Doing Business Differently with Becky Mollenkamp

Arden Evenson:

Hi everyone, welcome to Feminist Founders. You might notice I’m not Becky. My name’s Arden Evenson, a communication strategist and writer who works with companies who are thinking differently about how we earn money, foster financial independence, and build wealth, especially when it comes to expanding who has access to these solutions. Becky invited me here today to talk to her about her work and how she does business differently. And since we met through a community of business owners thinking about exactly that, it only makes sense that we come together to discuss this topic. So today we’ll talk about what is doing business differently even mean? Where do we start as people who want to break down capitalist, patriarchal structures and build businesses that support our own values and the people that support our own values and the people that work with us? I’m really excited about this conversation and I’m really excited for you to listen to this conversation and thrilled that you get this chance to learn a little bit more about Becky.

 

Arden Evenson:

Hi, Becky, how’s the day going? How are you doing this week?

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Good Arden, although this feels very foreign to me being on the other side of this for my own show. I’m a guest on podcasts all the time, but they’re other people’s podcasts, not my own. So this is very interesting.

 

Arden Evenson:

Welcome to your podcast hosted by me. So let’s dive right in. So a lot of your coaching work is focused on helping founders and small businesses kind of avoid recreating the toxicity and problems of corporate America. Can you start by sharing what you think is wrong about the way that we’ve been working?

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Well, it would be a much shorter list to say what isn’t wrong, but let’s hit on some of the highlights. I mean, first and foremost for me is that America has gone so far as saying that corporations are humans, that they are people, which is wild. And that really is representative to me of the way we prioritize profits above actual humans. And that is the umbrella problem. Everything goes down from there and all the other problems are rooted in that very thing, that completely upside down approach to how we look at business. It is about the almighty dollar first and foremost, and then people at some point later we think about them. And then planet, by the way, is even lower. And so to me, the biggest problem is that we need to reorder that so that people are most important. But when we’re prioritizing the dollar, then obviously what tends to follow next is productivity. Because how can we make more money, more quickly? That’s the natural question. If the most important thing is money, then it becomes, well, how do I get more? And then I think, well, how can I get more even faster? So then that turns into the productivity issue, which is how do we make people into machines? And I mean, going back to Ford and the production line and all that, it has really been about, how do I turn these humans, this human problem, into something that’s more reliable, you know, so that it’s, I can count on it. I can quantify it. I can say X number of inputs equals X number of outputs, and how do I make those outputs more quick? So that creates this productivity issue that leads to this feeling of hustle and grind. And then, from that then, becomes my worth gets tied into those things. My worth gets tied into how much money I’m making, which is then tied to how productive I am. So am I working fast enough and hard enough to generate enough money? And when I’m working for someone else, that’s even more bizarre because am I working fast enough and hard enough to generate enough money for someone else? It’s not even, am I making enough money for me? Right? But my worth is like, I don’t feel like I’m a valuable asset. We hear things like that, that you’re not a valuable enough asset, that you aren’t proving your worth here, all of these sorts of things that are very tied to who we are as humans, based on, am I working hard enough? Am I working fast enough? Am I generating enough money? And then eventually when we go and work for ourselves, it’s just the same thing, except maybe we benefit from that labor, but it’s still all about effort.

 

Arden Evenson:

And it’s so easy to fall into that connection as freelancers, as solopreneurs running our own businesses and connecting even more with the money because we need it. I live in New York. It’s not a cheap place. I need to make money in order to live the life that I want here. And that makes it really hard to disconnect this drive and this kind of motivation. And I’ve even had a wild week myself where I’ve been working on these two huge reports and at the end of the day, yeah, I’m wiped. And I can’t, even though I’ve written 6 ,000 words, probably in the last two days, it’s hard for me to still connect that with feeling accomplished, right? I can look at that word count, which is moving towards that kind of deliverable and that productivity mindset, but I’ve really been trying to reflect even myself on what’s the overall value of how I’ve spent my time on these projects with organizations that I am very values-aligned with?

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Money is both not real and very real, right? It’s something we made up as humans that we just all agreed to and said, this paper is going to represent some amount of value and we’ll exchange this thing for whatever, which could be goods or services. And we have attached so much meaning to this thing that really is fundamentally meaningless. And yet it also is everything. It’s like nothing and everything. And those sorts of things are really complicated in the same way race, gender, these constructs we’ve all created mean nothing and yet they mean so, so much. And so it’s like, we have to navigate that weird reality of the duality of the fact that they are both meaningless. How do we begin to detach so much value from these things that don’t actually have meaning? And yet still honor the fact that the reality of our lived experience is that they do have meaning, right? So like I may want to remove myself from gender constructs, the gender binary and say that’s all meaningless. And I have to be cognizant of the fact that my gender and how I am perceived very much affects the way I’m treated in this world, right? So it’s both and it’s the same with money.

 

Arden Evenson:

And I think we can, you know, my background is in econ and finance, so I could talk about money all day. But can you talk about sort of like, when we think about sort of shifting these when we think about shifting these systems, moving beyond them, creating our own, what kind of drew you to helping founders kind of build those more kind of people-driven, more values-aligned businesses?

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

It’s been a long process. I was a Corporate American hack, shill, whatever, for a long time. Well, actually, not that long. I’m pretty proud of myself for having stepped out of Corporate America pretty quickly. And yet, I recreated it for myself. But so I worked for someone, I worked inside of corporate America as a nine-to-five traditional employee for not that long out of college. And then I was like, I don’t like this. Meetings just to have meetings, meetings about meetings, the red tape. What I really hated most was the performative nature of corporate America, the way you had to show up and play the game in order to win. And it all felt so rigged. And, and I was like, but what about those of us who don’t play the game? And it became very clear there was a different path if you weren’t willing to play the game. And I just hated it. And I was like, this isn’t for me. So I want to go work for myself. You know, like I see other people doing it. You mean I could work in my pajamas and not have to go to 20 meetings a day? Sign me up. So I did that. And it was good for a long time until I started to do a lot of my own internal work. So until I had actually worked on myself, I was able to sort of, once I left the corporate world and just was self-employed but still participating in all the same kinds of systems, I was okay. Like I didn’t have the existential crisis I had until I started doing a lot more internal work, where I started to ask myself questions that we are never encouraged to ask ourselves inside of capitalist societies, which are, what do you want? Questions about what do you actually want for your life? How do you want to feel? What do you want to be known for? What lights you up? Right? When you start to ask yourself those kinds of questions, you can go into an existential crisis because the answers usually don’t fit inside of the box that capitalism gives us. For most of us, our answers would not be, I want to make someone else money. Our answers wouldn’t be, I want to work every moment I can. I don’t want to sleep. I don’t want to have fun.

