EP 146 The Story Behind Mission Driven Mom (And Where We’re Going Next)

In this episode, Audrey Rindlisbacher shares the story behind The Mission Driven Mom and the journey that brought it to where it is today.

What started as a small class for mothers eventually grew into a movement focused on helping women lead their homes with truth, principles, and purpose. But the path was not simple. 

Audrey opens up about the early success of the program, the challenges that nearly shut it down, and the difficult decisions that led to rebuilding it in a stronger and more intentional way.

She also shares the vision guiding the future of Mission Driven Mom and why she believes mothers have a powerful role to play in strengthening families and rebuilding culture.

In this episode you will hear:

• how the Mission Driven Mom program originally started
• the struggles and lessons that reshaped the organization
• why the program paused and later relaunched
• the long term vision for Mission Driven Mom
• why empowering mothers is key to strengthening families and communities

If you want to understand the mission behind this work and where it is headed next, this episode gives you a deeper look behind the scenes.

Join Audrey’s free training to learn how to build a more principled home and become more intentional in your leadership as a mother. 

Register here 👉 https://go.themissiondrivenmom.com/webinar-registration

AI Generated Transcript

Introduction and Why Things Are Changing

Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, the author of The Mission Driven Life and the founder of The Mission Driven Mom. I’m super excited for you to be here with me today, and it’s going to look a little bit different because I want to share something with you that’s been going on behind the scenes with The Mission Driven Mom.

I want to kind of pull back the curtain and show you a little bit of the backstory because we’ve made some new commitments. We decided to really up our game in 2026. You’ve probably noticed that on the podcast, on socials, in our emails, and this is all part of this new effort that we’re making.

We have this new vision for the coming months and the coming years, and why all of that is important to me and to our team, but also very important to you and important to your families and communities and our culture.

And so I’m going to tell you all of how we got to where we are and where we go from here.

How Mission Driven Mom Began

Now, some of you have been with us for years now. Maybe you’ve been here almost from the beginning. And when we launched, I have got to say it was really just kind of a glorified hobby for me.

I’ve told the story many places of going to a moms’ class and recognizing the pain in the women around me and understanding for the first time that other women needed the tools that I had discovered that had really revolutionized my home and my life and made such a huge difference for me.

And so I determined to make that available, and I didn’t have any idea how it was going to go. I had taught classes in the past, and I just came up with a price that was quite a bit more than I had charged before and seemed fair, but just was an arbitrary price, and threw it out into the world, and it stuck.

And to be honest, and I say this very humbly, it really was far more successful than I ever anticipated it being. And it went a lot further than I expected it was going to go.

And of course, we launched it. Level One took off, and I knew we needed to have an event. I really wanted to celebrate the women and have them walk across the stage and have a deadline and a solid goal for when they were going to be finished.

But I also wanted us to get together and see each other in person. And so we held our first celebration, and it was just a huge success. We filled the room. It was so much fun and so full of joy and had this graduation ceremony, and some of our students spoke, and it was so rewarding and enriching.

And then from there it took off.

Growth, Expansion, and Inexperience

The women that had finished needed a Level Two, and they needed a Level Three because I had a conception of how this whole thing would look, but I hadn’t built anything but Level One when we started.

And then the moms wanted their teens to have this experience. They have also asked for a program for their husbands, which we’ve never developed yet.

And as time went on, we were building content like crazy, and we were trying to continue to service the students and build content at the same time for the events.

And then we had women coming up, and so I built Level Three, and then they were able to graduate, and we launched a leadership team. And Level Three actually wasn’t all the way finished. It was just a pilot.

And around that time, it got past my pain point. And I think maybe I’ve said this before, but I did not go into this with any business experience. I did not anticipate it ever getting this big.

And we had too many people. We were running through too much money, and we were charging way too little.

And that was just because of inexperience. And it was because I hadn’t done my market research, and I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And I needed to learn from my own experience really how to do it differently.

Pulling Back and Rebuilding

And so we brought everything down to a really small group and then eventually let everyone go.

And we went quiet for a while.

And there was a time where I just thought, I’m going to move this program over to another platform so I can keep my promise and make sure that women have it for life, and I’m going to write the books that I feel like I need to write. Maybe I’ll finish and make Level Three formal. Maybe I won’t. I don’t know.

And a year and a half of time went by. I wasn’t podcasting. I really wasn’t doing anything. I was just fine tuning the program, moving it onto a new platform, making sure that everything was all cleaned up, and just trying to get rid of any unnecessary expenses.

I had done a lot of studying business in the meantime and I had learned a lot, but I just didn’t know if I wanted to go there again.

It ended in a pretty painful way. I felt badly about how much of our own personal reserves, and not just the time, but lots of money, had gone into the business trying to keep it alive.

We’d lost a lot of money, and I just wasn’t sure what to do with it. It just sat in the back of my mind.

