Broken Glass

What would you redesign if protecting your energy was a strategic priority? 

It’s Thursday afternoon, just before her next client call, and Naomi lies on the floor of her office, staring at the ceiling. 

Not because she’s being dramatic. Because she has ten minutes and no energy left to perform being an owner whose business is ‘going well’. 

Nobody sees the private arithmetic of her business. The sleep debt. The low-grade resentment. The way she treats Sunday evenings like the mouth of a tunnel. The fact that she can no longer tell whether her business supports her life or merely consumes it more gracefully than a job once had… 

Patty’s Perspective . . .

I had to break the news to Naomi: she had reached one of the most dangerous stages of a highly successful business, when the numbers validate a model her body is quietly rejecting. 

A profitable business is often treated as self-justifying. If it works financially, surely the answer is to optimize it, scale it, support it, appreciate it.  

But money is an incomplete metric, especially in expertise-based service businesses where the owner’s mind, nervous system, and emotional steadiness are central production assets. 

If the business extracts from those assets faster than they can regenerate, profitability can be real and the model may still be wrong. 

Chronic depletion in a mature business is frequently a design issue, not a wellness issue. 

Energy is not merely about hours worked. It is about the quality of demand your business makes on you. Two calendars can look equally full and have radically different physiological costs.  

One contains decisive clients, clear offers, realistic timelines, and work that uses your best strengths. The other contains ambiguity, high emotional labor, constant context switching, and decisions that should have been made earlier by someone else. Same revenue, different damage. 

For Naomi, capability became the trap. She can carry complexity, hold relationships, absorb nuance, produce under pressure, and recover quickly enough to keep the machine going. So she does. Until her mind and body file a protest. 

That protest comes as migraines and a new, frightening indifference toward work Naomi once loved. 

That indifference is important. When women can no longer feel devotion toward businesses they built carefully, they often assume they are ungrateful or burned out beyond repair.  

The solution is not always less work. Sometimes it is different work, cleaner work, truer work.  

Fewer clients but larger scopes. Tighter offers. More teaching, less hand-holding. Longer timelines. Better sequencing. Stronger minimums. More recovery space between cognitively heavy sessions.  

Naomi and I restructured everything weighing her down. We reduced the number of live client days, raised prices, eliminated one draining offer that clients loved but she dreaded, and built more non-client thinking time into her schedule.  

She worried revenue would collapse. It rose modestly. But more importantly, she stopped lying on the floor between meetings trying to gather herself like broken glass.

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. 

The Elegant Exit™ provides two viable paths when you reach that fork in the road: 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’. 

My research and decades of experience lead me to these conclusions:

 ‎ ‎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/