 

Arden Evenson:

Right. I love being under fluorescent lights in an office.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Right? I want to be micromanaged. Like, the answers are never any of those things. The answers are usually, I want to feel freedom. I want to have time for my family. I want to be able to travel. I want to feel like my work has meaning. All of these kinds of things. And as I started to go down that path and do a lot of that internal work and that exploration and inviting those questions for myself, things got complicated. It got much more difficult for me to do my work, even as a self-employed person outside of the corporate system, because I realized how much I was recreating that. And then you add on to that 2014 when Michael Brown was murdered in Ferguson, St. Louis, Missouri, where I lived, I mean, it was half a mile from where he was murdered. I saw the fires as the protests were going on outside my door. I actually left my house that night because I was like, these fires feel very close right now. And that really woke me up in a new way, like I had always thought of myself as a good feminist. It was that beginning of learning that I had been more of a good ‘white feminist’ and not really a feminist. Like I didn’t understand intersectionality until I started to do more work through that experience of saying what is going on here? Right? What is all this about and learning? And, and so then that added a new level of sort of existential crises to my crises of not only do I not want to participate in work the way it has looked for me, I also don’t want to participate in perpetuating these systems that are affecting people who don’t just look like me in different ways. And so that adds to all of these other levels of understanding, and that’s really sort of what made me say something’s got to give, something’s got to change. And I want to help, and as I started to do the work for myself, that was like eventually becoming a question of I want to help others who care about the same sort of stuff.

 

Arden Evenson:

Yeah, and I want to talk about how you work with clients, but can you give a couple examples or kind of talk through sort of what shifts you made and the way you approach kind of your own business kind of based on these, based on intersectionality, based on sort of your own kind of inner work?

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

The first piece on the inner work led to a lot of the like, ‘what do I want to do’ kinds of questions, which I was like, I don’t want to write. Yes, I’m talented at writing. Yes, I’ve always received a lot of external validation and praise for my writing. I’ve achieved with writing. But I don’t actually like it. It doesn’t actually feel good. This isn’t actually what I want. And I realized how that was such a capitalist trick too of getting the validation and seeking that external validation and praise and reward and achievement as a way to kind of keep us in our performing of the capitalist system. And so a lot of my work there was I don’t want to do this and unpacking and starting to figure out what do I want to do. And that’s what sort of eventually led me down the path of coaching. It started with thinking maybe I’ll do personal training because at the time I was running a lot dealing with depression from my brother’s death. And so that was where I started. Realized I don’t want to do that, and I’m so grateful now because I realized how much I was caught up in diet culture, which is a whole other issue inside of these same systems. And then sort of moved, I started to discover the online business space in 2013. I’m like, this is interesting. I like this. What could that look like? Sort of moved into business coaching, but not really coaching. It was more like business consulting and then realized who am I to tell people to run an online business? I haven’t done it yet. So then that led to mindset coaching, which I don’t love that term now either, because it’s so problematic, and eventually led me to where I am. So the personal piece of it was I want to do something different. The intersectional piece was as I was moving into coaching and moving farther down that road and finding the place I wanted to be, it was really saying, now that I know what I want to do, how do I do it in a way that doesn’t perpetuate these same issues? Because my coaching early on before 2014 and even slightly after that was still problematic because it was still integrating and including so much of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchal norms without even recognizing it. And all of that learning and unlearning with intersectionality is what helped me start to say it needs to look very different because the world is larger than my own experience. And what does it look like to do coaching in a way that honors that full breadth of experience that we have as humans.

 

Arden Evenson:

Your own sort of journey and path is kind of a lot of what I feel like I’ve gone through in the last, I guess, three years since kind of relaunching, becoming a freelancer. I’ve sort of gone in and out of that work for a while. But I, you know, left an intense startup job in 2021. And I was like, No, I really want the flexibility, the freedom, the autonomy of being sort of my own boss doing kind of my own work and having, I sort of finally allowed myself to recognize that that made me happier than climbing the corporate ladder and achieving a certain title, which is what I’d been told I was supposed to do. And even after that, the last three years for me have been such a winding path on what kind of work do I want to do? What does that look like? And constantly having to kind of pull myself out of the like, what’s monetizable? Like, how do we make money off of this? What does the market want to buy? And instead leading with like, how do I want to help people, right? Like, what role do I want to play kind of in people’s lives? What is the impact that I want to have? And sort of starting from there. And then yes, again, we have to figure out how to make money, but kind of not starting, not starting from that place.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Yeah, it’s what really made me want to do coaching instead of consulting. So early on I was doing that consulting and that’s sort of where that shift happened too. Once I started to understand intersectionality and doing a lot of this work, I realized that my ‘coaching’ at the time, before I became certified coach, before I really understood coaching was really consulting. It was advice giving. And there are certainly times and places for that. This is not to say that there shouldn’t be consultants or shouldn’t be strategists. Absolutely. And yet there are so many people calling themselves coaches who are not coaching. And what I recognized through my intersectionality work was I love coaching because it is about honoring the lived experience of each person rather than ‘the one right way’ of white supremacy. And so much of what is called coaching, and/or is consulting and advice giving, is caught up in this idea that there’s one right way of doing something. It’s very binary. It’s very like, this one right way, it’s this or that. And that is white supremacy at work. And we don’t see it if we don’t understand that. And I was perpetuating that. And so that for me is where that change really happened was like, I want to lean into and go all in on true coaching that is about, let’s honor your life and how you exist within these systems, the roles that these systems play in your life and saying, what does that mean for you as an individual? And how do we honor the changes that you need to make? Because those are going to look different than the changes I would have needed to make, or that I may still need to make, as a person who carries a good deal of privilege. And even if it’s somebody else who carries a good deal of privilege, we may have different kinds of privilege and different kinds of marginalizations. And so anyway, that is how all of that showed up for me is in the way I go about my work changed radically when I as I started to understand and unpack and, I don’t know what the right word is, deconstruct, leave corporate and capitalist thinking behind.

 

Arden Evenson:

When you are working and coaching clients, you said that the changes are very different, but I imagine that some of the kind of problems or challenges can be similar. What is keeping these clients kind of up at night as it relates to their business? What goals are they really struggling to achieve? What shifts are they trying to make?