Why We Came Back

And really, it’s pretty much my husband who is the reason why we’re back here where we are.

I don’t know if I would have had the courage, the gumption, the support that I needed to try it again if he hadn’t come to me last year and just said, we have to champion this. It blesses people’s lives. It’s got to be done.

And I said, I’m not going to talk about it unless we put the business principles in place that we learned last time, we quickly learn as many more as we possibly can, and really build this business on principle. And we do our market research so that we know really how to run it properly, how to price it properly, how to market it properly, all the pieces.

And we didn’t have all the answers, and I don’t need to have all the answers, but we definitely decided we were going to go for it.

And that’s largely thanks to my husband.

The Turning Point

We did that. We had some reserves because the teen program kept selling, and every once in a while women would come and buy the moms program. And we have schools that do the teen program and whatnot.

And we were going along. We had one employee. We had Anne working with us. She’s incredible, and she was organizing everything in the background and just helping us with things.

And then we bought a program, and one thing led to another. We invited some people back. That miraculously happened. And we got to this point in the fall where we needed to invest again.

We had run through the revenue that had been sitting there for the last couple years, and we needed to put money in again.

And I didn’t realize that when I came back, I’d drawn a line in the sand. And when we got to that moment, I realized, oh, I’ve drawn a line in the sand. I do not want to take those kind of risks again. I don’t want to feel guilty about that again.

My husband was like, what’s going on? I thought we were all in. I thought we were just doing this.

And I was like, yeah, but

And he’s like, but what?

And I was like, I don’t know.

And so I had to really go deep inside.

Three Weeks of Prayer, Reflection, and Clarity

I set everything aside, and for three weeks I did almost nothing else besides pray, ponder, research, study, think, and journal.

And the overriding question was, why?

Why would I do this again?

I can see the benefit that it is to women, but can’t I just throw it into a platform and charge a little bit of money and just let women buy it that want it?

Can I just

I don’t care about the money. It would be fun to watch a business grow, but not for business’ sake.

Why would we do this?

Why would I do this again?

I mean, in a few months we’re empty nesters, and we can pretty much do whatever we want and have all kinds of free time. And so why would I tie myself down? Why would I put myself to work? Why would I give myself a mission? And why would I risk my own personal money that I could spend on other things to do that?

Why would we do this?

And it just needed to be bigger. Not bigger than the moms that we want to bless, but I knew by this point that unless there’s a strong marketing engine behind something, it will never go anywhere.

It seems hypothetically like a good idea to throw something onto a cheap platform and just quote, make it available. But I have learned that the only things that make it to the most people are the things that are the best marketed.

That’s really the bottom line, is that you have to have a good marketing engine behind anything that you do, whether it’s a for profit or a nonprofit. No matter what you’re doing, your organization, you have to get the word out if you want people to be influenced by it.

And so that means that we have to be competitive in our pricing. That means we need good amounts of revenue so that we can crank it back into marketing so that we can get the word out.

So I knew all of that, and I knew that I couldn’t go back into this half heartedly. I couldn’t go back in hoping I wouldn’t have to put money in, hoping I wasn’t going to have to put time in, hoping I wasn’t going to have to build systems and train people and actually really build a robust business for real.

And so I needed a big enough why.

What Mothers Are Facing

And I want to read to you some of the sentences and paragraphs and concepts that I wrote about during that three weeks, because by the time this was done, by the time I got to the end of that three weeks, I knew that this was my call.

I knew that other women who had said yes to that call again last year, and even more coming into this year, we were here for a reason.

We have important things to do.

And even though every individual matters, and even though we want every single mom to have it, and we want every single mom and her family to be impacted by principles and have their life changed, it’s even bigger than that.

It’s bigger than me. It’s bigger than our team. It’s bigger than you. It’s bigger than all of us.

So I’m going to read to you some of the thoughts. This is very raw, uncut, just me journaling, talking to you about you, about the women and moms that would be influenced by the work that we’re doing and why. Why I would give my life to this. Why this would be where I put my energy.

Moms see every day the negative effects on their children of the lack of virtue in our culture. Often it worries or scares them, and they don’t know what to do about it besides training their children differently. But even that is difficult because it goes against the culture.

So this is what I was writing.

So here’s more. I’m going to read a couple pages to you.

So moms feel stuck and scared and overwhelmed as mothers, but also personally unfulfilled because they know motherhood is their first calling, but not their only one.

Many don’t have enough self awareness and self knowledge to know how to harness their gifts effectively for their own enrichment and to then use those gifts in the service of others.

They don’t feel seen. Sometimes they feel that they and their own interests and desires don’t matter. They’re always coming second or third or fourth because they want to be great moms, but they don’t know how to do it differently and it’s just getting old.

But they’re also women of integrity who begin to feel miserable as they put their family first and can’t find balance, and they long to do more and be more, but they believe that this will leave their family behind and make them a bad mom.

