During Pierce's first year, I spent an all-day strategy session as a black square on Zoom: camera off, muted, pumping breastmilk while Mike watched our son in the next room. Each time I unmuted to weigh in, the pump's motor was audible under my voice.
The realization arrived mid-session, with the pump still running. I am irreplaceable to my son, and replaceable to that meeting.
For the next couple of years I treated moments like that as scheduling problems, solvable with a better calendar and firmer boundaries. The problem sat deeper than logistics: I was operating inside a work model with no slot for a mother in it, and I kept negotiating with that model as if the flaw were my calendar.
Then I looked up who built the model. Once you see the names and the dates, a different question opens: who draws the next one?
TL;DR: The standard work model was written by particular people in particular decades, for a worker with a wife at home. Waiting for that model to accommodate mothers has a measurable failure record, including 2025's return-to-office exodus. Mothers carry the clearest design constraints in the economy, which makes them natural authors of business models built around real lives.
About the author: I've spent two decades designing business models for entrepreneurs, including 8.5 years helping build Abundance 360 and co-founding CTOx in 2024. I've coached 500+ leaders from 31 countries, and since 2023 I've run my own work on a model built around one fixed point: the morning school walk with my son. Everything below comes from designing models for other people first, then finally authoring my own.
The default model has named authors. Henry Ford took his factories to a five-day week in 1926, and Congress wrote the 40-hour week into law with the Fair Labor Standards Act on June 25, 1938, phasing it in by 1940. Those decisions solved real problems for one specific worker.
Legal scholar Joan Williams named him the ideal worker: available full time and overtime, uninterrupted by caregiving, because a wife at home absorbed every interruption. The model priced her labor at zero and built the workday on top of it.
Mothers then entered the workforce by the tens of millions, and the model held its defaults. Each of us has been negotiating individually with a structure that assumes we have a wife too.
For years I treated that structure like weather, something you dress for and work around.
It has a signing date.
Anything with a signing date is a decision, and the next one belongs to whoever picks up the pen.
Flexibility inside someone else's model is a lease, and 2025 showed how fast a lease ends. Full-time office mandates among Fortune 500 companies jumped from 13% to 24% in six months, and labor force participation for mothers of children under 5 fell from 69.7% to 66.9% between January and June.
Over that same stretch, 212,000 women left the U.S. workforce while 44,000 men joined it. The mothers who left in June carried the same ambition they had in January.
Economists still argue about how much of the pandemic-era participation record came from telework, which gave mothers of young children real hours back. The reversal is harder to argue with: mandates doubled, and mothers of young children left within months.
Both times, the variable was the model. The mothers were constant.
Claudia Goldin won the 2023 Nobel Prize in economics for mapping a century of this math. Jobs she calls greedy work pay disproportionately for long, inflexible hours, so the parent who stays flexible, usually the mother, pays a compounding price for every year inside the structure.
If you've lived this from the inside, you know the posture it trains. Thank you for letting me leave at 4 p.m. Thank you for understanding. I started calling this the gratitude tax: paying thanks, at regular intervals, for partial access to your own hours.
The gratitude is genuine. So is the rent.
Every business model answers a constraint set, and mothers carry the most honest one in the economy: compressed hours and a priority that stays singular. Greg McKeown points out that the word priority entered English in the 1400s as a singular noun and held that meaning for 500 years. Motherhood restores the original definition daily.
I said a version of this on a call once, and I stand by every word:
"When you're a mom, you learn how to maximize the moments of time you have. You get a real sense of what a priority is, a true priority. Sometimes mine was taking a nap or taking an uninterrupted shower or nourishing myself with a meal. It's in those humbling moments that you realize people who have the luxury of energy and time squander it."
Business schools build case studies to teach constraint-driven design. Mothers run the live version daily, with real stakes. It shows up in how I hire, too. I've said for years that I preferentially look for working moms as candidates "because they see the whole picture, have already figured out how to prioritize and staff their life with a village, and know what's important."
