures. My kids understand that Mom builds things and that building things takes effort and sacrifice, and that the sacrifice is worth it.
I protect energy, not just time. There are conversations I will not have after 7 p.m. There are decisions I will not make when I am depleted. There are certain voices I will not let into my inner circle because I cannot afford the drain. Boundaries are not about being cold. They are about being sustainable.
The Role of Systems in Protecting What You Love
I need to talk about systems, because I think women in faith communities are sometimes told that needing systems is a lack of trust. That if you really depend on God, you would not need a process for anything.
That is not theology. That is chaos dressed up in spiritual language.
God honors preparation. The woman in Proverbs 31 did not stumble into a thriving household by accident. She planned. She invested. She got up early. She had systems.
At Ekot Group, we have built operational infrastructure specifically so that the businesses can run without requiring me to be present in every detail, every hour. That is not disengagement. That is stewardship. It means when my child is sick, I can be with my child. It means when my husband and I need a weekend away, the company does not fall apart in my absence.
I cannot overstate how much a well-designed operating system is an act of love toward your family. Every hour you spend building repeatable processes is an hour you buy back from the operational grind. Those hours belong to the people who need you in person.
Seasons: Knowing When to Push and When to Pull Back
There have been seasons where I worked at a pace that was genuinely unsustainable, and I knew it and kept going anyway because the opportunity required it. I do not regret those seasons entirely. They produced real things.
But I also know what the cost looked like up close. And I know that those seasons have to be bounded. They cannot be the default.
Learning to read your seasons is a spiritual discipline as much as a business one. You have to be honest about what this particular season is asking of you, not what you wish it were, not what you see other founders doing, not what your pride would prefer.
Some seasons call for aggressive growth. Some call for consolidation. Some call for radical presence at home because something in your family is fragile and needs you now. The business will not always understand. Build a team that can hold the business when the season requires you elsewhere.
And when the next growth season comes, and it will, you bring more back to it. The women I admire most do not build at the expense of everything else and then collapse. They build in waves. They know when to go deep and when to come up for air.
Defining Success on Your Own Terms
I was named to Utah Business’s Women to Watch list. I am proud of that recognition. I am also clear-eyed about what it does not mean.
It does not mean I have arrived. It does not mean the tension is resolved. It does not mean my children always get the version of me they deserve, or that my faith life is as consistent as I would like it to be.
What I can tell you is that my definition of success includes people, not just assets. A company I built that cost me my marriage is not a success. A portfolio that grew while my children grew up feeling like they competed with my calendar is not a success. A life that looked impressive on the outside and felt hollow on the inside is not a success.
Success, for me, is a daughter who watched her mother build something real and decide she can too. It is a marriage that is stronger because two people built something together, even through hard seasons. It is standing in front of God someday and being able to say: I used what You gave me. For something that mattered.
That is the north star. Everything else, the properties, the companies, the recognition, it either points toward that or it does not earn a place in my life.
If this landed for you, I write about this intersection of faith, operations, and building a life that holds together in my newsletter, Operator’s Notes. And if you want to hear these conversations go deeper, in real time with real entrepreneurs, join us at The Broker’s Table podcast.
You are not too much. You are not too ambitious. You are not failing. You are just in the middle of it. Keep building.
