Whether it’s a side hustle, a small racket, or you’re operating a wealth machine, running a business can be nerve-wracking and often stressful. In modern work culture, the term “multitasking” has been overused to the point that it’s counterproductive. Doing all things at once and not prioritizing your mental health can be detrimental to you and your future.
Today we’re joined by an amazing woman and a hotshot entrepreneur who’s proved to support women in their thriving business, Patty Block. In 2006, Patty founded The Block Group to empower women-owned businesses and bring unique solutions, especially to the complex issues in the industry. And most importantly, her organization is on the lookout to bring in more revenue with little to no stress involved. Catch her in our talk today.
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Women’s Journey to Success: Roadblocks to Building Blocks in Business with Patty Block
Welcome to Actions-Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. A lot of us on our journeys are going to be building something, building a business, or building something similar, whether it be a side hustle or your main hustle. One of the problems that a lot of people encounter, especially when your business is a side hustle and you need other forms of revenue to keep yourself afloat, is stress. We, oftentimes, have a lot on our plates. Our work, our side hustles are not the only things we have on our plates. Oftentimes, we have family. We have other social and community obligations. Those things are important as well.
My guest today, Patty Block, is the founder of The Block Group. Her organization helps women entrepreneurs bring in more revenue without creating more stress. Yes, they don’t have to go hand in hand. At least, that’s what Patty has to say for you today.
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Patty, welcome to the program.
Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
Definitely. Thank you for joining us. One of the things I’m wondering is, your main message here is that you don’t have to create more stress to create more revenue. What does that generally look like? What should the average person be thinking that that means to create more revenue in their business without creating more stress?
There are several pieces to that. I think everything starts with pricing. The people that I typically work with are women business owners who are experts in their fields — a lot of accountants, attorneys, engineers, and PR and marketing professionals. The market is screaming at us to get bigger to scale. That’s, of course, the jargon that everybody uses, “We have to grow and scale.”
Yep. Everyone wants to scale, Have it be a unicorn.
Exactly. First of all, not everyone wants that. Secondly, there’s a lot of shoulds in that, “We should get bigger. We should do these certain things,” just like “We should spend a lot of money on marketing.” For most of the people I know, those marketing strategies don’t work. They’re very expensive, so we’re pouring a lot of money into that. There are things that work better, especially for women, that focus on how you can bring in more money, but not add to your stress of juggling all these different issues, and family, and business. Once you add a lot of employees to the mix and you have management responsibilities, that creates a tremendous amount of stress.
It's really finding the right balance for you as a person and you as a business owner. Share on X
One message I’m hearing, which I’d like to reiterate for my audience, is you don’t have to scale. You don’t have to become a unicorn. I’m sure there’s plenty of people — maybe their dream is to start their own business and run an operation where they employ four or five people, and have $1 million a year in revenue, and that’s all they really want. One of the things you’re saying, it sounds like, is that that’s okay. Stop pressuring yourself to do what the Silicon-Valley-type lingo was always saying, “You have to want to scale up to become big.”
That’s exactly right. Again, there’s not a one-size-fits-all.
I often talk about, “Build your business in your way.” However, you may not have all the background experience and knowledge you need to build your business. That’s where I help my clients. I think everything starts with pricing and making sure that we’re pricing for value, and we’re not stuck in that hourly billing model.
When you talk about pricing, are there a lot of people settling for less in how they price their services? Is this an issue that you find is more prominent among women than men?
Yes, absolutely. In fact, let me share with you. When I was growing up, my mom made these fabulous cookies. The whole house smelled good. It was warm. Cookies were gooey. It makes your mouth water. My whole life, I watched my mom eat the broken cookies. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I even thought to ask her, “Why do you only eat the broken cookies? Do they taste better?” She laughed and said, “No. I eat the broken cookies, so you can have the whole ones.”
Not too long ago, I saw this really shocking statistic. 62% of women rely on their businesses for their primary income. 88% of those businesses make less than $100,000 a year. I started to connect the dots between what I call the broken-cookie effect and this idea of keeping your business artificially limited.
