Why Hustle Culture Creates Entrepreneurial Poverty

There is a lot of talk these days about how we need to end burnout and escape hustle culture. But so many women entrepreneurs are still finding themselves stuck in this feast-or-famine cycle where they can't seem to escape either of those things because they need cash flow coming into their business right now.

Well, if that's you, if you're finding yourself stuck in this in-between stage where you can't really get your business to work 100% for you, then I want you to keep on listening because we are kicking off a new series here on Promote Yourself to CEO to help you break free from the feast-or-famine cycle and the entrepreneurial poverty of time, energy, and money in your business so that you can finally have that sustainable success you're looking for.

Are you ready to grow from stressed-out solopreneur to competent CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Racheal Cook, and I've spent more than 15 years helping women entrepreneurs sustainably scale their businesses. If you're serious about building a sustainable business, it's time to put the strategy, systems, and support in place to make it happen. Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, the hard lessons learned along the way, and practical profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.

Hey there, CEO. Welcome back. We have another great series lined up for you this month here on Promote Yourself to CEO all about breaking free from hustle culture and ultimately breaking free from the entrepreneurial poverty of time, energy, and money in your business.

I find that there is a lot of talk out there that focuses on the antidote to hustle culture, the antidote to burnout all being wrapped up in productivity tips, tricks, and hacks, automation tips, tricks, and hacks, or outsourcing tips, tricks, and hacks, all of these things that, to be quite honest, are utter BS to me.

I hear all of these things and I just think to myself, “Nope, the antidote to hustle isn't complexity. It isn't building the 37-step funnel, and then doing a million other things in your business.” That actually creates this culture of FOMO, the fear of missing out, and it pushes more and more women into what I call entrepreneurial poverty.

Now, if you've listened to any of the interviews that I've been giving over the last year or so, entrepreneurial poverty is a concept I have been talking a lot about in interviews I've been doing on other people's podcasts, but I haven't gone in depth in it here on my own podcast.

I want to kick off this series all month to talk about how our current entrepreneurial hustle culture has been directly creating entrepreneurial poverty for women in business. When I'm talking about entrepreneurial poverty, I am not just talking about money, though that is one component of it. It's a big component of it. But I'm also talking about the entrepreneurial poverty of time, I'm talking about the entrepreneurial poverty of energy, and yes, the entrepreneurial poverty of money for women business owners.

Let’s take a look at each of these. Then I'll bring it around full circle to talk about how we can strategically burn-out-proof, hustle-proof, life-proof our businesses for more long-term sustainable success.

When we're looking at the entrepreneurial poverty of time, I am looking at women who are busting their butts feeling like they are working 24/7. Even if they're not actually sitting at their desk working 24/7, they feel like they're on call 24/7 for their business. They feel like they can't get away from it and it creates this underlying anxiety that is constantly keeping them worried about their business, not able to step back and unplug.

When we have that poverty of time, it usually means that we don't have boundaries in place. We're not only working from home, but we're living at work. These are the people who I'm talking to who tell me things like, “My email is just nonstop. I'm always checking my email. Every time my phone notifications go off, I feel like I have to answer it right away. If a customer emails me at 10 o'clock at night, I feel like I have to reply even if I'm already in bed.” These are the people I'm talking to who are taking appointments at a time when they really want to be with their families.

I talk to so many women who are making themselves available in the evenings or on the weekends instead of family dinner and actually going out to rest, recover, to have fun with their friends because they feel like the customer's always right and the only way to succeed is to accommodate everyone else's schedule first. These are the people who when I talk to them, they're not just working 40 hours a week in their business, but sometimes they're working 60, 80, or more hours a week.

These are the people who are working nights and weekends on a regular basis. They're never getting a break from their business. These are the people I'm talking to who feel like they always have to say no to their friends, to their family, to hobbies. What are those? To taking care of themselves, because there's always something else that feels more urgent that they have to handle in their business right that second, and they just end up feeling like there's never enough time.

They're always playing catch up in their business. They can never get to the point where they actually feel ahead of things, where they feel like they're on top of things, they actually feel in control of their business. This is the entrepreneurial poverty of time when you don't have time to truly focus on the big picture of CEO-level work in your business, when you don't have time to do any new business development, or to focus on building out a rinse and repeat marketing and sales strategy.

