Why Only 1% of Women Founders Ever Sell: Rethinking the Business Exit with Alisha Pennington

Adrienne Garland (00:01.464)
Hi everybody and welcome back to the She Leads podcast. I am so excited to introduce you to my next guest. But before I do, I'd like to ask you to take just two minutes to give the show a five star rating and review on Apple or Spotify. This is so important for the show's visibility and the visibility of each and every one of our guests.

The women on the show share their journeys, wisdom, and lessons so you can go further, faster, wealthier, and with more ease. If you're interested in seeing more successful women leaders and entrepreneurs in this world, please take the step to support women everywhere. Thank you so much in advance for helping to share our incredible show with more people. Welcome to the She Leads podcast, Alisha.

Alisha Pennington (00:52.847)
Hi, thank you so much for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Adrienne Garland (00:56.174)
I'm so excited to welcome you. And before we dive in, I just want to give everybody a little bit of a background on you. So my next guest is Alisha Pennington, and she's a business consultant, author, and founder of Exit, a platform and community that is dedicated to supporting women as they prepare to exit, sell, or evolve beyond the businesses they've built.

Alisha Pennington (01:11.867)
Mm-hmm.

Adrienne Garland (01:20.14)
Alisha founded and exited a multi-seven figure staffing agency, so she deeply understands what it takes to scale and exit a company that's been built from the ground up and the often overlooked reality of what comes after the sale, giving her a unique perspective to exit planning that goes beyond valuation and into alignment. Now, through exit, Alisha helps women confidently navigate the strategic, financial, and identity shifts

that come along with stepping away from the businesses they've built and into their next chapter. So we have so much to talk about here on the She Leads podcast today. And I kind of want to start, I want to hear all about your backgrounds and the way that you built and scaled your company. But before we dive into all of that, I really want to understand, you know, I saw the stat only 1 % of female founders ever exit. Why?

Alisha Pennington (01:56.123)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (02:03.621)
Sure.

Alisha Pennington (02:16.899)
Right? Well, if you ask me, it actually has very little to do with literacy, which essentially is we don't know how to exit because we're smart women. We are starting and scaling and running sophisticated businesses. It is not that we don't know how to figure it out because we're women. We will figure out how to figure it out. Right. In my experience in the research is showing that there is kind of a two prong problem.

Adrienne Garland (02:17.663)
is that.

Adrienne Garland (02:37.87)
Yes.

Alisha Pennington (02:46.407)
One is a complete lack of representation. We do not have enough examples of women who look like us, who are running businesses like us, that are demonstrating what an exit might look like. And don't get me wrong, there are unicorn headlines of the Alison Ellsworths and the Aliwebs, and there's incredible examples that are out there, but the message that we digest is that

you have to be worth almost a billion dollars in order to be worthy of an exit. And that just simply isn't true. And then the other problem is that, and this is a statistic that is increasing year over year, women have more emotional attachment to their businesses than men do, let's just say it. And so the statistic is actually 68 % of women identify emotional attachment as the reason why

Adrienne Garland (03:17.576)
Mm. Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (03:30.958)
Mmm.

Adrienne Garland (03:34.488)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (03:42.191)
they will not sell or exit their business. And so what are we doing about that? How are we addressing that? Because it's not that because we're more emotional creatures, we can't exit. No, we have to untangle ourselves. And there are social constructs, there are cultural constructs, and there's conversations that have to happen between women in order to allow that to be a true reality for us.

Adrienne Garland (03:44.546)
Wow.

Adrienne Garland (04:06.648)
Yeah, you know, in a way it makes a lot of sense. So many women start businesses after they've done the thing, whether that is, you know, corporate or they have maybe taken a step away to care for kids or aging parents or anything like that. And so the businesses that they create are almost created out of

Alisha Pennington (04:16.505)
Mm-hmm.

