Some days, life just feels like a grind—constant, repetitive, and exhausting. Between raising kids, running a business, and trying to maintain some sense of personal well-being, it can feel like there’s no escape from the daily routine. But is there a way to make it easier? In this episode of Babies and Business, Avram and Rachel explore why life can feel monotonous, how to shift your mindset, and what small changes can make a big difference. If you’re feeling drained from the daily grind, this episode is for you.

 

 

 

Show Notes

Key Highlights from this Episode:

• Avram and Rachel share why parenting, business, and fitness can all start to feel like a grind

• How they use goal-setting to break up the monotony and stay motivated

• Their approach to managing the parts of life they can control (and accepting the ones they can’t)

• How financial stability has helped them reduce business stress and make better decisions

• Why building flexibility into their business gives them more freedom as parents

• The small changes they make to keep routines from feeling exhausting

Mentioned Episodes

Profit First – A cash management system by Mike Michalowicz that helps business owners prioritize profit, control expenses, and ensure financial stability from day one.

Mentioned Episodes

Babies and Business Episode 68 – 2025 Fitness Challenge – How it Started vs How It’s Going

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

Episode Transcription

 Avram: Guys, we’re tired. We’re just, we’re just real tired today. We’re filming a recording actually on Valentine’s day, all days. And uh, we just feel like life has been a bit of a grind lately. Maybe you can relate

Rachel: Having an eight month old is a lot of work. Eight month old and a two and a half year old, almost three year old.

Avram: and running the business and doing all these things, carving out time for the relationship, carving out time for fitness and health.

Rachel: Being intentional about those kinds of things, that takes a lot of effort and energy.

Avram: Oh my Lord. So the word that came up in our commiseration the other day was, Was the word grind

Rachel: Yeah

Avram: and I was like, what if we talk about this? I think that we’re not the only parents that feel it like, like if we take it back to when the first baby was born, I thought like the first three months was intense and it’s intense.

But what you don’t think about as well, the next years that happened after that and just how Slowly over time can really grind you down.

Rachel: Yeah.

Avram: And so we wanted to break open this topic today in a couple different ways, because part of life is always going to be a grind. It’s going to be monotonous. A lot of the same, it’s going to feel like it extends on forever.

And

Rachel: It’s those things that you don’t even think about, that you just simply do. You know, they happen every day.

Avram: there’s parts of life that you actually have some choice around it. And I think that’s where this topic becomes kind of interesting. And so I looked up the definition of grind before we recorded today. Did you know what it meant? Did you have a guess?

When you hear the word, how

Rachel: I never, oh, I mean, it feels like a, a trudge. It feels like you’re going up this hill and it’s going to take forever. That’s what I think

Avram: Well, so I looked it up and the definition that I found one of a couple is hard, dull work.

Rachel: yeah,

Avram: That’s, that’s noun as a noun. That’s the definition of grind as a noun. Hard, dull work. And I was like, well, man, so much of what we do with raising children can feel like a grind.

Rachel: Yeah,

Avram: So much of building a business can feel like a grind, especially there’s moments where you’re really excited, but then there’s just like the work, the work.

Rachel: right

Avram: day in and day out, whether you’re doing the work yourself or you’re building the systems for somebody else to do the work, all they can feel like that.

Rachel: right. Well, it’s hard dull work and it’s I think monotonous falls in there You know, so a lot of what we do because it is repetitive Can feel that way with children with your business all sorts of different aspects of life Even going to the gym can feel repetitive if you think about it.

Maybe there’s not so many Different kinds of lifts to activate this one muscle, you know, so there could be monotony in that aspect

Avram: it’s true. one of the things that we know keeps things fresh and alive is setting a new goal or setting, some different priorities in your life. And we’ve talked about that at length. You can actually go back at a recent episode. We did episode 68 babiesandbiz.com/68, where we talked about our fitness challenge that we’re doing this year, which is.

Really, the intention is to change things up for eight, eight weeks. Do something different.

Rachel: For me it just gave me different motivation. Different because I know I perform and I show up better and different when it is for a competition, like I remember when I ran my first, what was it, 12 minutes? Yeah.

Avram: We had a 12 minute run to see how far.

Rachel: And I went a whole mile and that was a big deal for me.

Um, and I realized that I pushed myself faster.
And longer than I ever before and so I’ve had a really emotional breakthrough that was a huge emotional breakthrough for me So when I was considering whether I wanted to do the transformation challenge or not, you know, I’m I’m nursing I’m eight months postpartum and I just thought is that gonna be a lot of work?

