The narrative most working mothers hear is relentless: You can’t have it all. Choose your career or choose your family. Lean in or opt out. Work-life balance requires constant sacrifice, endless trade-offs, and ultimately, settling for less in one domain or the other.
Sophia Deluz-Bhan, COO and co-founder of Search Atlas Group, has a different answer: The framework is broken.
“I don’t have work-life balance, and I never wanted it,” Deluz-Bhan says. “Balance implies two opposing forces – that time with Ruby costs my business, or time building Search Atlas costs my family. That’s a trap. I have integration.
The Timeline That Shouldn’t Work (But Does)
Ruby was born in 2022, precisely when conventional wisdom says a female founder should slow down. Search Atlas was scaling from 50 to 150+ employees. The company was integrating its first major acquisition, Signal Genesys. OTTO SEO, the flagship AI-powered search marketing platform that offers the best local link building solution, was in intensive development for its 2024 launch.
Most founders would step back. Delegate the big projects. Take a reduced role during early motherhood.
Sophia didn’t step back. She redesigned everything.
“People expected me to pull back during the most intense growth phase of the company,” she reflects. “Instead, I redesigned operations. The systems I built so I could be present for Ruby—strong leadership team, async communication, clear processes—those same systems enabled our hypergrowth.”
As a result, Search Atlas grew from $10M to $30M ARR during Ruby’s first three years. The company expanded to 250+ employees across dozens of countries. OTTO SEO launched successfully. Search Atlas won Best SEO Software Suite at the 2024 Global Search Awards, Best AI Search Software Solution at the 2025 Global Search Awards, and was named the #1 SEO Platform by Capterra with a 4.9 out of 5 rating.
And Ruby? She appears in video calls. She’s part of the company culture. She’s learning that her mother’s ambition and her mother’s presence aren’t mutually exclusive.
Building Systems for Integration, Not Balance
The secret isn’t superhuman stamina or a 4 AM wake-up routine. It’s operational systems that don’t require constant presence, physical location, or face time to function.
Sophia built Search Atlas with an infrastructure that enables her integrated life:
Remote-first operations mean she can work from Miami, Colombia, or wherever Ruby needs to be. Geography doesn’t dictate whether she can lead the company.
Async-first communication eliminates the expectation of constant availability. Deep work happens in protected time blocks. Updates flow through documentation and recorded videos, not endless meetings.
The strong leadership team makes decisions without requiring Sophia’s approval for every detail. Delegation isn’t weakness—it’s how you scale.
Clear processes and documentation mean the company runs on systems, not heroics. No one person is the bottleneck, including the COO.
Values-driven culture where life integration is modeled from the top. When Sophia talks about the animal sanctuary in company all-hands, or Ruby appears in video calls, it’s not oversharing—it’s setting expectations.
Having Kids Actually Made Sophia a Better Business Person
Sophia disagrees with the notion that you either prioritize your kids or your business because, according to her, having a family helps you in so many ways:
Better retention. When employees see their COO living a multidimensional life (professional excellence, present motherhood, animal rescue work), they understand that the company values humans, not just output. Talented people stay.
Stronger culture. Search Atlas rejected hustle culture in favor of a values-driven culture. The result is sustainable high performance, not burnout cycles.
Better decision-making. Parenthood develops skills directly applicable to business leadership: patience, perspective, long-term thinking, and emotional intelligence. “Building a $30M company taught me skills that make me a better mother,” Sophia notes. “Raising Ruby gave me perspective that makes me a better COO.”
Operational excellence. The systems that enable Sophia’s integrated life enable the entire distributed team. When the company doesn’t require her constant presence to function, it’s more resilient, more scalable, and less vulnerable to single points of failure.
Redesigning Time: What Actually Changed
Sophia didn’t scale Search Atlas to $30M while raising Ruby by working 80-hour weeks. She didn’t sacrifice sleep or time with her daughter. She didn’t “do it all” through sheer force of will.
She redesigned how she works.
Time blocking protects both work and family. Deep work happens in dedicated blocks when Ruby is with caregivers or her father. Family time is equally protected—no email, no Slack, full presence.
Boundaries between “deep work” and “available time” are clear to her team. When she’s working, she’s fully engaged. When she’s with Ruby, she’s offline. No hybrid half-presence that satisfies neither domain.
Leadership empowerment means decisions don’t wait for her. The executive team owns its domains. Managers solve problems. Documentation enables async decision-making.
Modeling integration from the top permits the entire organization. Remote work isn’t just allowed—it’s how the COO operates. Family isn’t something you hide—Ruby appears in video calls naturally.
“I didn’t scale Search Atlas by being everything to everyone at all times,” Sophia reflects. “I did it by building systems that didn’t require my constant presence, empowering leaders to own decisions, and protecting my time ruthlessly. The company is stronger because I’m not the bottleneck.”
The Model for Other Mothers
Sophia’s story matters because it challenges the dominant narratives working mothers hear:
You can’t scale a company during early motherhood years. (She grew Search Atlas 15x while Ruby was 0-3 years old.)
Remote work means lower ambition or reduced effectiveness. (Search Atlas hit $30M ARR entirely remotely.)
Work-life balance requires constant sacrifice. (Integration, not balance, is the framework.)
Having “outside interests” means you’re not serious about your business. (The sanctuary and the company coexist productively.)
Women must choose between being present mothers and ambitious professionals. (False choice based on broken systems.)
The model isn’t universally replicable. Not every woman has the resources, support, or control Sophia has. But the principles apply far more broadly:
Build systems that don’t require constant presence. Empower teams to own decisions. Set and defend boundaries. Model integration from leadership. Refuse false choices. Design organizations around outcomes, not face time.
“Female founders still receive just 2.1% of VC funding,” Sophia notes. “Often we’re told we’re ‘not serious enough’ if we have families. But Search Atlas proves the opposite. The question isn’t whether women with children can build successful companies. It’s whether investors and organizations will stop penalizing us for refusing to pretend we don’t have full lives.”
About Sophia Deluz-Bhan
Sophia Deluz-Bhan is COO and co-founder of Search Atlas Group, which she scaled from $2M to $30M ARR while raising her daughter, Ruby. She operates Paz Sanctuary, an animal rescue across two countries, and has built Search Atlas as a fully remote organization of 250+ employees. Search Atlas was awarded Best SEO Software Suite (Global Search Awards 2024), Best AI Search Software Solution (Global Search Awards 2025), and named #1 SEO Platform by Capterra with a 4.9/5 rating. Sophia advocates for work-life integration over balance and designs operational systems that enable working mothers to lead without sacrificing presence.