Adrienne Garland (04:32.256)
necessity because it has to work. And so you can see that somebody might be very emotionally tied to that business for what it represents to them.

Alisha Pennington (04:33.807)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (04:45.615)
Right, I think you're getting at the heart of it here, which is that in America specifically, but I think that this is actually a global phenomenon as well. Women tie their worthiness and their value to their output in society. And that's a social construct. That is a cultural thing, right? Historically, our output has been related to homemaking and children. Thankfully, we've evolved beyond there.

Adrienne Garland (05:11.278)
Mmm.

Alisha Pennington (05:13.901)
And now we do have the permission to have our own businesses and be wildly successful in those businesses. But the new message that we've internalized is that if we're not still running that business and collecting accolades, what value do we have in this world, in society? And even if that is a subconscious thought, even if that is not something that we are cognitively believing, when we think about selling this thing or not

Adrienne Garland (05:29.87)
Mm.

Alisha Pennington (05:43.461)
having it anymore, those are the types of tensions that arise in our body that we may not have the language to be able to say or to be able to even identify that, that's the thing that's holding me back. And these are the conversations that we need to have woman to woman because I even see us holding ourselves back. We'll hear a woman say, you know, I think I might want to sell this. Why would you do that?

Adrienne Garland (05:51.136)
Hmm.

Adrienne Garland (05:55.682)
Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (05:59.587)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (06:08.197)
What? Like, it's your baby. Don't you love it? right? You know, like we are the ones in many ways that perpetuate this rhetoric and it's not malicious, right? We're all, we're trained this way too. And so, I mean, it is as simple as these conversations to bring the awareness forward so that we start to understand, okay, this is the problem. And this is how we start to socialize the solution around it.

Adrienne Garland (06:08.674)
Right. yes.

Adrienne Garland (06:32.706)
Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (06:36.172)
Yeah, we really need to decouple our identity from the business. a long time ago, I have this very good friend, she's a therapist, and we went through the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program together. And I had the privilege of driving into the program every day with her. So an hour and a half, either way with a therapist.

Alisha Pennington (06:42.068)
You've got it.

Alisha Pennington (06:53.786)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (07:01.346)
fantastic. Free therapy sessions.

Adrienne Garland (07:06.112)
It was amazing. But she used to talk about this idea of, your business is not your baby because you cannot make logical decisions about your baby. Right. Yeah. And it almost reminds me of the, you know, what we're focused here on the She Leads podcast also about growing and scaling businesses to

Alisha Pennington (07:13.467)
Mmm.

Alisha Pennington (07:18.267)
Exactly. Yes. Yes.

Alisha Pennington (07:25.147)
Thank

Adrienne Garland (07:30.856)
million dollars and beyond. So much of what we're building, we try to keep our arms around. And almost when it gets past the point of us, we lose control. And so I think that there's so many different things going on here.

Alisha Pennington (07:40.727)
Mm-hmm.

Alisha Pennington (07:53.211)
Well, again, this goes back to the identity piece, right? So going back to what you were saying, a lot of women start businesses to create a job for themselves. And there's nothing wrong with that. A lot of us, like you were saying, are forged into necessity entrepreneurship. And that is okay. It is trial by fire. It's drinking from a fire hose. It's figuring it out in real time. Honestly, fantastic. But then we have to sophisticated ourselves.

Adrienne Garland (07:56.664)
Yes.

Adrienne Garland (08:02.776)
Yes.

Adrienne Garland (08:10.434)
Hmm.

Alisha Pennington (08:20.985)
We have to move beyond the model where the entire burden is on our back, right? We need to build a brand. We need to treat it like the asset that it is. And this is where I see a lot of women start to experience what we identify as imposter syndrome, or we start to meet that tension and resistance when there's a seriousness that has to be treated with a separation of those things because...

Adrienne Garland (08:21.326)
Hmm.