If you're focused on putting out fires, if you feel like you're always getting pulled into the weeds of your business, and you never have the time to do the big-picture work that's going to help your business move forward, you will stay stuck here. These entrepreneurs who are struggling with poverty of time are the ones who never take a break until they are forced to. Let me say that again. They don't take a break until they are forced to.

Unfortunately, I've seen over and over again, this has shown up with people becoming incredibly sick, not able to work, people who hit burnout, people who are experiencing debilitating anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges. It's because they are working, grinding, and going so hard that they don't give themselves time to truly rest.

Honestly, it's not that they don't have the time. It's that they haven't made the time to design their business to support their life. When we are stuck in the entrepreneurial poverty of time, it is putting us on the path to burnout. It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when.

Even people who are out there talking about you need to hustle hard, you need to grind, you need to go 24/7, there is a limit to how long you can do that without something breaking down. Either your health is going to break down, your relationships are going to break down, your mental clarity is going to break down. There is a point where you can't just keep grinding indefinitely.

We are not machines and even machines need to be shut down and rebooted. Even my phone has to be plugged in to charge every single night and you do too. You deserve more rest than your iPhone. When we are in entrepreneurial poverty of time, it will come to bite you in the butt at some point.

Now, if you followed along with my story, then you know that I committed to working only 25 hours a week when I started my business in 2008, I did that for a few reasons. One, I struggle with chronic health challenges. I have chronic pain, I have chronic fatigue, and there are some bad days where I simply cannot have the mental clarity I need to do the work that I do.

It takes a lot of focusing on my health and my well-being for me to show up and perform at the level I am performing, to create at the level that I'm creating for you. I have to prioritize my health and well-being. On top of that, I got pregnant with twins right after I started my business. Within my first 18 months of business, I had two newborns. I'm talking about the poverty of time from a lot of life experience here. I'm not just coming to you with “Oh, in the last year, I discovered how to have a four-day workweek in my business.”

No. This has been over 15 years of working 20-25 hours a week so that I have the time that I need to take care of myself to put my own oxygen mask on and that allows me to do the work that I want to do, that allows me to take care of my family, and that allows me to show up for all the people in my life who depend on me. I do this not because it comes easy, but because it was a requirement.

Because I had a big mindset shift when I found myself coming out of burnout, coming out of a lot of challenges when I left corporate consulting, when I had to change my mind instead of “I'm being the last person who gets taken care of,” I realized I deserve to be taken care of. My family deserves a mom and a wife who is present when she is at home, who is able to spend time and have real relationships with them.

I also knew that for me to, again, show up and perform at the level I'm performing, I needed to really, really, really take care of the asset. The asset is me. This business, The CEO Collective, I am the biggest asset in this business and you are the biggest asset in your business too. If you're not taking care of yourself, then the business is going to be on very shaky, shaky ground.

If you're struggling with the poverty of time, then you want to listen to the next few episodes because we're going to talk about the three big shifts in the upcoming three episodes that you can make that will help you to redesign your business for more sustainable success.

Now, the next type of entrepreneurial poverty is energy poverty. Energy poverty is huge right now for women entrepreneurs. I think the last few years I've seen the conversation changing. I really have seen this come to the forefront when people talk about emotional labor or the mental load. The last few years since the pandemic started have amplified this for women.

Women have been basically crying for help because it became so clear how much emotional labor and how much mental load was put on women to keep our society running. It has been amplified. It has been brought to the surface. So many women were already feeling like they were spread too thin.

What's happened over the last few years is that we have depleted our energy and emotional reserves. We are waking up each and every day and dragging ourselves to go through the motions of life. When we're having this energetic, emotional poverty, we don't have the bandwidth to do the things we really, really want to do. It's not just about time right now, it's about emotionally feeling like we can show up the way that we want to show up.

As entrepreneurs, how this really starts to impact people that I am working with, and I've seen this over and over again, is it reduces their capacity to go out there and be visible in their business. I have seen so many women who now feel like they don't have the bandwidth, they don't have the energetic capacity to put themselves out there, to show up consistently in their content.

They feel like they don't have the energetic or emotional capacity to take on more work or more clients. They don't have the energetic or emotional capacity to put themselves out there to be more visible in their business. All of the things that will help them grow their business, they just can't, they're tapped out. They are drained.

