Episode 285: She Tripled Her Income Without Burning Out

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There’s a version of school ownership that no one warns you about.

You’re doing everything right — growing your enrollment, hiring good people, investing in professional development. But somehow, you’re still the last one to leave. You’re still the one people call at 5am. You’re still holding it all together with your bare hands, convincing yourself this is just what leadership looks like.

Aliyah Johnson Roberts thought the same thing.

Today, Aliyah runs two thriving childcare centers in Philadelphia — Pratt Street Learning Center and Busselton Learning Center — with 225 children, 36 staff members, and a leadership team of six. She has had the most profitable year in the history of her business. She’s tripled her income. And she’s currently working toward spending just three days a week in the building — not because things are falling apart, but because she’s built systems, rhythms, and a leadership team strong enough to hold everything without her constant presence.

But it wasn’t always this way.

“I Was Staying Until 6pm… and It Wasn’t Even Necessary”

When Aliyah joined the Schools of Excellence Owners HQ program in 2021, she describes her situation honestly: “We were coasting.” The centers were okay. Things were functioning. But she was personally overwhelmed, routinely staying at the centers until 5 or 6pm — and not because the work demanded it.

“I realized it wasn’t necessarily a heavy requirement of me,” she says. “I was making it my requirement when it just wasn’t totally necessary.”

This is one of the most common patterns we see in school leaders. The center doesn’t need you there. But somewhere along the way, you started equating your presence with your value. Your identity got tangled up in being needed, being available, being the one who holds it all together.

And in the meantime? Your family was waiting.

Aliyah was putting attention toward a business that, as she put it, “didn’t really need me” — while pulling away from the people who did.

That realization was the turning point.

The Shift: From Rescuer to Removable Leader

One of the most powerful moments in Aliyah’s journey came through a conversation about where she was finding her significance.

She had been treating her staff and the children in her care almost like an extension of her family — taking personal responsibility for every need, every problem, every gap. It felt noble. But it was quietly costing her everything else that mattered.

Here’s what we know to be true at Schools of Excellence: overfunctioning is not responsibility. It’s fear in disguise.

When we hold everything because we’re afraid of what happens if we don’t — when we’re the first call for every problem, the last one to leave, the one absorbing every shock — we’re not leading. We’re rescuing. And rescue mode is not sustainable.

The work wasn’t about teaching Aliyah to care less. It was about helping her redirect her significance — back to herself, her marriage, her children, and ultimately back to leading her business with vision instead of just presence.

What She Actually Learned (And How It Changed Her Business)

Aliyah’s transformation didn’t come from a checklist. It didn’t come from a new hire or a fancy software system. It came from the inside out.

Here are some of the specific shifts she made that directly impacted her bottom line:

1. She stopped having an open-door policy.

This sounds small. It isn’t. When your door is always open, your calendar belongs to everyone else. Aliyah implemented time blocking and theme days — dedicated focus time where her door is closed, her phone is silenced, and she’s working on the business instead of just in it.

“They gave me back my time,” she says. “Time to spend with my family. Time to work on the business so I could actually build it.”

2. She learned to have a meeting with herself.

One of the assignments Aliyah was given early in the process was to schedule quiet, intentional time for herself — a “meeting with herself” to think, breathe, and reflect.

She has a sunroom in her home. She’d never really used it.

“The first time I completed the assignment, I realized how beautiful it was outside of my bedroom window,” she says. “I’d been there five years. I had never taken the time to just pause and look out the window.”

When leaders learn to breathe — really breathe — they stop reacting and start leading. They stop seeing chaos and start seeing opportunity.

3. She invested in her leadership team — holistically.

Aliyah didn’t just send her directors to standard professional development. She invested in a full-day leadership training with the entire administration team, focused not on systems and checklists, but on the deeper human work: trust, boundaries, emotional regulation, conflict resolution, and what gets in the way of genuine team cohesion.

“I knew we were experiencing some things that weren’t about surface work issues,” she shares. “There were things going on personally between team members that were standing in the way of us progressing.”

This kind of investment terrifies most school owners. It requires vulnerability. It requires opening doors that are easier left closed.

But on the other side of that discomfort? A leadership team that actually trusts each other. A team that can hold the school — and the children in it — without the owner needing to be there.

The Results: More Profit, More Freedom, More Purpose

Let’s talk about what happened when Aliyah stopped white-knuckling her way through school leadership and started building rhythms that hold.

• She tripled her income. Not by grinding harder. By creating space to think, lead strategically, and stop filling every hour with reactive management.
• She had the most profitable year in the history of her business. Both locations are running at 85–90% capacity.
• Her team health score went from a 3 to an 8. This isn’t a vanity metric. Team health is directly correlated with retention, parent satisfaction, and the predictable experience of excellence that families choose you for.
• She’s working toward being out of the building two days a week. Not someday. Now.
• She has the mental and emotional space to think about her next business venture — and her exit strategy, built on the right people rather than just the right numbers.

This is what it looks like when a school leader stops being the glue and starts being the architect.

The Investment Question Every Owner Needs to Answer

When asked about the hesitation many owners feel around investing in a coaching program, Aliyah reframes the question entirely.

“Can you afford not to?”

She’s not being rhetorical. She’s asking you to actually count the cost of the status quo:

• How many hours have you lost to problems that keep cycling back because nothing has fundamentally changed?
• How much has staff turnover cost you — in time, recruiting, training, and the morale hit to your team?
• How much have you spent on professional development that didn’t stick because it was surface-level content delivered to people who hadn’t done the inner work?
• What has operating in survival mode cost your marriage, your children, your health?

“We think, I can just get professional development,” Aliyah says. “But we don’t take as many PD trainings as we used to. We are very intentional about what we do every single year.”

She draws a sharp distinction between buying things — sensory tables, new markers, CDA certifications — and investing in the people who will actually use them.

“We don’t have the teacher who is well enough or even present enough to use [the sensory table] the way it’s supposed to be used. But if we invest in them… they become a better person. Therefore, they become a better teacher.”

This Is What a Removable Leader Looks Like

Aliyah is planning to sit in her backyard this weekend. Her magazine is already on the table. She’s excited about it.

That might sound like a small thing.

It isn’t.

We work so hard to build beautiful lives — beautiful spaces, beautiful schools, beautiful futures — and then we never get to enjoy them because we’re always working. The goal of Schools of Excellence has never been to build schools that perform on paper. It’s to build schools that run excellently and leaders who actually get to live.

Aliyah is proof that these two things don’t have to be in conflict.

When you stop carrying everything yourself, your school doesn’t fall apart. It gets stronger. Your team rises to meet you. Your numbers go up. And you get to look out your sunroom window and actually notice it’s beautiful.