Balancing business and family life takes intention and a solid plan. In this episode of the Babies and Business Podcast, Avram and Rachel share how dedicating one sacred day each week to work on their business transformed their schedule and mindset. They break down the simple tools and routines that keep their team aligned and their weekends restful. 

From defining what “done” really means to creating decision trees that empower others, you’ll learn how to build effective business systems and processes that save time, prevent burnout, and create more freedom for what truly matters—your family and your life.

Show Notes

Key Highlights from this Episode:

• Avram and Rachel record this episode from their bedroom—proof that business and life often blend in creative ways.
  
• Why they guard Fridays as a “work-on-the-business” day instead of getting lost in daily tasks.
  
• How they shifted focus from productivity to efficiency using principles like Parkinson’s Law.
  
• The difference between working in your business and working on your business.
  
• Rachel shares how protected time on Fridays helps her manage project systems months ahead.
• Avram explains the power of three essential tools—process maps, IPOs, and decision trees—and how they help streamline work and empower the team.
  
• Why strong business systems and processes are key to growth, freedom, and peace of mind.
  
• How hiring a VA and documenting your workflows can help you reclaim time and energy.
  
• Avram and Rachel encourage listeners to start small, even with just two hours a week, to make space for strategy and rest.

Mentions & Resources

Parkinson’s Law – A time management concept showing that tasks expand to fill the time you give them. It’s a mindset shift toward working efficiently, not endlessly.

Profit First – A simple cash flow system that helps small business owners pay themselves first and build profit into every sale.

Clockwork – A business efficiency method that teaches owners to systemize, delegate, and create time freedom while their business keeps growing.

Mentioned Episodes

Babies and Business EP 3 – What you can accomplish when you have no time

Babies and Business EP 6 – Your First Hire and Choosing the Right Partner

Babies and Business EP 14 – How to Drop Operating Expenses 27% with Profit First

Babies and Business EP 54 – Get Scrappy with Parkinson’s Law: How to Be More Effective vs Productive

Babies and Business EP 72 – Your First Hire and Choosing the Right Partner

Babies and Business EP 104 – Tired of Date Nights? (Try This Instead)\

Episode Transcription

Below you will find a transcript of this entire podcast episode. Enjoy!​

Avram: Sometimes we spend our days in the office in the bedroom.

Rachel: Wow.

Avram: you didn’t. Well, you knew that I was up to something

Rachel: I never know what’s gonna come outta your mouth, so. 

Avram: We are recording in bed. Uh, just wanna let that be known. We don’t have our podcast studio reset up yet. If you’ve been a long time listener. You remember that we were recording in the garage underneath a storage rack. That was surrounded by painter’s canvas.

Rachel: This is the most sound dampened room in our house right now.

Avram: Yeah. ’cause you know, there’s an office with one piece of furniture and a chair in it that would not do so great for the acoustics.

Rachel: So we’re working on that. So

Avram: Fridays in the office, uh, for the Gonzales’ do look a little different. Today, being in bed while sharing this with you is one thing, but not the main point of what we wanted to share.

We want to invite you into a different reality in how you dedicate parts of your week to growing your business.

Rachel: Yeah. And to not have burnout or, wanting to escape your life, that kind of feeling or needing a vacation from your life.

Avram: Yeah, raise your hand if you’ve ever felt like there was no end to your week that you might put the babies down for bed and there is still more stuff to be doing. You get to Friday, sweet Friday, and you’re like, oh, the babysitter’s coming over. Let’s go out to dinner. You look at each other and you’re like, we must question mark.

And then you nod and say, we will. And then Saturday morning arrives

Rachel: And you are punished.

Avram: and you are punished by no rest, right? Weekends with toddlers, there’s no rest. It’s playtime, right? These are, you know.

Rachel: weekends are your children’s memories.