When we don't have the energy, when our energy is depleted because of the mental load, because of all the emotional labor we have been doing, all of the unpaid labor that falls onto women's shoulders, when we are tapped out, we really end up in a hole. We end up in this hole that we have to slowly claw our way out of as entrepreneurs because your job as the CEO of your business is to be the person who is visible, to be the person who is bringing in new clients, to be the person who is creating growth opportunities, to be the person who is driving this business forward.

It takes a tremendous amount of capacity to do this. It takes a tremendous amount of mental load, all the things that you're carrying in your head, it takes a lot of emotional capacity. Because when you're dealing with people, whether it's your team, your clients, your family, your friends, or whatever, every relationship has an emotional connection there that either drains you or refuels you and I'm just seeing so many people who have none.

They're in the hole, they have nothing left to give, they're just ready to tap out. If we don't have the energy, if we don't have the emotional capacity, then we cannot move our business forward. It's like taking all the gas out of your car. You can't move it forward without a huge push without it feeling excruciatingly difficult.

It doesn't have to be this way. If you're feeling depleted on the energy front, if you're energetically depleted, if you're emotionally depleted, then we need to shore up your resources. We need to get you out of that hole and build your new baseline, build your support infrastructure for you as the owner, as a CEO of this business, and we need to make sure that we are not wasting our energy or our emotional bandwidth on things that are not helping you to thrive in your business.

We have to stop letting the fear of missing out drive the bus. We have to stop letting all the noise out there tell you that you have to do more and more and more, that things have to be super complicated, that things have to take up all of your mental and emotional capacity when honestly most of those things are just contributing to that mental load. They're contributing to the emotional frustration and depletion.

We are going to talk about how do we start shoring ourselves up, how do you resource yourself so that instead of being in that hole where you feel like “I've got nothing left to give, I am tapped out,” how do we get you out of the hole? Then how do we build your business so that you never end up in that hole again, where at least, if you end up in that hole again, you have more support, more resources, more ability to pull yourself out of it without having to slow down the business or shut down the business?

Finally, the last piece of entrepreneurial poverty is money. Of course, when you talk about entrepreneurial poverty, the first thing that comes to people's mind is money. This is the easiest thing to point to for women entrepreneurs who are starting to feel stuck.

It's usually when you get to this level in your business where you're not a beginner, you're not in startup mode, you've been working with clients successfully for a while, you've been making some money, at times great money, but you still find yourself going back and forth with this feast-or-famine cycle in your business.

I want you to know you're not alone. 82% of small business owners struggle with this feast-or-famine cycle, this cashflow juggle in their business. When we're finding ourselves in that feast-or-famine cycle in our business, then not only is it difficult to financially keep the business moving forward, it also compounds the other two problems. It becomes energetically more difficult to keep the business moving forward because it is exhausting to go through the cycle.

When you're constantly jumping back and forth in hustle mode, it triggers that fight-or-flight response because the survival instinct starts to kick in. When you're looking at your bank account going, “I don't have any new invoices hitting the account. I don't have any new clients coming in the door,” it starts to make you feel panicked. Panic is not a business strategy.

When you find yourself in this cycle where you feel panicked, you feel that survival mode kick in, you get into hustle mode again, which is very much survival mode, hustle mode is very much a scarcity mindset, it starts to take up so much of your time because your business isn't efficient. Your business isn't set up for you to get out of that feast-or-famine cycle. The infrastructure is not there. It means you're working way harder than you need to get the results that you're looking for.

Just to be clear, what is the feast-or-famine cycle? This is a cycle that many businesses find themselves in. The majority find themselves in it. In the stage two of the Business Growth Checklist, if you haven't checked that out, you can go to the show notes and download the Business Growth Checklist, but the biggest challenge in stage two is the feast-or-famine cycle.

It looks something like this: You start off in your business, you have no clients, so you start off in hustle mode. This is when you know you've got to get out there. You've got to bring in those new clients. You've got to hustle. You've got to put all your time and your energy into marketing your business and talking to new potential clients.