It's not about size. It's not whether it's big or small. It's about limitations and stepping into your power. Share on X
As I started connecting the dots and realizing, that’s what we, as women, are doing. We’re following the example set by our role models, our mothers and our grandmothers, where we’re bringing that spirit of self-sacrifice into our businesses, and acting like there’s a glass ceiling when there isn’t. That is why I focus on helping women generate more revenue with less stress, because, to your point exactly, it is keeping those businesses very limited in what they can do and the kinds of results they can get. They have a very limited audience because of that.
That is counterproductive for all of these women who are building very successful businesses. They still feel not only terribly stressed because they’re juggling so many things, including their families and extended families, but also, they feel as if they can’t keep up. There’s this sense of, I’m failing somehow if I’m not doing the same things my colleagues and competitors are doing. There’s a lot of comparison.
It sounds like what you’re phrasing this as is a limited mindset. This limited mindset is likely behind, what it sounds like is, artificially low prices or people pricing their services lower than they should be. Does this also refer to how people will market, how people will go after other clients or what kinds of clients even they pursue?
Definitely. That’s a really good point. It limits a lot of different things. The reason I start with pricing is because everything else flows from pricing. If your prices are too low, or let’s say you’re still using that hourly billing model, then because you’re an expert and you have all this experience, you could do — in fact, I have a client who used this example. She is a chief marketing officer. She’s outsourced to smaller companies. She has said she did an entire marketing plan and a rebranding in about three hours. If she’s on an hourly billing model, the value of that is tens of thousands of dollars, and yet, she was paid $2,000. You can start to see that it’s not just the dollar amount; it’s the method. It’s the structure of your pricing.
That’s interesting, because one of the things that I, oftentimes, tell people, something fundamentally changed about our work when we left the factories and entered what’s referred to as the service-sector economy. When we’re in the factories, the hourly billing model made sense, because the value of your work as well as strict in work hours — 8:00AM to 5:00PM, blah, blah, blah — was almost perfectly correlated with the number of hours you were there until you start to get tired, or fall down, or whatever they used to do back in the day.
Now that we have these service-sector jobs, the connection between the number of hours you’re working, what specific average you’re working, and the value you’re producing for people, is far less pronounced. Someone could easily be working tons and tons of hours but not really producing anything of value, while someone could be, as your examples with your client, producing a lot of value in a small amount of time. One of the things that sounds like you’re doing with your business is helping people lean into these high value in a short-amount-of-time type of proposition, because that’s where you reduce the stress.
I think that’s part of it, and that’s a good point. In my view, because I love the work I do, and so do all my clients — we love the work we do. We feel like we make a difference every day. Because of that, I don’t worry about the time. It doesn’t matter to me whether I spend an hour or three hours on something. I work very efficiently. What does matter a lot to me is that I’m compensated for the value that I’m bringing to the client. There’s so much fear underneath pricing. We’re afraid that if we price too high, we’ll “price” ourselves out of the market.
There’s no such thing as what the market can bear. I really believe that. It’s about finding your buyer and building value in the mind of your buyer. That combination is part of what reduces the stress, because you have a process and a system. That’s what I teach. I teach how to build a structure around your pricing, how to raise prices if needed, and how to talk about that. That’s the hardest thing — just to be confident and understand that there really is a rationale behind your pricing. I have a sales method that works very well for women, that feels more like matchmaking. I teach that to my clients.
The combination of those two things, the pricing structure and that selling method, make it so much easier, not only to find and help your ideal buyer understand what’s going on and how you can help them, but also because you feel so much more confident when you’re sharing your information. You know that you’re not just making up. You’re not guessing at a price or guessing at the number of hours it will take you. I will tell you, we guess wrong.
Yeah.
100% of the time, we guess wrong.
Almost always. Anyone that’s ever done project-management type of stuff knows that our estimates — or even just look at how government contracts work. Our estimates, they’re just guesses. That’s it.
That’s exactly right. There is a price point for every buyer. Your buyers are already segmented. If you think of a retail example, like Walmart, Macy’s, and Neiman Marcus — in that situation, when you walk into the store, you know the quality and the prices that you should expect going into a Walmart versus a Macy’s.
If I’m buying it for a wedding, I’m willing to spend more than if I’m buying it for a work event.
All of those things factor in. We don’t really think about that when we look at our own pricing inside our businesses. We think either hourly, or we think there’s some issue of, “I’m going to customize this for every client. Every prospect that comes to me is special, is different.” There’s no standardization. That also causes stress. Now, we have to spend three hours working on our proposal, instead of 30 minutes, because we’re creating something new every time we have a prospect.