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I work with folks who are making one of these. It’s really sort of the second leap we make in business, but it feels like the first big leap, I think. So when we start a business as a service provider, which is who I work with, usually we start because it’s something that we do and we do it well. And so we’re just going along, getting clients work and doing our work. And then we start to be like, God, I’m running, I don’t have as much time to do the work because I’m having to sell the work and I’m having to bill for the work and all the, you know, the and the marketing and all these other pieces of what we do. So often we’ll start to cobble together some consultants and folks that we have helping us with components of the business. And maybe we’ve even brought on our first like subcontractor or something, maybe one of those folks that we brought in to help with marketing, maybe even they’re a part-time employee. That sort of that first leap is kind of where you’re no longer truly a solopreneur, but you’re kind of moving into that small business-ish kind of space. But where I’m really working with people is that the next real leap that for most of them feels like the first time they’re taking a big scary leap in their business, which is they are now—that cobbled together team ain’t cutting it. You know, maybe they even have now brought on and they’ve got a little a team of subcontractors because they’ve got so much work coming in. But what they’re starting to say is this doesn’t feel good. I thought when I got to this level of growth, maybe they’ve hit seven figures in annual revenue, gross revenue, or maybe they actually have enough, they’ve got several, a couple employees or something. But they’ve hit some milestones and they thought this was going to make it all better. Once I get there, then I will rest. Then I’ll have time for fun. Then I won’t have to do any admin work, whatever, right? And they get to this place and they start to think, well, am I broken? Do I just not know how to do this? Should I not be a business owner? Because this shit still feels awful. I’m not getting enough sleep. I’m not enjoying this. This doesn’t feel good. And often they’re thinking, maybe I just need to go to get a nine-to-five. Maybe I need to scrap the whole thing. Maybe I’m not meant to be a business owner. Often it’s sucking them of their passion that they maybe once had when they started the business because they’re trying to do too much still. Even if they’re starting to let go of some components of it, they’re still micromanaging people, they’re having a hard time delegating. The big important tasks they’re sure as hell not going to let go of because I can’t upset that big critical client, right? They’re still too concerned, it’s my business, it’s my name. I can’t let go of this thing. So they’re, while they have some support, it doesn’t really feel like it because it really isn’t yet because they haven’t learned how to make the leap from small business owner to CEO to, no, I’m the person who is the leader the visionary of this company, I’m setting the tone of the company. I am the face of the company. I am what this company is about, but I’m not the one doing all the damn work. And just because you’ve gotten rid of some of the admin stuff, because you got somebody else scheduling some social media posts for you, or because you got somebody else doing your billing, doesn’t actually mean you’ve let go and stepped into a CEO role. If you’re still the one doing the bulk of the service providing, then you have work to do to be able to grow that company to that next level. And so what’s keeping them up at night is, I don’t know if I want to do that. That sounds really scary. What happens if I bring people on and they ruin this for me? What if they destroy all that I’ve built? What if I bring on people and I can’t afford it? What if the money all dries up? What if I don’t have any more clients? That is usually that point where maybe they even internally, if they haven’t even confronted it yet, but somewhere in there they know they are at this, I got to either make the leap or I don’t because they can’t keep going the way they are. And so it’s often the leap feels so scary that they’re starting to say maybe I shouldn’t do this. Maybe I’m not a leader. Maybe I’m not a boss. And so they’re at that crucial place. What’s funny is what usually brings them to me because I call myself an ‘accountability coach’ is they will often convince themselves at that place, maybe just maybe what I need is just like a kick in the butt and a little bit of help of time management. If I could just figure out how to juggle all these pieces right, just right, then I’ll make it work. And I think the reason they end up with me is because they, I think somewhere inside of them know that’s not really it. And what I really need is somebody like Becky to help me say, you’re just doing, you need to let go of all the corporate shit that you’re still holding onto, still recreating and do business in an entirely different way and trust yourself that you are somebody who can do this. And so, yeah, it’s funny because like they’ve bought all the planners, they’ve hired all the strategists, they’ve they’ve done all the things, they even have somebody who’s given them their 10x growth plan. They just can’t implement any of it because it all feels like, none of it feels right. And no, another planner isn’t going to solve your problem. Time management is not going to solve your problem. But I think I can.

 

Arden Evenson:

One of the things that we’ve talked about before that I think is sort of an interesting transition even for myself is this difference in being a manager versus a leader, and how important it is for founders to transition more into that leadership role. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about those differences?

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I think so often people think when they’re at that place, they have been managing and they probably don’t like it because most people, now this isn’t true for everyone, but most of the people at least that I work with, they tend to be these really high achieving, type A kind of women… 

 

Arden Evenson:

I don’t know them.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Yeah, well, I know her well because I was her too. And we go into business for ourselves because we can’t work for other people. We hate it. We hate working for other people because we should be the leaders. We’re the ones that are out there. We have the big ideas, right? And we are those visionary kinds of people. And we are people who people listen to that are like, you’re going to take me there. I’ll go with you, right? We tend to be those people. We were the class president, or we were the one who was always doing all the work on the project because we didn’t want to anyone else to fuck it up and don’t you mess with my grade. And we got into the good schools. We are those people. That’s who I work with. And for those people, they tend to be leaders. Leaders are exactly that. Leaders are the people that other people listen to, that other people get excited by what they’re saying. They’re the people that if you say, I’m going here, people are going, well, I want to go with you. You made that sound amazing. Bring me along. They’re the people who are setting the tone, that are getting people excited about what’s happening. They’re the ones influencing people to take action and make big decisions. That’s not the same as a manager. A manager is the person who’s checking in and saying, I need your TPS reports this weekend, right? Like that’s the person who’s saying, did you check your time card? Have you gotten those 10 boxes completed? We have a deadline and it’s got to be met. That’s a very different set of skills, important skills, but not at all the same skills. For people who know CliftonStrengths, which used to be called StrengthsFinder, it happens to be an assessment tool that I really love. I use with a lot of my clients. All of the caveats around it was invented by white men, for white men and those things are problematic. And I often find that of a lot of the assessment tools, it’s one that tends to work really well for a lot of my clients professionally, at least. And often what I’m talking about here is people who have a lot of influencing strengths and strategic strengths often are the people who make the best sort of CEOs. They’re the kinds of people who tend to start their own businesses because they are people who are thinking about the future, about how do we get there? And they’re the kind of people who get people excited about coming along with them on that ride. People who make great managers tend to be, not always, but tend to be people who have more of the relationship and execution strengths, because they’re the kind of people who want to get right up and close and personal with somebody, help them get stuff done, make sure stuff’s getting done. Those are two very different sets of strengths. And what often happens is these people who are really meant to be those visionaries, the ones who are thinking strategically, what’s the big picture? Where am I going? How do we get there? How do I get people excited about this? Find themselves in this role of managing that little cobbled-together team that they’ve created, and it’s sucking the life out of them because it is not what they’re meant to do. It doesn’t feel good and it shouldn’t, but it doesn’t mean that you aren’t a great leader. It means you’re not management material, and that’s okay. No CEO is in there doing annual check-ins or quarterly check-ins or monthly check-ins on his all his employees, and I’m saying he because that’s who we’re traditionally thinking of in that C-suite. He’s not over there checking and saying, did you get your TPS reports done? He has managers who do that. He only checks in on the managers and those people, it is less about what’s happening on the day-to-day, but are we moving towards the goals, right? Because it’s still forward-thinking about leadership. So there’s a big difference between leadership and management. And the fact that most people don’t know that because for a whole host of reasons and that are very problematic in Corporate America about the way we promote people, which we could get into, but that might go off on a tangent. But most of us don’t learn what leadership looks like. And for a lot of women, we don’t understand that that is a role that we can own. Because women are typically thought of as those relationship people, the caregiving kinds. We are often put in managerial kinds of roles and not cultivated to see that we are visionaries, big-picture thinkers, influencers, cheerleaders, people who get people excited about things. And so we are often put into management kind of roles and think that’s what we’re supposed to do. And that somehow it’s reflective, it’s reflects poorly on us if we don’t love the people-to-people managing our team thing. And that is simply not true.