Avram: I love that quote 

Rachel: I love that quote and it really keeps things in the mind frame sometimes that I need that, gosh, kids just wanna play and they want memories with you. So it can be balls out on the weekend.

Avram: Yeah, so it’s like, where’s your rest day? There is none when life is like that. We shared in a previous podcast about date day and how we’ve changed things up and That podcast was about how our mornings go. It’s about going to the gym together, which we never got to do before. It’s about going and having a nice breakfast with each other while we still have the energy

Rachel: it’s the beginning of the day. It’s a slow start to the day. It’s wonderful.

Avram: Unlike date night where you’re trying to like rally the energy after a really long week.

Rachel: Yeah. And you know, if you stay out late, you will definitely be punished

Avram: oh my God, you stay out late and you are screwed,

Rachel: and if you know, you know.

Avram: Uhhuh, and so we started several months ago, even before date day, we started treating our Fridays very different.

Rachel: It’s a very much, guarded day. We don’t take meetings on this day. We don’t do actual work for our clients on this day. We don’t actually have any kind of team management on this day. There’s all sorts of things that make this day a different day. The pace is different. We start it slower, like we said, but we also, man, we get to spend really good quality time, not only with each other, but working on our business.

Like doing the things that are going to move the needle. Having these strategy meetings with each other about how are we going to move our business forward? What are the activities that we’re going to do to bring in and attract new business? Um, we record our podcasts. There’s so many things that we do, but what’s really cool about it is though we work, and it could be in our business or maybe it’s for us, unpacking a little bit.

Avram: Some home stuff

Rachel: Organizing some stuff around the house, that’s also beneficial, but it’s like what matters to you? Whatever you’re doing that fills you up and gives you that bit of rest or accomplishment could be just the thing that you need. And instead of feeling like, oh man, I didn’t do anything for the business, you could just sit in it and be grateful that you have this time, and instead of making progress or whatever things in your head.

Whatever those things are that mean progress or look like progress to you, maybe rethinking that that rest is beneficial.

Avram: The to-do list is endless.

Rachel: Yeah,

Avram: So I think we spent our first few years in business being trapped by the to-do list.

Rachel: absolutely.

Avram: And you know, when we, we’ve discussed this a lot. When you have kids, then it shrinks the time that’s available down even more, and you gotta get really scrappy with it. We recorded this incredible episode on a concept called Parkinson’s Law.

Lemme put it in the show notes. I would highly recommend that because that was the mindset shift that most impacted. Our change from looking at productivity, which is the things that we do into efficiency, which is how much we can do with limited time.

Rachel: Yeah, limited time, resources, whatever that is, whatever your resources, and it’s most often time, energy, and money.

Avram: we got good at being scrappy with sometimes as little as 15 or 20 hours of work time in a week.

Rachel: Correct?

Avram: So when our time started opening back up again by putting our children in Montessori, instead of them being at home with a nanny part-time, what happened was we realized we could get everything done that needed to be done in the business.

Because both Rachel and I, we’re still wearing some hats that require us to be there for the day to day.

Rachel: Absolutely

Avram: Our goal, long term is to ascend beyond that. To hire and train a team to do the things that are day to day so we could be even more strategic and have greater impact. But we are not there yet.

Monday through Thursday, we accomplish all of those things, and we do that between the hours of about 9:30 and 2:30,

Rachel: yes,

Avram: so we can get all of the most important work done in 20 to 25 hours a week, which leaves Friday. So this has been a journey to get here. I don’t want you to get discouraged if you are still in the day to day and really in it.

Rachel: Right.

Avram: Because we have so many episodes we’ve recorded in the past, we’ll share them in the show notes.

Rachel: Yeah.

Avram: We shared Parkinson’s law. We talked about Profit First. We talked about Clockwork principles. We’ll put five to 10 past episodes in there that are all about efficiency systems and getting back your time.