You get to the point where some of those people are signing up. They're paying your invoice or signing the agreement and now you are in feast mode. Money's in the bank. You have invoices coming in. You're starting to get into work with those clients and it's really exciting. Because when your client docket fills up, revenue is coming through the door, you're getting paid. This is the part where we feel like, “We've made it. I'm finally successful. This is what having a business is all about.”

But then you roll up your sleeves, you start putting in the work with your clients, you are delivering your product, program, or service, you are doing the work for them, doing the work with them, or just delivering the work, whatever it is that you do, whether it's a course, a group program, or one-to-one service, whatever they've hired you for, there comes a point where those clients wrap up, they finish their engagement, and now you're back at zero. You've got to fill that client docket again.

This is the point where you've probably started to realize that the money is running out. You're running out of cash flow, payments have stopped, you've gone through whatever the invoices were, you're at zero again, so you've got to go out and start the hustle all over again. You've got to go out and get new clients all over again. It is a vicious, vicious cycle.

Many entrepreneurs stay stuck in this cycle for years because they haven't figured out how to simultaneously work with clients to deliver that product, program, or service and keep the sales and the marketing engine going in their business. This is one of the biggest reasons we see people stay in this feast-or-famine cycle for such a long time is they basically have two different modes that they are in. They're either in client-work mode or they're in hustle mode, and they don't know how to keep both parts of their business running at the same time.

It's frustrating because in the first few years of your business, especially if you're still working out what marketing strategy works for you, what sales strategy works for you, what product, program, or service is the right fit for your clients or that you really love delivering, you're trying to figure out all of these moving parts of running a business and it truly is frustrating because it is like juggling.

Imagine you're a juggler with three different balls in the air. You've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got delivery to your clients, and it's so easy to drop one. How do we get out of this? How do we start building the momentum you're looking for? Well, this is what we want to talk about: getting that momentum, getting out of the feast-or-famine cycle, and building momentum so that you're not starting at zero every single time but instead, we're building a foundation in your business.

This is what I'm talking about in this upcoming series about ending the entrepreneurial poverty of time, energy, and money for women in business. I want to talk in this upcoming series about three key strategies to more sustainable success. These aren't about all the hype. They are not about overcomplicating your business. In fact, this will simplify a lot and I am here to tell you that when you simplify, you are better able to amplify. Simplify your business to amplify your results.

I want to talk about one more thing for a quick second because I feel like now people are starting to see why all the hype is leading them in the wrong direction. They're starting to see it because things are changing faster than ever. This is something that happens in any industry that happens in any space.

Over time, the changes start coming faster and faster and faster. When changes are starting to happen faster and faster because the market is becoming more sophisticated, strategies that used to work are no longer as effective, it starts to show the cracks in what people are talking about.

Honestly, something that my colleagues and I, my peers and I are talking about all the time is that there is this hustle monster that has people believing that hard work, that grinding, that doing more and more and more, that complexity is how they're going to see success. That being everywhere and doing all the things is the answer. The people who are the most successful in business, honestly, if you were to get behind the scenes in their business, you would see that they likely have simple uncomplicated businesses and business models.

There's a lot of hype. Celebrity entrepreneurs right now, all of the influencer celebrity entrepreneurs, they're doing you dirty right now. They really are. They're getting everybody hyped up. They're giving so many promises that are just outlandish. Honestly, they're unrealistic. Then when you get inside of their programs, their courses, or their coaching, then you realize that a lot of these programs are not that great.

They're really just a social gathering. It is more about business sorority than business school. There are too many things happening where it's about looking like we have a business compared to actually being in business. In fact, there is a huge segment of the small business space that is now being called aspirational entrepreneurs. This is who the majority of the celebrity influencer entrepreneurs are directly targeting. They're targeting people who are aspirational entrepreneurs.

This segment, if you're going to market to them, I mean it is a massive segment, these are hopeful entrepreneurs, wanna-be entrepreneurs. They are pre-revenue. They have not made money or they haven't made much money at all. At the same time from the surface, if you were to look at their websites and their social media feeds, it might appear that they are incredibly successful because they have all of the trappings of what we think of as a successful business.

They are going out there and branding themselves as successful. They have the professional photoshoot. They have the beautifully-designed graphics. They're being visible all the time on social media. However, this is a case of the emperor has no clothes. These are the same people who when you start joining online programs, online coaching, online courses, you will see them spending almost all their time in Facebook groups. Why? Because they're aspirational entrepreneurs.