 

Arden Evenson:

Well, and it really feels too that when you get kind of hung up and like maybe over involved in that management piece that you’re missing opportunities, right? To be the visionary and to be the leader. And I think even as we’re having this conversation, I’m reflecting on a lot of startup environments I’ve been in, which are different than online or like services-based businesses. But you see the same thing. This is a company that starts out with just a few people, becomes a lot bigger. At the beginning, the founders need to have their hands in everything but they really struggle often at later stages of taking a step back. And it doesn’t just kind of maybe frustrate them or slow them down or overwork them. But it also kind of slows everyone down that there were several times where I’m like, you don’t need to be involved in this part. There’s actually a lot more important stuff that you should be thinking about at your level. And who am I to say that I’m not really, you know, I’m more thinking that than giving them advice on how to run their company, but I’ve seen and heard within that startup environment in particular, so many examples of this where founders have really failed to kind of make that transition into a leadership role and the company suffers.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Or the wrong people try to become leaders who aren’t meant to be leaders. Somebody who starts a company because they’re great at coding. And I can tell you almost always, not always, there’s not a rare exception. But generally, a person who’s a coder is not the same person who is a leader. And that’s okay. And the thing that’s a problem I find is, and now I’m going to go into the thing I said I might not, but I’m going to anyway, because in Corporate America, we reward leaders. And there’s a reason, because if you are that visionary and you are that person who’s able to get people excited about something, you probably are able to make the company money. Those are often the best sales people. So they often very much make company money. They’re also the people who tend to like make the news because they’re the ones who aren’t afraid to be out in the spotlight. So anyway, these are the people that we elevate just in society in general, but also in business, the business world. We elevate them as like, this is the role everyone should want. It’s the role that pays the best. So everyone wants to be that leader and not a manager. Managers don’t make as much money. They don’t get as much glory. And so we’re pushing people into leadership and, because of the societal structures we live in, that means white men, because it’s the most money, it’s the most, you know, prestige. So they’re being pushed into that and gladly going there and we’re pushing the other folks, the marginalized folks into the more managerial or worker-bee roles. The thing is all of these roles are important. They’re all important to the success of a company. You can’t have that tech startup that doesn’t have the coder, the worker bee, coding the stuff. But you also can’t have that company go beyond just some guy in his basement coding. If you don’t have that person who knows how to get people excited about the thing he’s creating, and the person who’s thinking strategically about how to sell it and the person who’s helping as that team starts to grow, keep everyone engaged and excited to be a part of the company. You need all of these areas. That’s why CliftonStrengths measures all four of these areas. They’re the four critical components of a company. But because everyone wants to be the CEO, everybody’s, we start promoting people into these leadership roles who should be managers or workers. And so it starts to create a lot of problems. That’s where people have had really bad bosses or people who’ve worked for companies that failed because the CEO didn’t know how to be a CEO and they shouldn’t have, they had no business being a CEO, but we can only make more money in that. So part of that also, all of that to say, some of that informs how we think these roles should look. And also some of this is having some real hard conversations with ourselves. What roles am I meant to be in? When we’re at that critical tipping point again, typically I’m working with people, the kinds of women, mostly women, that I work with are those people who are meant to be that visionary, that leader of the company. I had something art and what does that look like because sometimes that means we need to find a partner and learn how to also honor the equal contribution of both folks, even if one person is the more visionary head of the company and one is doing more of the ‘grunt work’ as it were, and I’m using air quotes, but like the doing. So sometimes that’s it. Sometimes it’s saying, you know what? I don’t want exponential growth. Let’s back this back down so that I don’t have to manage or lead. That’s also okay. So my work isn’t always about just saying we have to get big, but it’s learning what do you actually want and where do you excel and where do you not? And then how do we figure that?

 

Arden Evenson:

I’ve recently been partnering with a kind of distributed agency model that’s led by two women partners. And part of their sort of story of how they ended up working together is because the things they described that they wanted to do were basically the exact opposite of what the other one wanted to do and also where their strengths lie. And it also just makes me think about part of the hard thing of stepping into the leader or the CEO that we want to be is because we maybe just have a lot of bad examples. And it was so refreshing. I was with these women to do a pitch. I was brought in for my expertise, but just, I feel like I got so much out of just observing the way that they worked together. It was so different the way that they supported each other and spoke to each other, just different expectations. They both have kids, different expectations around scheduling and supporting each other, and giving each other the benefit of the doubt and just kindness that we were doing a pitch and one of the women was like, I didn’t sleep well last night, oh no, I forgot this thing. And the other partner was like, give yourself some grace today. You’re doing great. And I was just like, I’ve never heard a man say something like that. It would normally be, how could you forget the thing? The thing she forgot was Post-it notes. It’s fine. We can get more Post-it notes. But it’s just even seeing those small examples and not just seeing the white men that have risen through the ranks of a very specific personality type even as the only example of what a leader can look like I think is also just like really valuable here. And I think it’s probably what folks also get by working with you is like being able to see you kind of lead by example and kind of in running the business differently too.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I hope so. And I want to just say on that point, because white men are going to take a little beating here, but it’s not just white men, to be clear, because it is, it’s that patriarchal conditioning, that white supremacist patriarchal conditioning. And that gets internalized by all of us, because I think there are probably people listening, saying, I had a woman boss that was just as toxic. Right. For sure. And we all have. And so that is why as women if that’s who you are, you can go out onto business, or whoever you are, you can have any marginalization and go out on, go into business on your own and think, I’m not doing that. And then yet you find yourself saying like, my God, why am I getting upset with my employee who forgot the Post-It notes. That’s why we have to do a lot of deep programming. It can’t just, the answer isn’t just, I’m gonna go to business on my own. And the answer isn’t just more women in C-suites. These things are not the answer in and of themselves because it’s just perpetuating and continuing the same hierarchical nature of a patriarchal system. Matriarchal systems are very different. They are more linear in nature. They are not hierarchical. And what you’re describing with these women sounds a lot like that. And when we talk about partnership or saying maybe I don’t have a certain set of strengths and I need somebody who does, because I’ve had this happen with a client where it was like, okay, you really need to be stepping into the CEO role, this visionary and leader kind of role. And you need somebody else to do this sort of COO role, the management of people and the operations, the execution part. And what we worked with for these two was bringing that together and saying, and how do we do that in a way that honors you both equally, that’s giving equal weight so that we’re not looking at this tier system of, I’m the CEO, I’m up here. I’m the COO, I’m down here. No, let’s talk about what does it look like in a matriarchal system? It does not have to be that hierarchical nature. But to do that requires looking at these roles in a completely different way and you have to do a lot of deprogramming because it’s really hard. Our natural instinct is probably gonna be that how did you forget the Post-it notes. It takes efforting to get to the place of saying, give yourself grace. But we can get there, and I love that you gave that example because that is a lot of what it feels like when you start to do the work enough to get to a place of unlearning and saying no, I can do business completely differently. Me being a CEO does not have to mean I’m on the golf links on Saturday, don’t give two shits about my employees, and it’s only about how do I make more money so I can get a bigger bonus. It does not have to look that way.