Interesting. That reminds me of people like Steve Jobs, who would famously wear the same exact clothing every day. What he would say is, “I don’t want to think about this. It’s one less thing to stress out about. ‘What am I going to wear today?’ I have other things on my mind.” You’re saying that the pricing model is one of the areas where people can reduce stress by standardizing, by saying, “This is the standard package,” and then maybe occasionally, make a need-space adjustment for certain specific situations, but usually, not really think about it.
Yes, and also, to have a combination of choices. Many of my clients bill on a monthly basis — a type of retainer situation — but then, they know their clients have specific projects. Instead of trying to figure out all the pricing at the beginning of the engagement, they might price on a monthly basis and then scope a particular project. That’s a really common combination that you can use. Meanwhile, you have the revenue coming in every month. It helps stabilize your company when you have something like that, instead of these revenue ups and downs that a lot of people struggle with.
Just think of any software package right now. Usually, there’s monthly packages. There’s typically three options, maybe a free option as well. Those are the types of structures that combine different types of shoppers or different needs, but also keep that revenue relatively stable as opposed to, “Oh, 15 people bought something big last month, but only one bought this month.” You have to even that out yourself.
Yes. For most service providers, we’re not working on a volume model. We don’t have 5,000 clients, nor do we want 5000 clients unless you’re in software as you mentioned, with software-as-a-service. Most service providers and certainly professionals, we’re boutique practices, and we like it that way. We limit the number of people that we take on. When you start getting creative with your pricing model, you can actually take more people, because you’re increasing the efficiency and reducing your personal stress. You can take on more people if you want to, or you can take on bigger clients if you want to, where you might not have had the capacity to do so earlier in your journey.
Would you say that since you’re dealing with people, as you said, that really like their core job, really like what they’re doing, you’re just trying to minimize as much as possible — business and a lot of things going on — all this other stuff, whether it’d be dealing with employee relations, dealing with pricing models, and all that stuff, so that they can spend as much of their time as possible doing that job function that they originally signed up with a job function that they love?
Exactly. That’s part of the problem with selling.
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When we don’t know what we’re doing, we avoid it. We’re experts, so we know what we’re doing, and we’re providing our service. All those other things feel like a distraction to us. What ends up happening then is we avoid it. We set our pricing when we start our company. We just don’t worry about it anymore, because it feels like conflict to have to change it, because then, you have to deal with objections. You have to answer questions.
All of those things keep us stuck and go back to that glass-ceiling idea that we’re almost creating it in our own companies without realizing it. It’s the same thing with selling. My clients, in general, would much rather be delivering their service than bringing in new clients. When I can help them see sales in a different way, I really help them see their whole company in a different way. That reduces their stress. They’re more receptive to working on things that make them uncomfortable, like pricing and sales.
You’ve talked before about uncomfortable conversations. I think a lot of people do tend to avoid uncomfortable conversations. It results in strained relationships, passive-aggressive behavior, all these other things. What role does embracing uncomfortable conversations and understanding their true context play in reducing the stress and increasing the revenue in a business?
When you are less direct, there can be a lot of misunderstandings. Just because you say it, doesn’t mean the listener gets it. We make that mistake every day. We, as humans, make that mistake every day. We think, “Well, we said it. We don’t need to say it again. Certainly, I was clear enough. Certainly, the other person gets it.” That is almost never the case. We make all these assumptions about communication. When you are very direct, very transparent, you have what I call key points, so you know what you want to communicate, and you repeat that, because people are not good listeners. They’re so distracted. They’re not tuning in to you.
As a business owner, that can be really frustrating. However, you have the opportunity to improve your communication and your listening skills through using tools. For example, I recommend, in the sales method, that you use something called a needs analysis. That is asking strategic questions of your prospect. When you do that and, of course, you’re listening to the answers, you’re also reflecting back and double-checking to make sure they got it, to make sure you got it, that you understood what the point they were trying to make. All of those communications methods are critical as you are building your business.
That reminds me of whenever people will listen to something and then repeat back what they just said, and make sure they understand the context of it. It says, “What I’m hearing from you is that this is what’s going on, this is how it’s affecting your business, and this is what you’re looking for.” Is that a way people can get more comfortable with the idea of being direct? Whatever fear comes around when someone’s afraid to be direct, so they beat around the bush. They’d be like, “Well, it’d be nice if we had something different,” as opposed to saying directly, “No, this is what I want.”