Is that going to be more than I should set myself up for and the more I thought about it? I just thought you know I do better when I have something, some kind of goal to work towards. So that is what I did to change it up. You know, the grind for me, going to the gym can sometimes feel like a grind. But when I have a goal, I work harder and better and I’m more present each class because I know that I have a goal to meet.

Avram: I think that’s a key element. Also here with us in the studio is our youngest August. He woke up early from his nap. If you listened to the last episode, you know that, you know, that we’re batch recording these before we go out of town in a couple of weeks so that the team keeps posting this stuff when we’re out, uh, chillin with family, and he’s in here right now.

But, uh, let’s talk about some of the I just thought this was so interesting. There are some parts of the grind that you get to choose your own adventure, and you can’t avoid the grindiness of life, but there are certain things you can do to make it easier.

Rachel: Sure, and that can be some of the things that help to invigorate us or reinvigorate us in the business that we’re in or in at home, whatever those kinds of things are, but it can help to Make things seem less like a grind because it’s for maybe it’s a goal that has an expiration date or it’s something like that.

So

Avram: I brainstormed, I thought of a couple different things before we started recording here today. I thought, man, in some ways I feel like we have a lot more choice when it comes to our business and being able to make changes in the business that affect our life in a big way versus some of the stuff with kids.

 but we’ll get to that. The stuff with the business, right? You get to choose, as the business owner, you get to choose what role you fill. That is a choice.

Rachel: Yeah I mean

Avram: choice to do it all yourself. It’s a It’s also a choice to hire and have some other people do it.

Rachel: sure and you know at at the beginning if you’re at the beginning of your business in your journey You may feel like you don’t have a choice because you’re wearing so many hats, but You get to choose

Moving forward, you know, how quickly do you want to grow your business? What does that look like what kind of support you need to get that ideal position for yourself. If you are wearing multiple hats that are unpleasant to wear.

Avram: Absolutely. You also get to choose how much money you earn with the business. So you get to choose your profit margin because of how you price things. You get choose how much money you take out of the business. You get to choose.

Rachel: Well, and you can choose like we mentioned right here, or in our notes, Profit First, it’s really changed our business and it’s helped us to be profitable as a business from day one. It doesn’t matter how much profit, but it is the practice of having profit in your business.

And not making that be five, six, ten years down the road. So you can look at some of those episodes that talk about Profit First and the principles that it helps in small businesses to control costs and to pay in a proper ratio for your business, depending on the kind of business that you’re in.

Avram: We’ll throw a couple of those in the show notes. You can always go to our website, babiesandbiz.com to see show notes on any episode. This one’s episode 74. So if you go to babiesandbiz. com forward slash 74, you can see episode 14 about Profit First. It’s our real life testimonial on how we cut operating expenses by like 27 percent over the course of a year or two.

And we keep more money as a household now in our businesses healthier than it’s ever been.

Rachel: Absolutely. So it really does help you. it’s such a great resource. It’s tax season right now, pretty much, it’s February and tax season is going to be upon you any minute. So if you find yourself struggling to be able to pay that tax bill that you know is coming, or you’re a little bit like, Oh, I don’t know what it’s going to be.

Profit First is for you because there is an account where you actually put a percentage away for taxes. And we’ve been doing that since, I think it was the end of 2020 that we started, maybe the beginning of 2021, I think. And it’s just been transformational for us. Taxes are coming and they come every quarter for us, plus in the time that we file our taxes. And we never stress, because we always have money there. That’s one aspect that Profit First can help you with.

Avram: Yes. So when it comes to the grind, you have a choice. For how much money you are making, taking home and having the business. We had the luxury in 2023 to let go of three of our biggest clients because they weren’t a perfect fit for our agency for a variety of different reasons. We talked about one of those previous episodes in worst client ever.

The, and so you can go back and check the show notes for that. We have, that’s a great podcast episode, but the point is because we were set up for success financially, this aspect of change in our business. We are less affected than we have ever been before. So that’s the point

Rachel: So we get to be at choice with our money, as opposed to really being beholden to the people that we actually work for as clients and it feels really empowering.

Avram: It does, you’re kind of getting the idea here The other thing I thought of was that with your business you get to choose the hours you keep so I think that’s pretty straightforward. You don’t get to do that with a job.

Rachel: No, correct. Well, you get to decide, if you have child care from this hour to this hour You’re going to make the most of that time and that’s the time that you’re going to work or it’s going to be you know that time is where you get to work for us where we work together And then maybe you work a little bit on your own after the children are up and I am taking care of the children.