 

Arden Evenson:

So a lot of the things that we’ve been talking about are things that you have worked through clients with in kind of the sustainable business blueprint. And I really liked the four areas, and not that these are all of them or not that these cover everything, but the four key areas that you work with clients on. And I wanted to kind of walk through each and just maybe highlight an example or two of what these things look like what doing these things differently can look like if we’re kind of shedding kind of corporate America’s practices. And so the first one is, and we’ve probably touched on this one the most, is this idea of humane hiring and management. And I think maybe we can touch a little bit more on the hiring piece since we mostly talked about sort of how you’re kind of managing in this non-hierarchical, more linear structure already.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I just think it’s this is really where it’s about shifting the focus from profits to people and starting there. And when it comes to hiring, I mean, there’s so many different ways that we can approach all of these things. Ultimately, with my clients, it’s about tapping into their value system and what that looks like in each of these areas, because it will be different for each person. There is no, even though I call it a blueprint, there is no blueprint. It’s a custom blueprint. You’re going to create your own blueprint when we work together, because there is no prescription. There’s no formula. If we get into the formula stuff, we get right back into the ‘one right way’ of white supremacy. And that’s just simply not the case. So I think the biggest thing, especially with the hiring piece for me is values. It’s values first. What are your values? Because that should inform your hiring far more than how, you know, what are the profits? What are the skillset needed to make the profits? What experience you have driving profits, whatever. What are our corporate values? What are our company values? What matters here and how well do these people align with those values? That’s first and foremost in hiring in a way that’s going to bring in people who will want to be with you on this journey of doing business differently. Because just as you’re going to be doing your own deconditioning and there’s so much work to do there, the people you’re going to be looking at hiring, it’s going to be the same thing. Most people, unless it’s their first job, and even then they’ve, I mean, school teaches us how to be good corporate cogs in the machine. This is the water we swim in from birth. So everyone you’re talking to, is going to have all of their own baggage around what does it look like to be an employee? What does it look like for you to be my boss? And if you’re trying to do things differently, it’s going to be challenging for them. And it starts then with making sure you’re bringing up people who really truly care about your values and that for them that is really aligned and communicating the ways you’re doing things differently. And throughout the process, from beginning to end of hiring, it needs to look differently. It needs to be values-led, and that’ll be challenging. I mean, it’s always challenging, but when we can hire for values, first and foremost, we are far more likely to end up with employees or co-creators, depending on how hierarchical you want to get, that are truly bought into doing things differently. And that will be there with you on that ride.

 

Arden Evenson:

There’s not a 0 % part of me that is a going to stick with working for myself because I just don’t want to apply for a job again. Like that process is so brutal. Doing assignments, trying to match up your stories and your data points with the specific questions. It’s so, I can do it well, but I feel like it’s not a good representation of who I actually am going to be once I get there. It feels so separate from the actual values that I bring as a co-worker, as someone actually doing this work as someone that you can partner with on things, you’re not going to get that from my scripted-out thing. And in the age of zoom interviews, all my Post-its around with all my notes about the things that I need to make sure that I cover.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Well, and that’s where we need to challenge because, again, the kinds of folks I’m working with, I mean, my business is Feminist Founders. I’m very vocal about the fact that I’m an intersectional feminist and that I am looking to create a more equitable world. And I want to work with people who want to create a more equitable, equitable world. And if equity is something we truly care about as business owners, we also have to think about that, like beyond just the who we’re talking, like how we’re talking with people once we’re in that interview stage and all of that. But even just the ways we’re approaching hiring. And how are we doing that in a conscious, purposeful, intentional way that makes sure that we’re bringing equity into the equation at all points along the path? What are the ways that we are looking at hiring that are still very much rooted in these old, capitalist notions around professionalism? Where are we bringing ableism into our hiring? Where is racism and other forms of discrimination showing up in sneaky ways and the ways that we’re, like where we’re listing our jobs, the wording that we’re using in the postings, how accessible the interview process is, all of that. So there’s a lot of deconstruction in the tactical, logistical side of hiring. And then also for the bigger question is to me it’s values-led, but those values should inform all of that process.

 

Arden Evenson:

The next area that you focus on is, and this feels like a little bit of an oxymoron, is anti-capitalist financials. Can you talk a little bit more about what that is?

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Capitalism is a must, right? I can’t escape it. I can be anti -capitalist and still have to exist within capitalism. We all live in capitalism if we’re here in America. And we can’t escape it, even if we want to. But what we can do is try to bring as much of the anti-capitalist kind of ideals into financials as possible. And to me, part of that then looks like, one big component of it is thinking about what’s enough. And that’s a question we never are asked in America. Here it is only about more. And we just get into this trap of like, I got a 10X my business, and then once I’ve 10Xed it, I got a 10X it again. And if I don’t do that, or I’m not aiming to do that, then I’m failing, and what does it say about me? What does it say about success? And that’s where so much traditional funding, there’s so many problems in that world because it’s just focused on the numbers. And I really want to work with people to say, let’s talk about what’s enough. That does not mean I’m asking people to downsize their dreams, to say I can’t have exciting ambitions for my life and want money. But how much is enough? How much money is enough to create the life you’re actually looking to lead? How much money is enough to be able to pay people enough? What do you actually want to pay people? And how much is enough to do that? How much is enough to be able to afford the ways that you want to give back to your community? And what’s enough there? What’s enough of your percentage of profits that you’re going to be giving away? And how much do you have to do to do all of that? How much rest is enough in your life? And what does that mean? And how does that affect your financials? So all of these different components, thinking about what’s enough. And the other piece of that financials is, what are we charging? And thinking about that. And where do we want or not want? And what does it look like to think about the way we’re charging for things to be more equitable? And what’s enough there or what’s not enough? And these are not questions that have, again, there’s no one answer. For every person, it’s going to look different. And that’s okay. It’s about your value system and about your ambition and your goals. I mean, there are, to me, some fundamental things that I think you can’t be saying that you care about equity if you’re not paying people a living wage. I don’t think you can say you care about equity if your aim is to be a billionaire who’s giving $0—well, at all. I don’t think you can be equitable if your business plan doesn’t include some amount of redistribution of wealth. So there are some fundamentals, I think, that we do look at. But there’s no one-size-fits-all answer on this. But it is saying, how do I question the conditioning I have, this automatic belief that I just need to be 10Xing all the time?