That’s called active listening, what you just described, of reflecting back. There is a whole method built around active listening. Again, it’s part of what I teach, because, to your exact point, that is the foundational aspect for everything else — that level of communication.
Yes, there are uncomfortable conversations. Absolutely. Sometimes, you’ll have them with a prospect, or with a client, sometimes with a family member. We all deal with that.
Yeah.
Those misunderstandings — there’s a big difference and there’s a big gap between knowing what you want and getting what you want. It’s very pronounced for women in particular, partially, because of the broken-cookie effect. We’re always putting others first. We may not even recognize what we need, what we want. Once we do, then we may not be comfortable to speak up, and to ask for that thing, including appropriate compensation for the results that you’re bringing to your clients.
What are the mechanics? What are the calculations? How do you develop these or customize the tools so that you can move things forward in a way that’s authentic for you, brings in more revenue, and doesn’t cause more stress?
A lot of these women that you’re working with are trying to overcome what you refer to as the broken-cookie method, or believing that others need to be taken care of first, or that their value is lower than what it really is in this compensation. One of the things I’m wondering is, I’ve heard some competing schools of thought as far as how people go about making changes within themselves. Of course, those changes reflect in their environment. Some people often talk about this idea of changing by doing. A clear example of that would be, you could be happier by simply smiling. Even if it’s a phony smile, it’ll release the endorphins in your brain, and therefore, just make you happy.
Other people believe that you need to do the work internally before it reflects outward. You can’t really expect people to treat you with the proper amount of respect until you go inside and determine that you have this level of respect. you deserve this level of compensation, you deserve this life even which is what really the end result or the ultimate goal is — the life of being less stressed and still spending most of their time doing the thing that they love doing. My question is, as you’re working with these women to overcome the broken-cookie effect, which of these two schools of thought do you feel like you lean a little bit more towards?
Like most things in life, I think it’s a combination. I think you do have to do the internal work. I founded my company in 2006. I’ve been working with women business owners for a very long time. Like all experts, I thought, “Oh, I get this. I understand all the challenges women are dealing with. I am a woman business owner.” I fell into that trap of “I know better”.
I went out and did some market research. I found what every expert finds if they are brave enough to ask the questions, I don’t know all the challenges. I’ve made assumptions, so I needed to change my mindset. That was the first thing. I need to be listening closer to my audience. When I started asking, sometimes, difficult questions, but certainly, strategic questions about the challenges that women business owners are facing, I got answers that surprised me. I will also say I was thrilled.
This goes to changing your mind by doing. I’m going through market research. I’m interviewing people. I’m recording that. I’m processing the information I’m getting where I thought the issue was going to be about juggling a million things. I thought that was the number one issue for women business owners. That wasn’t. What I realized is, it’s a symptom. What I kept hearing was revenues go up and down. How do I get steady revenue? How do I build on what I’ve already built? That’s what I kept hearing and that’s how I narrowed the message to really understanding how women price, how we do it now, and how it would be more effective for us as people and us as business owners.
That shifting my mind by doing is part of what I did. I also teach people how to shift your mindset. For example, I have an exercise about how you attach value, how you change your mindset. I have a four-step process for how you can start shifting how you think, bringing to people’s awareness these limiting beliefs, and believing that you have to price based on what the market can bear — it’s a huge limiting belief — and understanding your own value, and how to talk about it, because it feels like bragging. We avoid that.
I'm based in Texas. Here in Texas, we have a saying: It's not bragging if it's true. Share on X
I love it. I love it.
That’s something I help women understand. What you’re talking about, your value, the value of your service, that is factual. You know the kinds of results you can get. I teach them how to talk about it in a more effective way that doesn’t feel like bragging.
Wow, okay, so much to unpackage there. First of all, I think one key mindset moment for the listener is a lot of people’s fear of being wrong. I get where it comes from, because it’s ingrained to us in our schooling system. If you get too many questions wrong, you fail the test. People end up in this idea, whereas it feels like, to really grow and advance as a person, as a human, as a business, everything else, you need to embrace being wrong. That sounds exactly like what you did back in 2006 when you were starting the business, embracing being wrong.