Hiring virtual assistant could be a big deal for you. That’s another powerful way to gain back your time. We have now got to the place where Fridays are sacred and they are dedicated to these things that are only the things that fill us up. Like recording the podcast, doing strategy. It’s fun to make sales.

Right? But I still don’t schedule sales calls for Friday. Right. But working primarily on the business. So we have spent several Fridays before we moved, I think a lot of the months of like June and July, Fridays, we cranked out so many new systems

Rachel: processes and systems. Yes.

Avram: Processes for the business.

Rachel: Oh.

Avram: That have our team, just like we recorded in the previous episode, Rachel mentioned when we were, uh, we grew beyond, beyond our home. I was recording a bunch of videos. I recorded in the span of one week, six months worth of videos, like what would normally take me six months. I did it in one week.

Rachel: yes.

Avram: We built the systems to support that process on a Friday.

Rachel: We sure did. What I do in our business is one of the things that I do is the project management and with the project management is the creation of systems. So I make a list of the. The systems that we need to, or the system of process, whatever it is that we’re working on, I make a list of those things that we need to create because I need your assistance and your vision and strategy that goes into that.

So I make the list and then when we get to a Friday or I tell you that we need to do this, then we schedule out that time on a Friday and we can really blow it out because it does need both of us there and it is something that builds into our

Avram: Yeah, and it’s, it’s, it’s easier to create these things when you have protected time because it can be really stressful when there are other things that are demanding or asking for your attention. And you know, that these critical things that you, that you’re working on the business, they’re very important.

If you kick ’em down another day or two, or a week or two, that’s, that’s a whole nother week of delay in growth and buying time back for your business. Yeah. And so again, the sacredness of our Fridays to dive deep and do these things without distraction has been impactful.

Rachel: Yes, well, and, and being able to build these systems. So what does this do for me as a project manager? If I have these systems built out, I can actually start planning out all of the tasks for our team to make sure that all of these things that we’re doing for our clients are in the system, and I can be six months in advance.

Avram: Yes.

Rachel: But it does require knowing the strategy for each client, how we’re going to move through our strategy, and when things will transition so that I can plan those accordingly. And then I have my sheets of how I make sure that happens. So the lack of systems has been a huge bottleneck for me.

So being able to dedicate one day where I know each week we can visit systems and processes is wonderful because it helps us have this forward momentum and it will support us in our goal of being a bigger business, meeting these milestones that we have because we need systems to support that.

Avram: Yeah.

Rachel: And then we also have systems for supporting these new clients that we intend to bring on that are coming our way.

Avram: Yeah. I’m gonna drop some knowledge on, you right here around like, so what is a system and a process. And we can kind of wrap it up here. ’cause I want this to be tangible for people. Like what are the things that we’re spending our time on? There are three different tools that we use and deploy frequently that we learned from Clockwork, which we’ve shared a lot about that buy back your time. Okay. So firstly, what is the difference between a system and a process? A system is like the way that you do a thing. So you might’ve heard of the acronym SOP, Standard Operating Procedure.

Rachel: Yeah, so it’s like the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It happens like this.

Avram: This is how you do the thing. Right. The process is the 10,000 foot view of how something moves all the way through each of those SOPs. Right? So if we think about a new client that comes into our system, we have an onboarding process. There are a ton of steps inside the onboarding process that touch multiple team members.

Rachel: Yeah, that’s the big point. There is when it touches multiple team members, they need support.

Avram: So one of the tools that we use and create a lot to bring cohesiveness to the team is if we’re starting something new, we will create a process map. So think about like a bubble chart

Rachel: Yeah.

Avram: that shows, you know, here’s where it starts and then here’s the major steps.

Rachel: Yes. If this, then that.

Avram: Well, that’s the next tool.

Not there yet.

Rachel: All right.

