Expand Your Empire

She Built It For 22 Years. Made Herself Replaceable On Purpose. Then Sold It.

Most conversations about selling a company stop at the wire transfer. The money hits, everyone claps, roll credits. Christine Slocumb built a healthcare marketing agency over 22 years, made herself replaceable on purpose, and then sold it to private equity. And then she wrote the book on everything the sale price doesn't tell you. Her book, Mastering the Exit Gauntlet, is about the part that comes after. What happens to your identity when the inbox goes quiet on day one. What it costs to be the only woman in the room for 22 years. And the reframe that keeps coming back: everything you get after closing day is fun money.

What you do with it is the actual point. In this episode:

• Why the business that feels like a part of you is the hardest one to sell, and why not being emotionally ready to sell is the most expensive mistake you can make going in
• The five-year plan Christine's advisor gave her that changed everything, including her lifestyle, before the sale ever happened
• Why you should be able to step away from your business and take a vacation right now, whether you're selling or not
• What it's actually like to be the only woman in the room during a three-year sales process, and how Christine navigated proving herself to buyers who were buying the business, not her lifestyle
• Why the wire transfer number at close is the only number you can count on, and how to think about everything else as a variable
• What selling did and didn't change about Christine's relationship with money, and why zeros in your account don't automatically change a complicated relationship with it
• The relationship dynamics nobody talks about when your wealth changes overnight
• Why shuttering is not failure, and why the buffet of choices available to business owners is bigger than most people let themselves see

Christine is a paid contributor to Inc. Magazine writing on business exits and post-sale identity, and an exit advisor at christineslocumb.com. Everything is linked in the show notes:

Purchase Her Book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1966168802

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cmslocumb/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisslocumb/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@christine-slocumb

This week on Expand Your Empire, Amanda sits down with Audrey Schoen, a licensed marriage and family therapist who specializes in financial therapy for high achievers, entrepreneurs, executives, and couples. Audrey is not speaking theoretically. She has lived the tipping point where your business pulls from your life rather than funding it, and she built her practice helping others find their way out of it.

Together, Amanda and Audrey get into the uncomfortable truth most entrepreneurs skip: your relationship with money shapes your relationships at home. From the childhood blueprints driving your financial decisions to the emotional landmines buried inside couples' money conflicts, Audrey breaks down why logic and spreadsheets are never enough on their own.

In this episode, they cover:

• Why money is one of the most avoided topics in the therapy room, and why even therapists aren't immune
• How the blueprint you built in childhood is still running your pricing, your spending, and your conflicts at home
• The difference between functioning and thriving, even when everything looks fine from the outside
• What it means when your business can't stand on its own two feet without pulling from your life
• Why naming your enough number is the only real way off the treadmill

If you are a business owner, high achiever, or building something with a partner, this conversation will make you rethink what you have normalized and what it is costing you.

Read about our guest this week:

Audrey Schoen is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist based in the

Roseville/Sacramento area, working with entrepreneurs, executives, and

high-achieving couples across California and Texas.

She specializes in private intensives, concentrated, high-impact work

for people who've spent years building something impressive and are

suddenly confronted with what it's cost them personally. Her clients are

successful, and that success has quietly hollowed out their relationship,

their sense of self, or both.

Audrey uses a direct, no-fluff approach combining Relational Life

Therapy, Brainspotting, and Accelerated Resolution Therapy to help

high-performers do the inner work that actually sticks

Connect with Audrey Schoen, LMFT:

Check out her website: https://www.audreylmft.com/

Check out her Instagram:   / audreylmft  

Check out her Facebook:   / audreylmft  

Check out her YouTube:    / @audreylmft  

Check out her LinkedIn:   / audreyschoen  

A founder gets a number. Revenue for the month. A client who didn’t renew. The bank balance before payroll. And instead of treating that number as information, she treats it as a verdict.

This episode is about the decision-making problem hiding inside that confusion, and why it quietly costs founders years of decisions, not just one bad month.