 

Arden Evenson:

I think about just networking events I’ve been at in the last few months. And I often say I have enough clients. I’m not really here to pitch anyone on business. I’m really just trying to meet people that are values aligned, honestly. And if I’m at a point where I want to grow and get more business, then those people that I want in my orbit. But people are like, oh, I have enough work. And part of that is, thinking about what those trade offs are. As you know, I’m going through fertility treatment, and there’s a lot that’s out of my control. But one thing I can attempt to control is my stress levels. And I know what kinds of clients cause me stress. I know that having too much work causes me stress. And so I have chosen to build a business where I am prioritizing lower-maintenance clients, lower-maintenance work, slower work. And it might not be the highest-paying work, but that’s not the priority right now. I still have to make money. I still have to pay for these fertility treatments. But there’s a limit to that. And there’s a recognition for me of what those trade -offs are to making more and more money.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I think it’s just the questioning of it because too often it’s just that simple questioning that doesn’t happen. I can’t tell you, I just had a client who was like working with a strategist who had her on this 10x path and it was like that strategist never actually asked what she wanted. It was just, there’s this assumption built in that of course you want a 10x, right? If you can, who wouldn’t want to? And so it was us unpacking and realizing what she really wanted was pretty much a 2X. And that was it. If she could 2X her business, we looked at everything, that was all. And can you imagine the relief that comes when you realize I don’t have to have all of the pressure that comes with 10Xing, to downsize that, to reduce that by five fold and get down to, I just needed 2X. It changes everything. And that is where, it’s amazing to me. I guess because I’ve been doing this now for a while and it shouldn’t amaze me, but the number of people who just, we don’t investigate, we just operate from this assumption that I’m supposed to always want to be going for exponential growth without really interrogating why, why do I need exponential growth? And it’s wonderful to see the freedom that can come from that interrogation. Now, I want to also be honest that there can also be a whole new set of issues that come up when you do that. A lot of internal work that has to happen. For her to do that, there was a lot of internal stuff that came up around like, what does it say about me that I don’t want to 10x? Does that mean I’m a failure? Because again, I’m working with a lot of high-achieving women who have, for a long time, taken a lot of their personal worth from achievement. When you start to say, I’m ready to get off that hamster wheel, we can think we’re ready to get off the hamster wheel. But when we do it, it comes with a, it is far more challenging than we think. It can be very, a lot of internal work that has to happen. And that’s the stuff I really love helping people with too, is being able to sort of say, yeah, of course that’s gonna be hard. Give yourself grace. Of course that’s hard. When you have your entire life believed that your value is from achieving the next big thing, whatever that next thing and the next thing and the next thing, when you start to say, the next thing doesn’t have to be a big thing. And I’m okay. That is hard. So I just want to point that out, because there may be some people who can already start to sense that, if when you heard that client said, I’m okay going from wanting to 10x to just 2x, if you could hear that little voice in you saying, that sounds like failure to me, then I get it. Because yeah, that voice is going to be there. And you have to do that. That’s work to do.

 

Arden Evenson:

It took me three times leaving my job to go work for myself to realize that that was good enough, right? To realize that I didn’t need to keep achieving on someone else’s expectations and titles. And I’m here now as the person who is known for telling everyone to work as little as possible and make time for other things. But that took a while, 10 years ago Arden would be like, what’s wrong with you?

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

For sure, and listen, I’m still, I still breathe the water, breathe the water, I still breathe the air. I still am swimming in the waters. There’s where it was. I’m that fish, I’m the goldfish in the water too. Like you can do all of the work. You could, first of all, I don’t think we can ever, it’s not a destination we arrive at. We are never free from the conditioning, but even if it were, let’s say you were magically able to extricate every last bit of your patriarchal conditioning you would step back outside into the world and breathe it in again. And now it has gone through your lungs and back into all the parts of your body. So you can’t free yourself from it. So just know even the best of us, and I hate that word because that’s hierarchical too, but even those who have done the most work are still grappling with the shit every day. It still comes up for me all the time. I still have to tame that beast, that voice inside of my head who’s will say that sounds like failure to me or like, what are you thinking? And why don’t you want more? And no, you can’t rest here. I’m still dealing with it all the time too. It doesn’t go away.

 

Arden Evenson:

Even I have a little 5, 10 % little voice in the back of my head now that’s like, after we get off this call, we’re going to feedback from that new client. I wonder if that’s going to be good. I wonder if we’re going to get to work with them again. I wonder if they like the work. I wish they would tell me that they liked the work.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Of course, yeah, that’s, I mean that is how we’re wired.

 

Arden Evenson:

Well, speaking of things that we breathe in and out a lot, bro marketing and sales is something I know a lot about having worked in finance and tech for most of my career. And so what is no-bro marketing and sales look like?

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

And this is an area that can be really challenging for people because once you start to make these other changes and you’re like, okay, I want to do things differently. This is an area where people still will struggle, yeah, but what if they don’t buy? If I try to do things differently and they don’t buy and then I can’t make these changes and what if I grow my business and now I don’t have people buying from me? But we all know what it feels like to be victimized by bro marketing, to have these manipulative tactics used against us to feel the pressure, to feel the urgency, to feel the like, you know, shame that comes along if you don’t buy the stupid pop ups that are like, are you sure you don’t want to 10x and whatever, right? We all know the stuff and yet it’s very often people are like, but is there an there isn’t another way like these are the best practices, quote unquote, because they work and this is not. There are other ways to sell. There are other ways to talk about your business that don’t have to rely on those things that can be ethical and honest and consent-based. It can be done, and we have to be realistic that yes, it may affect your sales. It may lengthen the sales cycle. It may, you know, reduce how many sales you make or how much you charge or all of it. There are things that will change. That is true. And that’s often balanced out by the change that comes along after we start to analyze what we actually need. If I don’t have to 10x my income, and I’m okay with now 2x, that drastically shifts how much I actually have to be selling and how quickly. And it allows me a little more freedom to say, I don’t have to use these really disgusting tactics to just get money in the door, right? But there’s a lot of work to be done there. And I want to be clear too, because I am a coach and not a strategist. I am not the person who’s going to teach you no-bro sales and marketing techniques, or the anti-capitalist financials, or the hiring, the operations that we’re going to talk about. I’m not the person who’s going to be here telling you how to do the things. I’m here to look at each of these categories of our business, these four big important pillars of our business and ask ourselves what’s working and what’s not working and what do I actually want it to look like? For you to do that internal investigation based on your values, based on your vision, to figure out what you actually want that to look like. And then where you need tactical, practical, strategic advice, I have amazing referral partners who I have vetted and I know and who all do this work very differently. So when we talk about sales as an example, Alison Davis, who I regularly refer to and who’s amazing, she does sales, she knows the stuff. She will teach you and show you and handhold with you on how to actually execute on a new vision for how sales can support what you want your business to look like in a way that is ethical, in a way that feels good, that’s aligned with your values. So I just wanna be clear, like I’m gonna talk to you about, it’s possible to do it differently. We know the things that don’t work. I’m gonna help you find internally what you do want it to look like, even if you don’t know, tactically how to do it yet, we all inside of us as business owners have an idea of what we want it to look like and feel like. And then I’m gonna help you find the people when you need it who can actually help you execute on that in a way that actually feels right.