Avram: Not there yet. Right. So, so the process map can, people can see the main parts. So if we were to think about like the Babies and Business Podcast, just as a top level thought you would see this map. Maybe Kim who edits our thing can put this in the shownotes

Rachel: I think, I think we will put something in here so that when we’re talking about this, instead of just conjuring up in your mind and not really knowing, we will put something tangible in here so that when you’re listening to this, please don’t do it while you’re driving. Look at this when you’re sitting down, but it will be helpful for you.

Avram: Yeah, so if you look at the process map for our podcast, there’s several steps. One is the ideation and brainstorming.

Rachel: Yep.

Avram: Another major step is the actual like recording. Another one is the editing. Another one is all the copywriting that goes into it. Another one is all of the design work. Another one is the actual publishing and promotion of it

Rachel: Yep. So it is the step that it takes from origin to completion.

So it would be the thing that someone looks at to understand what it looks like to be completed. So they would know from this point to this point, regardless of their, involvement in it. It is not fully done until this happens.

At the very end.

Avram: and that leads into another tool. So the first tool to process map. The second tool is the IPO. We’ve gotten pretty loose about what this looks like since we learned it, but, so I’ll keep it very brief and I don’t think we’ll have an example of it for you in the show notes, but IPO stands for Information Permissions and Outcome. So what Rachel was just sharing about is you need to make it really clear what done looks like for your team member. Okay? But you also need to be clear about what is the information required, like, what is the context of the task that they’re to accomplish? What are the permissions, meaning, like what decisions can they make with or without you?

What kind of access into the, do the need to tools or the resources in order to accomplish it. And then outcome, what are like the check boxes of what this looks like? Are there examples you can attach? So what we’ve done in the past is, and when we first started, we just throw all this stuff in a Google Doc,

Rachel: yeah.

Avram: ’cause it’s really easy. You can share a Google Doc with somebody. This is everything that goes into it. It also eliminates the need to have a super detailed step-by-step SOP.

Rachel: Exactly. Sometimes we’ll attach a video at this point 

Avram: We will attach a video that shares

Rachel: and sometimes the video can be, um, and maybe not at this step, but it can be something like, this is how the task is done. And it’s a screen share of you doing the thing. Now we do things on the computer, so if yours is a physical thing, it may be someone videoing you.

Taking a video of you doing that physical thing.

Avram: We had a house cleaning client at one point that had videos about all of the individual things. Like this is what a, uh, a refrigerator clean out looks like and how it should be done. And videoing that processes

Rachel: And this is what done looks like. That is where you’d be able to do that. I wanna actually add one other tool that we use that I actually find to be most beneficial. And that’s the decision tree

Avram: that’s the third one that I wanted to talk about.

Rachel: Well, I want you to tell us about the decision tree. And we can show you an example of this.

We have one because this is where there is branching decisions.

This is the tool that will help most entrepreneurs with the biggest problem that we have. And the biggest problem is, the things get boomeranged back to us, and then we begin to wonder, well, can anybody else do this task at all? Are they qualified? What is this? Why is it coming back to me?

Avram: Why bother hiring somebody if I have to make the decision every time anyway

Rachel: If I have to touch it anyway, so this is one of the things that I think we use the most when it comes to helping people be independent and be able to do the thing without us touching it all the time. And coming in for reviews and, and, uh, you approving something that they have approval authority for certain things based on what we’re gonna see.

Avram: Yes. So a decision tree is, if you think about a flow chart, it is a flow chart.

Rachel: Yep.

Avram: And so the decision tree starts with whatever the decision might be.

Rachel: our decision is like someone wants a change to their website. So they fill out a website, change request form on our website. So then from that, then the person receiving that request would do X, Y, and Z based off of certain things.

Avram: Right? Yeah. So

Rachel: Is it straightforward? Yeah. Can you do the thing?

Awesome. Go and do the thing. If it’s not straightforward and it’s ambiguous, well then you need to do this next step. If it’s this, then it might have a different question. Okay, well what about this? Well, what about this? Well, what about this? Okay, then you need to push it to somebody else to do for approval.