In this episode:

• Why a bad number gets treated as a verdict instead of data, and how that warps decision making around pricing, hard client conversations, and EBITDA
• The two questions that get fused together, and why only one of them is actually useful
• Why two founders can get the exact same bad month and end up with completely different next 90 days
• Where this pattern actually comes from, and why it gets louder once you own the business
• Why your numbers will always get recruited to do a job they were never built to do if there’s nothing stable underneath you privately
• A 10-minute homework exercise to build the muscle before the next bad number lands

If you want help mapping out what your numbers actually say about where you stand structurally, the link to the wealth strategy blueprint is below.

I met Susan at a Coronado Chamber of Commerce event. She mentioned she'd bought an auto shop. When I found out why, I knew I had to have her on.

After sponsoring two Ukrainian families and watching how hard it was for them to stabilize here in the US, Susan didn't want to stop at temporary support. She bought an existing auto repair shop in Point Loma and created a real pathway for them to have work, dignity, and community.

In this episode:

• How Susan went from sponsoring families to buying a business she knew nothing about
• Why she negotiated seller financing instead of touching her retirement fund, and how that deal actually worked
• The difference between charity and empowerment, and why one is far more sustainable than the other
• The operational lessons of buying an existing business: customers, niche, pricing, and stepping out of day-to-day operations
• Susan's advocacy work with Voice for UA and the urgent timeline facing Ukrainian families on temporary status in the US

If you want to support Voice for UA, links to donate, advocate, or get involved directly are below.

Website: Www.voice4ua.org

Connect on Instagram: @voice4ua

You Cannot Buy Your Way Out Of A Belief.

I want to confess something. I have spent a significant amount of money over the course of building my businesses on coaching programs, courses, masterminds, community memberships, and certifications. A lot of things I paid for and didn't even do.

Most of them were good. The content was solid. The frameworks made sense. This isn't about getting scammed.

It's about why I bought them.

In this episode:

• Why most of my purchases had very little to do with the program and everything to do with how I felt at the time I bought them
• The Gen X conditioning underneath the belief that stopping feels like failure and stillness feels like laziness
• Why the business that eats everything you feed it isn't hungry, it's a reflection of what's running underneath
• The question to ask before your next investment in a program, a tool, or a new hire
• Why this isn't a clean resolution and what I'm still working on myself

If you've been feeding the machine for a while and wondering why the number that stays never seems to grow, there's a free 45-minute one-on-one conversation linked below where we look at your actual numbers and trace exactly where the money is going and why.

https://elevateprofit.biz/profit-acce...

When is the last time you did nothing and let it be okay?

Not rest you scheduled. Not a Sunday blocked off so you could recover enough to work again Monday. Actually stopped, left space open, and didn't fill it.

If you're anything like me, the answer is that sounds like a trap.

The entrepreneurship space is always telling us to add more. Post more. Build the funnel. Launch the offer. Grow the list. The advice is always additive. There is always one more thing that is supposed to be the thing that finally makes it all click into place.

But nobody is talking about the cost of running 15 strategies at half capacity. Nobody's asking whether the reason it isn't converting is because you need to add something, or because everything you've already built needs more of your actual energy than you have left after spreading yourself across everything else.

That's the trap. And it's subtle because the trap looks exactly like discipline.

In this episode:

• Why effort has a quality to it and why two people can produce the same output and get completely different results
• Why busyness is sometimes avoidance and what it's actually protecting you from having to face
• The overeffort trap in its most personal form and what writing my own chapter taught me about standing in front of real things and asking if they're enough
• The effort audit, two questions to ask about everything currently active in your business
• Why the gap between expectation and reality is not evidence you're failing

Things are working. They may not look exactly the way you thought they would. What you've built needs more space, not more input.

Next week: the conditioning underneath this compulsion. The Gen X piece, the message absorbed watching parents grind, and how it's living in your business decisions right now without you realizing it.

This episode is not for the woman who doesn't know what she's doing wrong. It's for the woman who knows exactly what she's doing wrong, could probably teach a master class on it, and is doing it anyway.

She's read the books. Done the programs. She can articulate her money blocks with impressive clinical precision. She knows she's underpricing. She knows she's avoiding her numbers. She even knows she's waiting for a feeling of readiness that's never going to arrive on its own. She knows all of this. And she's still right there.