The other thing is, of course, exactly what you said at the end. It’s not bragging if it’s true. One of the things I wonder is, because there is some negative connotation some people have around people who brag too much, is there a need to walk this fine line or have this right combination of bragging or saying what your true value is without coming across as cocky, conceited, full of yourself as some of the backlash to it will often accuse people of?
Yes. We all struggle with people that are arrogant. That is not at all what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is stepping into your power. You have a power inside you, and you know it. That’s why you do what you do, because you have a power that you can bring to your clients. We all want to help our clients. We all want to serve others.
With the broken-cookie effect, I’m not saying don’t serve others. I’m saying serve others.
The better you take care of yourself, the better you can serve others.
It sounds like with some of the stress stuff, it’s the compensation as well as other things that are important to you — say, “I want to be able to spend time with my family. I want to have time to work out, keep my physical health in shape,” as well as the other things you need for your mental health. We’ve had several episodes about it. We will have several more, at least, about mental health, because that is a very important and underappreciated aspect of the human experience.
It is. You’re exactly right. The other part of that is, business owners can feel very alone, and often, don’t have a trusted resource to talk to, or to listen to them, or to understand what they’re dealing with. That affects us emotionally as well. We may or may not feel lonely, but we feel alone. We feel, sometimes, like we’re the only ones dealing with these challenges.
One of the programs that I put together is called the revenue roundtable. That came from the market research and that sense of feeling alone. I built a community of high-level women business owners. I curate the group very carefully. Everything that we do is about generating more revenue in lots of different ways. It’s not all about pricing. It brings together a group of women who now feel less alone. It’s a safe space. We know we can talk about any issue there, both personal and professional, because we don’t live in a silo. We don’t just get to focus on business all the time. There are lots of demands on us, as mothers, grandmothers, daughters, sisters — lots of demands on us. That is part of the goal of the revenue roundtable. It’s helping you generate more revenue with less stress and have that community.
That’s amazing, because that’s one of the things I’ve been feeling for quite a long time. A lot of the problems of our current era are related to lack of community. Why are more people turning to violence, drug addiction, suicide, all these horrible results? The disconnect that a lot of people have seems behind it. At a meeting of the revenue roundtable, what does it typically turn out like? Do you have to have certain controls on the event to make sure it doesn’t get too much on a soapbox or too far off the rails on things?
I really don’t. What we do is we have a set of standards. Anyone who knows me will not be surprised by that. It’s a set of standards that everyone commits to before they join the revenue roundtable. It has become a very cohesive group, because we care so much about each other. I facilitate all the meetings, and there’s a big educational component to that. It is very respectful. No one goes off the rails. Everyone is there not only to learn and to figure out how to get over their challenges, but they’re there to help others in the group.
At our last meeting, we had a member who was very upset. She was crying, and I noticed that right away. I asked her, “What’s happening? Are you okay?” The fact that she was there, even though she was feeling very emotional, reinforces what a safe space it is. Otherwise, she would have missed the meeting, if she wasn’t feeling up to attending. She was very upset about a business issue, and she talked about it. Everyone in the group could support her. Everyone in the group has experienced what she’s experiencing.
Again, it’s not just about being sympathetic. We’re empathetic. We’ve been there. We know about those revenue ups and downs. We know about when you have to fire an employee and how painful that is, or an employee quits, and you feel lost. You feel betrayed. You feel abandoned. It’s hard not to take it personally. All of those challenges that we all face as business owners, that’s what we can bring into the roundtable.
That’s amazing. It seems like, for anyone out there that’s thinking about community as a pursuit — and I wholly encourage all the community-building that we can get — part of it is having the right people and the right expectations. We see a lot of communities. I’m mainly talking about social media here, where people just start mudslinging and yelling back and forth about their differences. It seems like, as you said, you got the right people and the right expectations. Therefore, it really isn’t that anything goes wrong; it’s just there to support one another and also generate ideas for each other.
Yes. That’s really the whole idea behind the revenue roundtable. When I talk about an educational component, I have an online program called value driven pricing and another called painless selling the ideal buyers. The value driven pricing — everyone in the roundtable is required to take that. It’s included with their membership. We have a common language. Because I firmly believe that everything flows from pricing, that’s where we start. People see an almost immediate return on investment, because not only do they increase their prices, they change the whole structure of their prices, which builds their confidence and makes it easier to talk about. It’s a whole process that is so beneficial. Everyone that has taken the program gets that right away and starts to generate more revenue right away.