Avram: Yeah, and so a decision tree we walk through in depth all the branching logic that that I would make in order to make that decision. What we found is that almost all of this stuff has been taken care of By mapping it out into a decision tree, you are teaching them how to think like you think. So it is as simple as sitting down and mapping it out and thinking about all of the, you know, because as an owner, founder, you know, all of the

Rachel: implications, maybe?

Avram: all of the little, the little stuff that is an exception.

Rachel: Oh yeah, sure. Absolutely. All the things that you take into consideration when making this decision.

Avram: Yes. And your team members are not the expert on it like you are. So by you developing a decision tree, you teach them how to think about it, like you think about it.

Rachel: Mm,

Avram: So I like to just write out the decision tree on a piece of paper.

I take a picture of it and then we store it in Google Drive. Uh, either store it on its own in Google Drive or attach it directly to a task inside of Asana.

Rachel: organization is a whole other topic we might

Avram: other topic, right? But those three things, the process map allows the team to see where their task fits in together with the others

Rachel: Yep. in whole 10,000 foot view.

Avram: Yep. Where their team members task ends, and where their starts and ends. And then the IPO is give people a clear understanding of how to get to where they need to go without giving them all of the steps. Your team members are smart.

Rachel: Yep.

Avram: Allow them to just get to the outcome. That’s what you want.

You don’t totally care how they do it, you shouldn’t. 

Rachel: Yeah. 

Avram: Right. And

Rachel: that’s where you get the freedom, We’ve talked about that.

Avram: Then the third thing is this, uh, decision tree. So we ended up sharing a lot more with you in this episode than we had originally planned.

Rachel: Yeah.

Avram: show notes will be a powerful place for you to go visit.

Rachel: I think this episode is such a, a big nugget of information for you to uplevel your business with these different tools. If you’re struggling and you find yourself getting boomeranged back into a decision making or something like that, this is what we spend our Fridays on. So that’s what we’re advocating for for your business, is that maybe if you’re finding yourself in the weeds and in these different jobs that you maybe should, don’t want to do and don’t light you up. Um, Avram is going to be teaching a workshop. We’re really excited about this, hiring a VA. Maybe you need something like that. Maybe you need some tools.

Tools so that you can, help other people to understand what needs to be done. So having the ability of one day a week or whatever it is that you can carve out right now.

Avram: Two hours. 

Rachel: Exactly whatever you can carve out. Ours is a day, that you can build into your business, and you can get some clarity, and then you can start using these tools, buy back some of your time by hiring somebody else.

Have these tools go to work for you. You’ll find that you have more sanity, you have more ease. You really want to show up and do the things that you do because you’re not in the weeds of the things that you hate and that absolutely douse your fire.

Avram: We did a whole episode, I believe, on hiring a va, and there’s some blog posts on our website, so we’ll put all that stuff in there. You know, this has done such big things for our mental landscape and our wellbeing. You don’t need to be working 24 7.

Rachel: No.

Avram: Most people, that are entrepreneurs are pretty driven and you will spend a lot of time working on the business.

But, um, there’s a lot to be said for finding time to do other things, finding time for rest, and the only way to accomplish that is by executing and using some of the stuff we talked about today.

Rachel: So we’re really excited to put these in the show notes. We’ll make sure we have an example for those things and maybe there are gonna be some trainings virtually, that you can attend if you’re not here locally in Albuquerque, later on this year maybe, or even next year. But, yeah, really excited to share more with you.

Avram: Yeah, thanks for listening. Make sure to check out the podcast notes in the description of this episode and go check things out and start applying them to your life. If you’ve got questions, by the way, you can always reach us at hello@babiesandbiz.com. We are looking for, ideas and new topics and things, things that we could, uh, answer for you and turn into an entire podcast episode so, reach out to us with that kind of stuff. We appreciate you for listening. Bye for now.

Rachel: Bye for now.