So there’s different ways that we can work it and it feels really empowering because, wow, life is not consistent. You know, the nanny can get sick. We can get sick. Our babies can get sick. Things can, wrenches can be thrown into our day at any point or our week.  And we have to be able to pivot and it’s really nice to be able to pivot

Avram: that’s part of why we decided to record this episode also last week The nanny was out for like three days unexpectedly and it was like dang

Rachel: and oh boy did feel like a grind,

Avram: yeah

Rachel: but we made a conscious choice to do our days differently.

Avram: Mm hmm.

Rachel: We chose to go to the zoo on Friday and not even have, we had some work but not a ton because we were also really in a place where Our business did not need us to do any specific thing to keep all of the things going

Avram: Yeah. So it’s like man, What a blessing it is to have a business to afford you these types of things and it all comes down to choice. One of the things that we feel like in this season of our lives that we don’t have much choice about is a lot of stuff with our children.

Kids are relentless, right? They demand and they deserve your time, attention, and love.

Rachel: absolutely. And it’s something that just comes about. It’s like, you know, for us, the things that just come up for us is, well, you have to feed yourself, you have to bathe yourself, you have to, all these basic human needs and children have those same needs. And those can feel, uh, well, they can be really relentless because if they’re hungry, they’re going to let you know about it.

Or if they’re tired, oh boy, do they let you know all those kinds of things. They just show up in, really drastic ways.

Avram: You do not have a choice. You must feed them. must clothe You must take care of them. You know, if you avoid it, some parents that are pretty hands off, that’s not parents that are listening to this podcast, but, you can avoid teaching your children, guiding your children, well, they’re gonna grow up to be little monsters, right You don’t have a choice.

Rachel: you can avoid also, you can be some of those parents that, do as I say, not as I do. That was my father, in some ways, but being, you can be intentional, or, I guess for me, the choice, the parts that you don’t choose are the things that just come about with children.

It’s gonna happen regardless there time marches on and your children are going to learn from you and what are they going to learn? So you get to choose what they learn by how you show up and how you interact with them. Those are the choices that we have.

Avram: So, pretty interesting to think about it, and reframe life and where we’re headed based off of looking at what we can change and what we can’t. We’re starting to make plans to do so, right? So, I think my big takeaway from here, I’d love to hear yours. My big takeaway is That when you’re grinding for the right things the right reasons it’s rewarding.

It’s worthwhile.

Rachel: Yeah, I agree. I think that, Sometimes it just takes a shift in perspective. Sometimes it takes just changing things up a little bit. I know recently for me, it’s helped a lot to have time in the evening. You know, sometimes the babies are going to bed early and that affords us a little bit more time together and to decompress a little bit.

For me, Life feels like a grind when it is going from putting the babies down to going to bed ourselves

Avram: mm

Rachel: Because, well, I want to be with all of my boys you included, you know, I want to be with my little boys and then I want to be with you as your spouse and grow our relationship and talk about our goals because goals change.

And you know, we don’t know that unless we’re having conversations and speaking with each other and That’s really important. That helps me, that helps the grind for me not feel as much of a grind.

Avram: Yeah, yeah, man good episode I think that it’s important that you know You keep your goals in mind Keep your priorities in mind change things up every now and then keep things fresh because life just marches on

Rachel: Yep, really does, especially with kids.

Avram: yeah, we’re, we’re excited.

Rachel: our day starts at 6 AM

Avram: No matter what.

Rachel: regardless of how we feel. it doesn’t matter if we slept well or not. my baby needs to wake up and be fed at 6am every morning.

Avram: Yeah, life’s interesting. Today’s Valentine’s Day, and uh, you know, we’re excited to have date night. We didn’t have it last week, so we’re just feeling the need and we hope that wherever you’re listening, you’re having a great date. We have a community question.

Rachel: We do.

Avram: Duh. All right. So if you go to babiesandbiz.com/74 you’ll find the show notes for today’s episode all of the related episodes and mentions that we talked about But there’s also a community question at the very bottom of that page. Our question for you this week is what feels like a grind right now that you know is worthwhile. We’d love to hear about it and support you in that grind and moving life forward at the pace that you desire. Rachel’s uh Managing this baby really well right So we’re gonna we’re gonna close this episode out We appreciate you for listening If you haven’t rated us five stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify go do that right now and if you know somebody that just needs some perspective and might need a little bit of pick up pick me up and And know that somebody else is going through the same exact stuff Send them this episode, tag them on Facebook or whatever it is.

Um, so with that, we appreciate you for listening and we’ll catch you in the next episode.

Rachel: Bye for now.