If we’re looking at where all the problems lie, you see the first pain point being the pricing model. What are the other pain points? What are the other areas you see where a lot of women you work with need to make adjustments to their business to build a more functional, less stressful existence with the business for that matter?
There are a couple areas. It’s a really great question. A lot of things that we think of as problems, I think of as symptoms.
When we try to fix symptoms, we're not going to get a good outcome, because we're not fixing the underlying problems. Share on X
I’ll give you an example. People that are always putting out fires, they’re juggling a lot of things. They feel like it goes from one bad situation to another that they have to deal with. That’s a symptom. It’s a symptom that you may not have the business processes that you need. It’s a symptom that you may not be charging enough to be able to hire people to help you. It doesn’t have to be employees. I work with a lot of small businesses that hire contractors, or they hire freelancers, and that’s a very good model. Most of my clients have a distributed workforce. They don’t have a central office, and everybody works from home. That has its own challenges as we’ve seen during the pandemic.
Understanding how you can manage either a combination, a hybrid office, or a distributed workforce, there are specific challenges, knowing what to pay people. Again, if you’re not charging what you could be charging, that means that the people that have helped you, you’re probably not paying them very well, which means they’re not going to stay. You’re spending a lot of time and energy training those people, and they’re not going to stay. Again, that’s a symptom. That’s, I think, a good example of what I mean when I say everything flows from pricing.
Once you are generating more revenue, then you have choices. You can pay people better. You can add people. You can hire a third-party vendor that could also be really helpful to you. A lot of people do that. For example, I outsource my content marketing. I have a third-party vendor who does that. That’s more efficient for me. I have to have the funds to be able to pay for that. All of those aspects, a lot of things that we think of as problems are really symptoms. We need to fix the underlying problems.
It sounds like the underlying problem most commonly is pricing, and underlying to that is the broken-cookie issue as you mentioned it — the whole believing that you need to sacrifice more and believing that you need to take care of others before taking care of yourself.
Correct. That also showed up in my market research as I was doing the interviews. I asked the question, “If you had an extra $100,000 in your business, what would you do with it?” 100% of the people who responded answered, “I would give my staff a raise. I would hire more people. I would do a company retreat. I would probably upgrade my technology, so it’s more efficient for my staff.” All of that is fabulous. That’s wonderful, but what happened to mama?
Yeah.
What happened to – would you pay yourself more? Would you take more money out of your company? Would you structure things any differently if you had more revenue or steadier revenue? That’s what I wasn’t hearing. I then would ask the question, “Would you pay yourself more?” Most of the time, they said no. They said, “I would focus on building the business to be bigger.” Bigger is not necessarily better. It’s not just about pricing, but when you have more revenue, you have more choices.
With that more revenue, obviously, some of these upgrades to your staff, hiring another person, treating your staff better, has a potential to create less stress and give you back more of your time versus giving yourself more money. It’s interesting to hear different perspectives about, essentially, what’s more valuable — having more money or having more time?
My contention is you can have both. Exactly to your point, that’s the whole idea behind the broken-cookie effect. You don’t get to have both. Somehow, everybody else gets to have both, but you don’t. It works against us in many, many ways. My belief is, you can have both. You can have more revenue. You can have more time and efficiency. You can use your energy better. All of that contributes to having less stress.
This idea of sacrifice is pretty prevalent in our culture. One of the questions we often ask is, “Have you ever had to work hard? Have you ever had to sacrifice? Have you ever had to do that?” It almost seemed like a badge of honor. People, oftentimes, will be resentful of people that don’t seem to have to be sacrificing. It’s like, “Oh, you seem to have it easy.” It seems like with your clients, you’re fighting this idea, this cultural prevalence. What I’m wondering is, is that something that, in the revenue roundtable, you’re helping people do by reinforcing, “Okay, culture may be saying this. Culture may be saying to you, ‘You have to sacrifice. If you’ve never had to work hard, you’re not deserving of sympathy,’ all this stuff. We need to talk with each other,” and keep reinforcing that lesson that you’re telling people that this is not the way it really is. It is okay to take care of yourself. It’s okay to not feel stressed and be successful.