The clarity most leaders spend years chasing arrives with the role. Knowing the true priority is the design brief, and the rest of business model design is drafting to it.
It looks like aiming a professional discipline at your own working life. By July 2022, I had spent 15+ years designing business models for other entrepreneurs, and that month I sent my newsletter readers an assignment. "Normalize experimenting with your own 'business model,'" I posted that week. "What can you try today?"
I took my own assignment. The redesign, in the words I use to describe it now:
"When my son was born, I knew: I was not going to squeeze being his mom into little windows between Zoom calls. So I redesigned everything. I work 3.5 days a week now. Walk my son to school every day. Take vacations without asking permission. It's possible."
The pattern extends past mothers, because inherited models pinch anyone whose life stopped matching the blueprint. A client of mine, Matt, kept hunting for a better way to work: applications out, rejections back, frustration compounding. What he needed was a business model that let him put his family first, and optimizing inside the old one could never produce it.
You almost have to start with a clean sheet of paper.
The authorship transfer is running at scale. Women started 49% of new U.S. businesses in 2024, a five-year high, and in Gusto's research on new founders, 70% of women who launched in 2023 named flexibility as their top reason.
I read those filings as a generation of women deciding, one business at a time, that waiting for accommodation was the wrong bet. It's the same conclusion driving the economic redesign mothers have been running for years.
Start with the four questions from that 2022 issue. They require no resignation letter, and they put the strategist's lens on your own working life first:
Answer them honestly and one structural decision will surface, some fixed point your next model has to honor. Mine was the school walk. (Rain included.)
Yours might be one protected morning, or a person who stops getting your leftovers.
When you're ready to run the full sequence, I've laid it out in building a business around your life instead of around your job. And if your constraint set includes a toddler, that model carries requirements I've mapped separately.
Here's the tougher truth: nobody is drafting the mother-shaped model on your behalf. Companies answered that question in public this year, one office mandate at a time.
The women filing nearly half of new business paperwork are answering back.
You already run the tightest design review in the economy every morning. Point it at the model itself.
If the next version of your work had to be drawn around your actual life, what's the first line you'd put on the clean sheet?
Ready to draw that line? The Simplicity Protocol helps ambitious professionals do less to achieve more through weekly elimination strategies you can implement in 20 minutes or less. Subscribe and get one model-sized move in your inbox every Tuesday.
Henry Ford standardized the five-day, 40-hour week in his factories in 1926, and the Fair Labor Standards Act made 40 hours the national standard, signed June 25, 1938 and fully phased in by 1940. The structure came out of factory-era negotiations, decades before dual-income and single-parent households became the norm.
It was built around what researchers call the ideal worker: someone available full time and overtime, with zero caregiving interruptions, because a wife at home absorbed them all. Households changed. The default stayed.
Women started 49% of new U.S. businesses in 2024, up from 29% in 2019, and flexibility is the most-cited reason among women founders in Gusto's research: 70% of women who launched in 2023 named it their top motivation. On the evidence, model ownership beats model accommodation.
No. The same questions apply inside employment: renegotiating scope, restructuring hours, or moving to fractional and advisory work all redraw the model without a company launch. Ownership of the design decision matters more than the legal structure it lands in.
Flexibility is a set of terms granted inside someone else's model, and it stays revocable, as 2025's return-to-office wave showed. Authorship sets the defaults, from your workweek to your revenue structure. What you wrote yourself can't be recalled by someone else's memo.
It means your life sets the fixed points and your business gets built inside them, the reverse of the usual order. School pickup, workweek length, and presence with your family become constraints the revenue model has to satisfy. I've written a full lifestyle-first framework for that sequencing.
The world keeps accelerating. The Simplicity Protocol helps ambitious professionals do less to achieve more through weekly elimination strategies you can implement in 20 minutes or less.
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