Most money mindset content assumes the problem is awareness. It's not. The pattern is not in your strategy or your pricing model or your marketing funnel. The pattern is in your identity. And you cannot think your way into a new one.

In this episode:

• Why awareness alone has never been enough and what actually creates change
• Five signs you're playing small with money and the identity belief running underneath each one
• Why the smarter you are, the better you are at this particular trap
• Why paying yourself last is not a cash flow problem, it is a self-worth problem
• The one question that cuts through the preparation loop every time
• What the experience shift actually looks like for each of the five signs

The gap between knowing and being is not a thinking gap. It is an action gap.

This episode is about how to close it.

I have a few spots open for free Profit Accelerator Calls this week. This is for business owners who are making sales but want a clearer look at where the profit, time, or opportunity is leaking: https://elevateprofit.biz/profit-acce...

Every time I bring up investing, someone says I'm not good at math and checks out.

That was never the real reason. The real reason is that nobody explained it in a language that felt like it was built for them. That is what this entire show is for.

This is the final episode of Paychecks to Portfolios. We are on the multiple layers of the earn, control, own, multiply framework. And this is where the long game actually starts.

In this episode:

• The difference between accumulation and multiplication and why most people are doing one and calling it the other
• Why more income without a multiplication system just creates more movement
• The four multipliers, compounding, leverage, tax strategy, and network, and what they actually look like in practice
• The five roles an asset can play and why you need to know what job each one of yours is doing
• Why the question is not what should I invest in but what am I building
• The multiply audit, four questions to do right now
• This is the final episode of the Paychecks to Portfolios series.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Investing 101 Course: https://investing101.expandyourempire...

American Dream Mastermind Group: https://theamericandreamgroup.org/

Wealth Strategy Call: https://elevateprofit.biz/profit-acce...

If you stopped working tomorrow, not retired, just stopped, how long could you maintain your current life before things started to break?

If the answer is a few months, that is not a criticism. That is just data. And it tells you something important. You have built income. What you have not built yet is a position. And those are two very different things.

This episode is about ownership. What it actually means, how the wealth gap between men and women is not a mystery but a math problem with a very specific set of inputs, and why the entry point for getting in is lower than it has ever been in history.

In this episode:

• Why women control 32 cents of wealth for every dollar men hold and why the income gap alone does not explain it
• The second shift and why it is not just stealing your time but stealing your compounding
• Why you cannot outearn your way to wealth
• The difference between income and a position and why producing does not compound
• Three inroads into ownership that are available to you right now regardless of where you are starting from
• Four conversion moves to make this week

This is Part 2 of the Paychecks to Portfolios series. Listen to the rest of the series below:

Part 1: You Have The Income. So Why Are You Still Managing Anxiety Instead Of Money? – Expand Your Empire

Part 3: You Built The Income. Now Make It Work Without You. – Expand Your Empire

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Investing 101 Course: https://investing101.expandyourempire.org/investing-101

American Dream Mastermind Group: https://theamericandreamgroup.org/

Wealth Strategy Call: https://elevateprofit.biz/profit-acceleration

I was standing on a stage in Hilo, Hawaii, when a handful of women walked up after I got off stage.

Not to tell me how great the presentation was. To say thank you, because I had said out loud what they had been holding privately.

And if you are a grown, accomplished, financially capable woman and your response to someone naming your private thought is relief, that is not about me. That is about the fact that nobody else said it first.

So here it is.

Most of us have a deeply complicated relationship with wanting money. Not earning it, wanting it. We were taught to earn. But wanting to accumulate wealth, wanting to build something that compounds and grows and creates options that don’t depend on your next client, that feels like wanting too much.

And what happens when you want something you also feel guilty about? You make timid decisions. You undercharge. You put everything back into the business. You avoid looking at your numbers.

That ambivalence doesn’t stay in your head. It shows up directly in your cash flow.

In this episode:

• Why earning and wanting are not the same thing, and why that distinction matters
• How emotional ambivalence about money leaks directly into your financial structure
• The earn, control, own, multiply framework, and why control is where the cycle either breaks or gets worse.
• Why you cannot scale what you cannot predict
• Four questions to find your real financial exposure right now