Yes, definitely reinforced that. The other part is, for my clients and colleagues, there is no problem with whether or not we work hard, because we all do. In fact, we over deliver. I call it the double whammy for women, because we underprice our services and then we over deliver. That makes it almost impossible for our businesses to be profitable. That isn’t taking care of ourselves. There is an emotional toll, and you mentioned that earlier. There is a huge emotional toll.
Part of what I’m looking for here is balance. How do we balance out our business, our personal lives? I don’t really believe in that work-life balance idea. As a business owner, your business is your baby. There is no distinction in my mind between my business life and my personal life.
Yeah. They say you never put it down. You never say, “I’m just going to forget about this for a few weeks,” or anything like that.
No way, nor do we want to.
Yeah, exactly. That’s the thing. People are scared about that. People start businesses. They’re so passionate about what they’re doing. They don’t want to forget about it for a while. Maybe they want to have a night out and do something different from time to time, but they’re not the average employee where it’s like, “Ugh, I just need a break.”
Exactly. We do think we need a break, but we often don’t take breaks, or we take very short breaks. Yes, absolutely to your point — the emotional toll is real. We want to find balance in everything that we’re doing, but you shouldn’t have to sacrifice things that are important to you in order to be successful. In Western culture and the media, there’s a very specific idea about what it means to be successful. I think, as business owners, we have the right and responsibility to define that for ourselves.
The same thing with whether it’d be work setup, work culture, or even pursuits. Our prevailing culture tends to ingrain in us one model of success. Success is either you build a business, you can get it bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, when you go to a corporation and you move up the ladder — up, up, up — until you get to the vice president, C-level suite. Some people really just don’t want that. For some people, success may be “I made enough money to get by, but I was always there for my children. I was always making a positive impact on my community.”
One last thing I’d like to do for all my guests listening to this conversation. If anyone is interested in The Block Group, interested in getting a hold of you, taking part in some of your initiatives or your coaching, what would be the best way that someone can contact you?
I’d like to offer your audience a quiz. It’s a free quiz. That is the revenue roadblocks quiz. You can go to my website at theblockgroup.net, and there’s a link to go to the quiz. What that does is it allows you to start to discover what is in your way — if you have revenue ups and downs, if maybe your pricing is too low, or you have no structure to your pricing, or you have an old structure that maybe you used years ago and you just kept it. You start to understand some of the things that are in your way.
Once you complete the quiz, you will get a report. That can be really helpful, because it outlines for you some of the next steps you can take to deal with those roadblocks. That’s one option. Of course, you can reach me through my website at theblockgroup.net. I also love to connect with people on LinkedIn. When you connect with me, please send me a note to let me know that you heard me on this podcast so that I can connect the dots, and we’ll know where you heard me. I love meeting people through LinkedIn. You’re welcome to reach out to me. It’s Patty Block.
Thank you very much, Patty. I encourage everyone to investigate their revenue roadblocks out there, anything you can do to build more connections and to improve the way you’re looking at things. I love the whole process of reducing the amount of stress we all put ourselves through. Patty, I would like to thank you so much for the conversation. Thank you so much for joining us on Actions-Antidotes and connecting with my audience.
I would also like to thank my audience out there as I do every time for listening, for tuning in. I encourage you to tune in to more episodes. By now, there’s probably enough old episodes. If you’re looking for more, you can tap into the first 45 or so, and probably find some more really good interesting conversations with people that are doing interesting things to follow their own passions, whether it’d be building a business, or helping other people build their businesses, or any of the other community and health pursuits that I’ve covered in the past.
Thank you very much and have a great rest of your day.
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About Patty Block
Patty Block helps women business owners who are experts in their fields fine-tune their operations and scale their revenue for strategic growth. As their trusted advisor, she brings a unique perspective, having experienced and solved many of the same complex issues women face, as leaders, as moms, daughters and sisters. A few years ago, Patty came across a shocking statistic: 62% of women rely on their businesses for their primary income, yet 88% of these businesses generate less than $100,000 in annual revenue. Her mission is teaching women how to generate more revenue with less stress, by reimagining pricing and selling. Patty raised three fantastic kids, all of whom are business owners and also work in Patty’s company (she essentially raised her own workforce!)