Successful entrepreneurs are not spending all their time in groups. They're not spending all their time having conversations online. They're actually working with clients. But aspirational entrepreneurs, they don't have clients. They don't have a team that they're working with yet because if they were successful, they would have a team they've got to take care of. They would have a team that had to lead, they would need to put their bandwidth there.

Aspirational entrepreneurs don't have that focus. Aspirational entrepreneurs spend a lot of time in all of these different places. To me, that is a huge red flag. It tells me whether or not somebody is a serious entrepreneur. Because the CEOs I work with inside of The CEO Collective, they don't want to waste time all day in groups. They don't want to waste time all day chatting on social media.

Social media might have a purpose, groups might have a purpose but when you are running a real business, when you are working on your business, you're working with your clients, you're leading your team, you don't do that. This segment of aspirational entrepreneurs, again, this is a massive segment. These influencer celebrity entrepreneurs who have all of the massive online programs, this is who they are actively targeting.

They're actively targeting these people who are hopeful that they will be entrepreneurs now, hopeful to get started. Because these are people who don't know truly what a business looks like or what actually goes into a business. All they're learning about is marketing for the most part, all they're hearing about is marketing. Really, they're playing out entrepreneurship the way a child would play house, play make-believe, and play dress up. They're playing dress up with websites and social media presence.

This, you can tell, is getting me so hot because I feel like it has only contributed to the culture of FOMO and confusion for those entrepreneurs who really want to have legit, successful, sustainable businesses. It has caused a culture of FOMO because these celebrity influencer entrepreneurs are actively talking to and actively selling to aspirational entrepreneurs.

They know these people will keep putting money into learning how to become successful on social media platforms, learning how to have the super complicated funnels, learning how to do all these things, because they don't know any better. They don't know what they don't know. Aspirational entrepreneurs don't have a strong business foundation. They are focused on only what they see as success from those celebrity influencer entrepreneurs.

But if you have a real business, you know that is just the tip of the iceberg. They're not seeing what happens behind the scenes. They don't understand the operations that need to happen to have a successful business. They don't understand the infrastructure you need to deliver an excellent customer experience. They don't understand how to go out there and create new offers that really help solve the problems your clients are coming to you with.

They're just taking all of this advice. It's leading them in the wrong direction. It's leading them into working all the time and running out of energy at some point. They're not going to see the money that they're truly looking for. They're stuck forever in this cycle of not just entrepreneurial poverty, but a cycle of consuming all the content, trainings, and courses, hoping that they are going to find the magic bullet, the one secret that's suddenly going to unlock success for them.

I'm here to tell you, there is no one secret to success despite what people are talking about. I get so hyped about this because I believe that as things continue to get faster and faster in this industry, as changes happen faster and faster, we have seen so many changes that it is only going to get more noisy.

You have to be very discerning about who you are going to take advice from and understand that growing a sustainable business is not just about marketing, it's not just about marketing and sales. In fact, that's just getting to having revenue in your business. You have to iron out marketing and sales pretty quickly if you're going to make any money out of your business.

But as you want to scale, it becomes a whole lot more about delivery to your clients, about having an incredible team to support you who can manage themselves so you're not having to get in the weeds and constantly have to micromanage. It's about having a business that runs like clockwork. There's a lot more that goes into it than just being on social media, which of course, I know you know because you're here and you're listening to me.

But these are the things that make me a little crazy. I've been in the industry so long and I am always kind of surprised when I see people who get panicked or freaked out when there's a new social media platform, new technology, or a new strategy that people are really starting to talk about. But these things are trend-based. They're very trend-based, which is so funny to me. It's just like how my 13-year-old daughter is now wearing basically what I wore in the 90s in high school, the combat boots and the flannel shirt.

If you were on the grunge scene in high school, that's pretty much how I dressed and now my daughter's wearing the same thing. It happens in the business space too. There are always going to be new trends that come back around. Right now, I'm seeing a ton of summits come back around. Those were huge when I got started doing a ton of them in 2010, 2011, 2012. The only difference was they weren't video, they were all conference line but ut it's the same idea.

