Your Wealth-Building Engine

“Your value doesn’t decrease based on someone’s inability to see your worth.” – Sheryl Sandberg, technology executive, philanthropist and writer.

What we believe is a funny thing. We’re strongly attached to some beliefs and yet, we allow others to evolve.

Belief can be strong and powerful, sometimes providing safety and sometimes feeling dangerous. I see this all the time with pricing, when women are afraid raising prices will scare away clients.

So watch out—because in every BELIEF there lives a LIE…

Today’s BlockbustHER BrainteasHER:

Are you building revenue—or an engine that creates wealth?

Patty’s Perspective . . .

The most radical thing about Living Capital™ is not the money—it’s the timing.

In fact, for women running companies under $5M in annual revenue, I’ve come to believe that you have more control, better focus on your real priorities, and better odds of building wealth when you build Living Capital™, instead of trying to sell your business to a stranger (what I call Latent Capital™).

For Renee, learning how to harvest from her business was a revelation.

She had once dreamed of a sale. But then we did the math. The fees. The taxes. The years she’d be locked into an earn-out while pretending she was ‘free’.

Instead, she and I designed an exit that paid her before she was done.

We built a wealth-building engine—deliberately, without drama. Distributions increased. Complexity decreased. And Renee created an intentional separation between business success and personal security.

• Designing the Engine
  
  

A wealth-building engine has three core cogs:

1. Extraction: deciding how and when the business pays you, not just what it retains. It turns profit into capital you can redeploy.
   
   
2. Diversification: ensures that no single source—client, market, or business—controls your financial future. It reduces reliance on continued performance.
   
   
3. Continuity: creates value that survives transitions. This might include equity structures, recurring revenue, or assets that remain productive beyond your active involvement.
   
   

As with any financial strategy, all three of these cogs require intentional design.

• Emotional Resistance to Wealth
  
  

Many founders hesitate here—not for financial reasons, but emotional ones.

Extracting wealth can feel disloyal. Planning beyond the business can feel like hedging bets. Preparing for life after the company can feel premature.

But wealth planning is not abandonment. It’s maturity.

A founder who builds personal wealth is not less committed to her business. She’s less dependent on it. Your business may be your biggest asset, but it shouldn’t be your only asset.

And that independence changes everything—from how you negotiate, to how you exit, to how you live.

• The Shift That Changes Everything

The moment Renee reframed her goal—from maximizing business revenue to building personal wealth—the strategy changed.

She still cares about growth. She still leads well. But she stopped confusing revenue with security.

“I realized I wasn’t building wealth,” she said. “I was just very good at earning.”

That realization didn’t diminish her ambition. It refined it. Because for Renee, wealth isn’t about excess. It’s about independence.

Now What?

If you’re like me, you’ve been taught that wealth comes after the hard part. That stress is a phase. That relief must be earned through suffering.

This belief is so deeply embedded that you may feel guilty when things get easier—even when you’ve already paid the price ten times over.

What if your real power-move is designing a company that pays you extraordinarily well while you own it?

What if your business can become a wealth-building tool so you don’t have to wait for some imagined, high-risk reward for endurance? This is what I call Living Capital™.

The corporate growth-and-exit paradigm rewards aggression, detachment, and delayed fulfillment. It assumes someone else is carrying the emotional, domestic, and relational load while the founder builds ‘enterprise value’.

We didn’t opt into that model because it was a good fit—we adapted because it was the only one offered.

So we contorted our businesses—and ourselves—to match a definition of success that constantly requires us to hide behind ‘everything is fine!’

That corporate growth-and-exit model was never designed for women, and what about the promised payday at the end of your business? For most women, it’s a mirage.

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.

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/