Women’s Journey to Success: Roadblocks to Building Blocks in Business with Patty Block

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. --- Listen to the podcast here: 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. --- 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. It's really important to understand what your personal values are, what's important to you, what's meaningful to you, and then build your business in that way. 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,...