You have to have a little bit more discerning look at what you're going to do in your business and not allow yourself to get hooked into the FOMO, not allow yourself to jump on everything that comes up because that only contributes to the cycle of entrepreneurial poverty of time, energy, and money because you don't have the clarity of the true foundational strategies that your business needs to be built on.

Our businesses can be built on very simple, streamlined, efficient systems and support teams that make it easier for us to do great work, work that we love, and serve our clients at an incredibly high level and that can be built so that you can take great care of yourselves, so you can have plenty of time to go on vacation and actually take time off where you don't feel like you have to check in every single day, you don't have to bring your iPhone, you don't have to bring your laptop.

In fact, you can spend a week or even more completely unplugged from your business just knowing that it’s running while you're gone. You can do this when you are building the foundation of sustainable success. But you can't do it if you're always doing what aspirational business owners are doing, being driven by FOMO, being driven by trends, being driven by hustle culture.

This series this month is all about the three core strategies that we use again and again to help our clients inside of The CEO Collective to get out of and prevent the entrepreneurial poverty of time, energy, and money in your business. This is about how you can make great money in your business consistently and consistently see more momentum in your business.

To be clear, I'm not going to give you some overhyped promises like this is going to help you double, triple, or 10x your revenue overnight. Let's be real, again, doubling tripling, 10xing your revenue is not sustainable long term. It's very hard to grow at those rates.

In fact, we see businesses crumble under rates of growth like that, because often it is driven by marketing and sales only and not by a commitment to serving clients on the highest level, a commitment to customer service, a commitment to quality, a commitment to taking care of your team and having truly the infrastructure to manage growth at that rate.

If you were to talk to business owners who grew that fast, you would hear horror stories about how difficult it was to run a team and constantly be hiring and all the people churning out. You would hear about the team members who feel exhausted and exploited because it always feels like everything is breaking all the time. We don't want catastrophic growth. Not long term, it's not sustainable.

But what we do want is solid growth, solid growth that you could do 25%, 50% year over year, where growth is coming not from hustling, but coming from the systems and the infrastructure behind the scenes that help your business to run more efficiently, where these systems are now rinse and repeat, where you have done the hard work upfront to put those systems in place, and then it does not take as much effort to continue to see the results in your business.

This is not about having the complicated 37-step funnel system that can break when this thing doesn't work with this thing, the algorithm changes, or all your different things that are trying to connect together and you're zapping them together don't work, something else breaks. You don't need the complexity. More complexity means more opportunity for things to break and fall apart.

In fact, in my own business, we've eliminated most of this. We have streamlined so much. We are always looking for how can we streamline and how can we simplify because I don't want to be dependent on the whims of Mark Zuckerberg, or any other social media platform. I don't want to be dependent on anything that could change and suddenly cut off where I'm marketing my business or where I'm communicating with my clients.

I want to build a solid sustainable business that will continue even if social media disappears or if I can't run ads anymore. If that's what you're interested in, if that's what you're interested in learning how to burn-out-proof your business, hustle-proof your business, saying no to hustle culture, and stop getting in this cycle of entrepreneurial poverty where you never have enough time, you never have enough energy, and you feel like you never have enough money in your business, I want you to stay tuned for this series because we're going to dive into some of the key strategies that can quickly start shifting things for you and your business.

Again, these are not complicated. They are not difficult to implement. These are the strategies that we're helping our clients with over and over and over again inside of The CEO Collective. If you're curious about any of the topics that I talked about today about entrepreneurial poverty, please connect with me over on Instagram @racheal.cook. That is where I have most of my conversations with you all in the DMs. I would love to hear from you.

This has been a little bit of a different episode for me to record because yes, you can tell I'm annoyed. I'm irritated and frustrated because I see how this entrepreneurial culture, the hustle culture, the noise, the FOMO has truly hurt people who are out here wanting to do good work and make a big difference in the world. I see how it's taken them down the wrong path.

I am here to fight against that and to help more people truly achieve their goal of doing work they love for clients they love and make the impact that they truly want to make. I'd love to hear from you. I can't wait to dive into this conversation over the coming weeks.

If you like this episode, again, take a screenshot, post it over on your Instagram Stories, share it with a fellow entrepreneur who you know is tired of the hustle and grind culture, and I will talk to you next week on Promote Yourself to CEO.