 

Arden Evenson:

Yeah, and I would imagine that these are just four kind of quadrants of the business for you to assess in partnership with them to figure out also they may be doing some of this already in a really values aligned way.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Yes, yes, thank you. That’s true. Let’s honor the fact that there are parts of these. There’s probably parts of all four that feel good.

 

Arden Evenson

Well then great, let’s move on to our kind of the fourth area, which is hustle-free operations.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

That is what are the things that we’re doing inside of our business, the systems, the tools that support us in saying, I deserve rest. Rest is a right. I deserve rest. My team deserves rest. If I’m going to be reducing urgency in the way I’m talking about my business and in the selling and marketing of my business, I have to also be able to reduce urgency for myself and for my team and in how I’m going about creating things. Because that hustle culture stuff is so much. I mean, that productivity piece, like we talked about at the very beginning of this, is like the biggest part of this capitalist stuff that we got to unpack from. So we need tools and resources that support that. And that very often isn’t happening. We can be talking the best game, but then when we actually look at how you’re spending your time, you’re working 60 hours a week, if we get real honest, when we start counting all the times you’re on your phone, checking email that you’re like, well, I didn’t really count as my work time. You’re working too much and you don’t have systems that allow you to work less, or you’re not trusting them, which also includes your team and how you’re supporting and delegating to them. So yeah, that last component I find is often one of the most challenging. I think that’s probably, that may be the area where the most capitalist stuff is still showing up—that and money.

 

Arden Evenson:

Well, it feels kind of hidden. It feels harder to identify, a little bit more invisible. A lot of this other stuff maybe feels pretty explicit practices around hiring or managing or how you’re marketing and sales. But the operations piece of it feels like it can be a little bit squishy and kind of hard to identify that you’re doing, you’re just repeating things that you’ve seen before and aren’t really thinking more critically about how you might actually want to be doing.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

And I think it’s easy to hide from ourselves, especially when we’re still like if we just have this kind of cobbled together team and we’re still sort of the one kind of managing it all like nobody really knows so we can hide not only from others but from ourselves, and we can convince ourselves we’re working less than we really are which is why a time audit is always such an important part of the work I do with people too because we really need to get honest about it so that you can make those changes because you need rest and not just rest doesn’t just mean sleep by the way, I’m talking luxuriating time, like you need time for you.

 

Arden Evenson: 

I just love that it feels like this is kind of a program or a way of working with people that addresses a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about, mostly in a vacuum, I feel like, for the last three years and challenging some of those norms. And so just to talk logistics, for a second, how do you kind of work with clients to create their kind of personal sustainable business blueprint?

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

We work together. Initially, we’ll do sort of a pre -work call because the truth is I could give you a big workbook to do on your own, but you’re busy and most people won’t or they’ll be rushing to do it right before we hop on the call. So we get on a call and do it together. It’s basically like I’m going to hold your hand while you sit and do the work because I know how that goes. I’ve had those assignments and I’m like, shit, my call’s in 30 minutes with that person. I better get this workbook done, which should have taken me four hours. And that’s not how anybody wants to work. So we get together for the pre-work session and work through a lot of the stuff of the unearthing of these four areas and the mindset stuff that’s with that. And then that gives you a little time to think about what you’ve noticed so that you can come to the next, really the meat of the work session together, that VIP experience with some ideas about like, now that you’ve kind of unearthed it and seen it, you’ve had to sort of confront it, then that’s that time where we can start to say, now, what do we want to shift? What does this, what does it look like for you in each of these four areas to make some big changes? So that it feels right, this business feels good to you. We map out your Sustainable Business Blueprint. What does it look like for you to build a business that feels sustainable? What is the growth that you want? Where are we trying to get to? So that once we know where we’re getting to, we can start to build out that roadmap and figuring out what that looks like and what changes need to happen, and when, and then what support do you need in making those changes, which is where some of those referrals can come in as well. And then we will come back a little bit later to then also sort of say, now that you’re beginning, just starting to do some of this execution, what’s coming up? Because that’s where we end up starting to have a lot of the like, heavy lifting around the feelings. Because you can have all the best intentions and have the plan and be like, I’m ready to execute. And then the feelings start to come up. And you start to go like, shit, I have imposter syndrome or God, I’m feeling all of this like feelings around being afraid of failing and why does it feel like a failure to do this, or I’m afraid of success and why what the hell’s going on I thought I wanted this but now it all feels very scary because what if it actually happens? And so we deal with a lot of that kind of stuff. And then I do ongoing support through accountability calls and I keep my call short they’re 30 minutes I used to want to give, as I think most women are inclined to do, I wanted to give too much and I had clients saying no I’ll pay you more for less because you’re busy. My clients are busy, these are busy people they don’t want or on their plate if they don’t need to. We do really powerful 30 minute check-ins where we can go through and say, all right, let’s look at the plan. What’s happening as you’re executing? What’s coming up for you? What challenges are getting in the way? What support do you need? It’s also that way to avoid the spiral that can kind of happen in the mindset and the shiny objects and all the things that pull you away from it. Having that on your calendar, those check-ins to say, let’s make sure I’m staying on track are really, really important. And there’s studies that show that if you actually have accountability scheduled, accountability call scheduled in your calendar, it increases your chances of reaching your goals by 90%. It makes a massive difference to actually put it in your calendar and to follow through with that. And that’s where hiring somebody and saying, ‘cause you know, I hear the same question in my own head sometimes. I could do it on my own. But are you? Do you? And we have, we can have the best intentions, but that’s where when we put an investment in of money, and we put it in the calendar and make a commitment of time, those are the things that help us actually take the steps to get it done.

