Whose Voice Is That?

If the most ambitious woman you know inherited your business tomorrow, what would she change in the first 30 days—and why haven't you? 

Laurie isn’t meeting my eyes when I ask this. Is she angry? Shocked? Relieved? 

I know it’s a hard question but a super important thought experiment.  

The truth is this: her business is already generating enough to make her wealthy, but…

Patty’s Perspective . . .

Laurie doesn’t have a revenue problem; she has a capture problem. Wealth isn't being created and then lost—it's being created and never collected in the first place. 

Laurie still wants to believe in the corporate fairy tale: grow, grow, grow; scale, scale, scale; and someday (maybe) you’ll sell your company to the perfect heir for a large pot of gold. 

Somewhere along the way, like many of us, Laurie absorbed a set of rules:  

• be available

• be reasonable 

• don't talk about money 

• put clients first 

• don't be too aggressive about profit 

• reinvest in the business before paying yourself  

• visibility is earned through service, not claimed through confidence 

These unspoken rules are the result of The Broken Cookie Effect®. The spirit of self-sacrifice we saw in our role models—our mothers and grandmothers—translates into an internal monologue that undermines us in business. 

Whose voice do you hear in your head? 

For Laurie, the money is already there. It's flowing through her business and out the other side—into overhead that could be trimmed, into underpriced services that could be raised, into a compensation structure that pays her last and least, into tax strategies that were never implemented.  

The biggest constraints on her wealth and freedom are not in her market, her clients, or her business model. They are in the story she has been telling herself about what she is allowed to do and have.  

Start your evaluation with these strategic questions: 

• Write down three things you believe you cannot do in your business—then ask honestly: who told you that, and why do you believe it? Is that belief empowering or restricting you? 

• What would you charge if you were completely certain no one who mattered would think less of you for it? 
• Is there a version of your business you've privately imagined but never said out loud—and what exactly are you afraid would happen if you said it? 
• Which ‘rules’ are you following right now that were written for a version of you that no longer exists?
   

Now What?

Imagine you’re walking on a dusty country road with long grass and beautiful wildflowers defining the path. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and tiny birds are flittering all around. You hear their songs and feel the breeze ruffle your hair. 

You’re going where you want to go, at the pace you want to travel. You’re in control. 

Now, there’s a fork in that dusty road and it’s up to you to decide the path right for you. 

I’m describing your business journey—sometimes beautiful, sometimes harsh, and always worth it.  

The fork in the road is how you want to exit, because you will exit someday, whether it’s chosen or forced.

Exiting your business is complex and confounding. Since 2006, I’ve seen women get harassed, hurt, and hustled. All. The. Time.  

That’s why I help women founders achieve an Elegant Exit™—because you deserve better. 

My research and decades of experience now have me challenging the basic premise of building wealth through a business sale. Not because selling isn’t certain—because it’s contingent. 
 
The truth is the Elegant Exit™ provides two viable paths: Latent Capital™ or Living Capital™.  

Both create freedom. Both build wealth. Both reduce stress. But they require different truths, different emotional muscles, and different definitions of ‘enough’.

 ‎ ‎1. Latent Capital™: selling, merging, or creating a deal that moves you out of the business.

The math can work IF you’re generating upwards of $5M annually, with consistent, predictable revenue. You have a strong leadership team. You’ve actively built real business value. And you have the patience and commitment to handle the emotional rollercoaster of the sales process.

‎ ‎ ‎2. Living Capital™: extracting value from the business while you still own it.

This is not about passive income—it’s about portable power. Generally, this is a better fit for businesses generating less than $5M annually. Women who choose this path tend to be deeply loyal—to clients, teams, and the identities they’ve worn for decades. Their exit comes in the form of evolving and extracting.

An exit is elegant only if it increases your personal wealth while decreasing the stress required to maintain it.

Anything else is just endurance with better branding.

The Elegant Exit™ is how you convert business success into real wealth—without sacrificing your nervous system to get there.

As your advocate, I’m looking out for your best interests, guiding you to discover right-fit options, execute critical decisions, and cultivate personal wealth. 

Contact me to learn more. 

What are your biggest blind spots in crafting an exit? Find out at: http://she-exits.com/