So a lot of what I was writing about was just what is the situation that moms find themselves in.

And I was that right there, and I understand it perfectly, and I empathize with all of those pain points and more.

A Bigger Mission

And then I went on, and this is again just all different thoughts thrown down on paper.

Our culture is suffering so much. We’ve moved away from the education that would have trained us to live according to true principles and pursue truth and virtue. And that’s why we need an army of moms that can train up a new culture.

We need moms who get their crap together and start making a difference.

And again, this is me a little raw, unplugged. I was upset about the culture, upset at where we find ourselves.

So I wrote, and I don’t care if they think they can’t. If moms think they can’t do this, and I don’t care if they don’t want to, or they don’t know how. They’re needed.

Their education is insufficient to find the balance, thrive as women and mothers, and make this cultural shift no matter how much modern education they got, because they don’t know how to live by principles, just like I didn’t.

And if they don’t have some balance and resources, they don’t know what needs fixing and how to fix it, that’s an educational problem.

And because they don’t know how, they console themselves that all that matters is their kids. They tell themselves that they’re perfectly justified in playing small and not taking risks. They believe no one expects them to change the world or even their neighborhood, so they don’t.

But if they don’t, who will?

Because moms don’t need to do this so they can feel important or have purpose and deep meaning, although they will.

It’s not even so their kids will see their example, although they will.

It’s because the world is rejecting truth and we need champions of truth. And moms have more motivation than anyone else to make a change in our culture because they want a better world for their kids.

We need a movement, something worth fighting for, sacrificing for, and giving our lives to. Providing a healthier culture for our grandchildren.

A New Identity for Mothers

So for any mom that is listening right now, here’s what I wrote.

I want to take you to a new life where you have power and influence over yourself, your family, and your community. A life where you’re seen and needed and used and you’re making a difference and you know it, and your family is on the journey with you every step of the way, because when mothers are lifted, the culture is lifted.

I want to give you two new identities.

The first one is, as a mission driven mom, you work on yourself so you can show up differently for yourself and your family. You seek truth, identify it, and stabilize your life with it. You learn to balance your own personal growth with that of your family. You become intentional and begin leading your family to a more principled, centered, intentional, servant leadership focused life.

You become powerful, confident, self accepting, and intentional.

And then once you graduate from the MDM Academy, you can join our leadership team.

And in this role, you see yourself as a member of a vast community of moms dedicated to lifting the culture and reinstating virtue and a love of country. You will surround yourself with women who know and speak truth with courage, women who see real problems in their communities and work together to apply principled solutions.

You are one of many noble, courageous, virtuous women who elevate the people around you and invest in each other’s worthy projects and goals. You and other moms like you become the hope for our future.

What We Are Building Now

Now, in order to accomplish this movement, we’re doing a whole bunch of things.

We’ve hired experts and built a powerhouse team of incredible women who know how to do their role with absolute excellence.

We’ve used best business practices to get us supremely organized.

We’ve put the time into market research to bring you the best product at a price that is still below market value, but where compensation is sustainable for us to stick around and serve you for a very long time.

We’ve refined your journey in the Academy and beyond.

We’ve reintroduced the MDM Celebration, and it’s coming again this fall. The theme is Mothers of Creation, and I hope to see you there.

We’re finalizing Level Three so that it will be available permanently.

We’ve outlined the Clapham Leadership Team and its role in our communities.

We have women finishing up mission projects who will graduate this fall.

And I’ll be releasing a new book this summer and another one coming next year.

There’s so much going on and so much to look forward to.

An Invitation to Join the Movement

Now, Henry David Thoreau said, for every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one hacking at the root.

MDM is striking at the root.

We’re taking first ourselves, and then our families, and then our communities, back to natural law, to truth, and to virtue, and providing principled solutions to difficult community issues, which will lead to lasting healthy solutions.

Are you ready to do something that’s really going to matter?

That will be one of the deepest sources of meaning, fulfillment, and joy in your life?

That will have the greatest lasting impact?

That will bring renewal and support to you and your family?

That will build the most beautiful lifelong friendships and sense of community you’ve ever known?

And fill your days with a sense of determination you’ve never had and lift you and your children and your community like nothing else can?

If so, then please join me and other mission driven moms on this journey as we link arms to change the world, beginning right now with you.

Because we can’t accomplish this alone.

So please join us and share this with every other woman and mom who’s ready to put their personal lives in line with truth and become part of something bigger than themselves, something that has the power to make the world a better place.

Because we can only do this together.

This is a movement, and we are so glad that you are a part of it.

Closing Invitation

If you want to learn more and dig deeper into the things I’ve been sharing with you today and over the last few weeks, I would love to see you join me this week at my free training.

I am going to walk you through why the culture has been declining and the simple and powerful steps you and your friends can take to build a solid foundation in your homes and then link arms with us to lift the culture.

The link is in the description, and I will see you there.