 

Arden Evenson:

Yeah, and like a commitment of someone else’s time too, right? 

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Oh yes, for my people pleasing clients for sure, yes.

 

Arden Evenson:

Yes, exactly. And I think too of like one of our kind of mutual friends, actually I guess the person who connected us initially has talked about sometimes it just feels good to click buy on an online course. You’re like, I am going to go learn about that thing. And then you never look at any of the videos or the courses no matter what your good intentions are. And I think the challenge there too, right, is that it’s, that’s just like one playbook, right? It’s not, it’s not personalized, even if you’re in the target audience, sure. but like it’s, it’s not personalized. You don’t have a partner and collaborator. And what I really like about kind of working with you in this sort of program is that, it’s hard, right? You’re saying every step is hard and having someone there along the way who knows it’s hard and is also there to help you work through it. I think actually results in implementing a lot of these things that we intend to do or implementing and getting the results that we hope to get from these courses that we keep buying.

 

Becky Mollenkamp;

Yeah, the support is just so important. And I know it’s hard because I feel this as somebody who tries to sell coaching that it’s a hard thing to talk about because I think often what we think we want is somebody to tell us what to do. So hiring a strategist feels good. They’re going to give me the plan. They’re going to tell me what to do. Great. And yet we have this collection often, many of us, of strategies that we paid for, audits that we paid for, the new strategy we paid for, the whatever, and we don’t implement it. And then we wonder why, and then we either blame it on the strategy or we bring a lot of shame on ourselves for having not done it. But the truth is that’s because it usually isn’t about you and it lacks the ongoing support. But even if you have the ongoing support, if it wasn’t yours to begin with, it was not gonna work. And no one else can know what’s right for you but you. And that’s what coaching is about when it’s done well. There’s a lot of people who call themselves coaches that aren’t coaching, and I get that. But like in its truest form, coaching as a skill, which is what I try to practice, it’s not about me. It’s not about what I know. It’s not about my experience. It’s not about my lived reality. It is about understanding how you show up in the world, what you want, the realities of the world around you and how they affect you and how you are going to forge your own path forward. The truth is most of these women, you’re smart. These are high-achieving smart women. They have the answers. Do they know every tactical execution skill needed? No, but they have the high-level answers. That’s what they know. They know where they wanna go. They know how they wanna do it and how they wanna feel while they do it if they can get honest with themselves. So they need a space to feel that freedom to get honest with themselves, to be able to come with those answers, to have some support and love and guidance and a little bit of sometimes a nudge towards being more honest, more free from the conditioning. But you can do it yourself, but that’s what coaching is about. And I just wish, I just want that gift for everyone.

 

Arden Evenson:

As someone who even dabbled in being a coach themselves, I do think that there’s a lot of work that has to be done to on helping people better understand what coaching is, what they should be looking for and who’s not really selling coaching. And I do think I am a strategist at heart. I do want to solve problems and give advice, but yeah, we end up if we’re, you know, it’s almost like we can just be focused on our Band-aid solutions or just like, you know, clogging up the hole in the boat as opposed to asking, why do we keep getting holes in the boat? And I feel like that’s where the strategy, hiring these strategists and stuff is coming from. It’s not that it’s not a real problem and that you shouldn’t be trying to find a solution. We just need to take a few steps back to understand sort of what the root of it is.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

I work with strategists. I have great referral relationships with strategists because they are so important. It’s about the when. And too often we flip this. People hire the strategist, then they end up with a coach later saying there’s something wrong with me. I’m fundamentally flawed because I can’t execute on this strategy. And it was just, if you had just swapped that around, gone to the coach first, gotten to the place of the understanding and the knowing and the belief in yourself. then you would be able to hire the right strategist for the right strategy that’s for you. But we do it the other way around and that sucks because then I end up with people who are feeling shitty about themselves, unnecessary.

 

Arden Evenson:

And like the strategists that are also trying to build businesses that are not sort of based in the patriarchy and capitalism want to work for people we can help, right? Like.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

That’s exactly it. Like that’s why my referral partners love me once they understand what I do, because they’re like, oh I have people all the time coming to me who aren’t ready and I don’t know how to help them. And I’m like, send them to me. I will get them ready for you.

 

Arden Evenson:

My last question for you is just what excites you the most about this?

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

What really lights me up is seeing people taking action in a way that feels good to them. And I mean, I really love when they come back and say things to me, like I didn’t know I could feel this way. I didn’t know it could look like this. Wow, you know, and that really, really gets me excited.

 

Arden Evenson:

Amazing. Well, I’m so excited to see this blossom myself, to see your clients go out in the world and be able to do business differently. Thank you for having me. Thank you for being here.

 

Becky Mollenkamp:

Thank you for having me on my show. No, I really appreciate it because here’s the thing. I hate talking about myself, as most people do. And yes, that’s the kind of thing I work with my clients on. I continue to work with myself on. We have to be able to talk about what we do and part of that no bro thing is learning how to be okay with, learning how to talk about yourself without feeling gross about it. That it doesn’t have to be bro -y. This conversation was just a nice conversation. I’m happy to share it. And I’m hopeful that it helps people better understand me because I’m spending a lot of time on the show talking to other people who are doing business differently. I am too. And I really help people do business differently. And it’s important, I think, for people to learn a little bit more about me and my work. So thank you for facilitating that in a way that didn’t feel icky and bro -y.

 

Arden Evenson:

Thanks again.

 

Hey, before we go, it’s Becky popping back in to say, once again, thank you to Arden for that interview of me. It was uncomfortable, but she made it as comfortable as she could for me to talk about myself. I really appreciate her time doing that, and her guidance and her care. And I hope that you got to learn more about me and my business because I know I don’t talk about that enough. So thank you for listening. And I wanted to let you know that this is the end of Season 2. I am done with the interviews that I’ve done for Season 2. But don’t worry, Season 3 will be coming back with a fresh set of interviews of some amazing people. I’ve already been starting to record, so I can’t wait to bring those to you starting in September. Between now and September, though, I’m not going to leave you hanging like I did between Seasons 1 and 2. I plan to run content this summer. It’ll just be different. It won’t be interviews with founders like I do during the regular season. I will be sharing all sorts of things with you. Some of the past Feminist Founder Forums that I hold monthly for my paid subscribers of the Feminist Founders newsletter so you get a little taste of what those are like. I will also be sharing a couple of podcast episodes that I’ve recorded where I was the guest on someone else’s podcast, so I’m going to share those with you. And I also have a very exciting thing that’s coming in about a month or so, a new project that I’m working on with a friend of mine, Tiana Brown, So there’s lots to come this summer. It won’t be a regular season, but it’ll be mini and special episodes all summer long until Season 3 returns in September. Thank you so much for being a listener for sticking around this season, and I hope you enjoy the summer content and I’ll see you back for Season 3.