Alisha Pennington (08:45.987)
it was cute and it was fun when it was my face and my brand and I delivered the services of the product or, you know, I did behind the scenes of me, you know, packaging the product. But now all of a sudden when there's a distributor or there's a VA or there's a community manager, like these things become more distant from ourselves. It requires us to elevate as leaders as, you know, these different skill sets that potentially we have not inherently had and

Adrienne Garland (09:04.802)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (09:13.891)
I think that women come to a crossroads at each stage of their business to determine, I want to keep going with this? And if I do, what does that mean for me? And I think that a lot of women are afraid of success because what it means about them in society, in their friendship circles. is it? You know, if I'm a wildly successful woman, what does that mean for the relationship with my mom?

Adrienne Garland (09:24.568)
Right.

Adrienne Garland (09:41.196)
Yeah. gosh. Wow. That hits hard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (09:42.287)
What does that mean? You know, you know? And these are under the surface conversations that again, we may not have the articulation for, but this is what we have to be talking about. This isn't YouTube videos on how to figure out your EBITDA and valuation and multiple. Believe me, women are smart enough to figure that stuff out. These are the hard things that we need to

Adrienne Garland (10:07.896)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (10:11.589)
hold space for it's not a single conversation. It's the socialization of these topics that allow us to grow into a space where we then can boldly say, I'm building this thing to exit. I'm just going to sell it at the end of this. Because that's very normal for men. I mean, they they have entire social circles where they I was gonna say where they think up ideas and they want to sell it, you know, we're out, you know, we're out here with

Adrienne Garland (10:14.495)
Mmm.

Adrienne Garland (10:26.85)
Yeah.

is very normal. Yes, in three to five years. Yeah.

Right.

Alisha Pennington (10:39.779)
successful businesses and we would rather shut it down. We would rather just quietly let it disappear and float off into the abyss than to say, I want to sell this thing. And we're doing ourselves a disservice.

Adrienne Garland (10:53.25)
Yeah.

We are, and we're letting our value be, seep away from us, which is what we also tend to do in so many of our relationships. And it's exactly what you're saying. It's societally based and it's sort of.

you know, like a cult. We don't even know that this is what's going on. And it's insidious. we do, I really love that you have pointed out, like we need to have these conversations, even if we don't know what the answers are. And it's not to complain, it's to bring awareness to some of these things so that we can start to ask, now that we're aware,

Alisha Pennington (11:20.783)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (11:32.697)
Right.

Adrienne Garland (11:42.798)
you know, where do we go from here? What do we do next? Which actually takes me to asking you, how do you almost know that you're in this place? And then how do you move through that? Because I don't think anybody wants to get stuck there.

Alisha Pennington (12:01.817)
Yeah, you know, I think that exiting looks different for every single woman, you know, and this is part of why we need greater representation because I think that Candice, the candle maker who's doing $20,000 a year pouring wax in her living room has an asset that can be sold, but she's the first person that would be like, let me just stop doing this. You know, I don't have anything valuable, but how incredible would it be if then Susie

Adrienne Garland (12:19.597)
Mmm.

Adrienne Garland (12:23.597)
Right.

Alisha Pennington (12:30.037)
didn't have to start her candle business from scratch. She could get Candace's book of businesses and Candace's recipes and branding and she can start it. That's the other thing is we think that by selling it's somehow selfish. But what if in the marketplace we are actually cutting short the next woman who could have been entrepreneurial, who could have taken a step up, who could have stood on our shoulders, but instead she's starting from scratch.

Adrienne Garland (12:39.458)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (12:58.427)
Again, this is something that men do. They're passing around ideas and equity and IP and all of these things to help keep getting to the next level. And we can do that. We have the savviness to do that. There's no reason why we can't hand these things off. Women are responsible for $3.3 trillion a year in economic value as

Adrienne Garland (13:24.206)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (13:25.027)
as female business owners. You mean to tell me that we can't transfer that to another woman so that when she finds herself in necessity entrepreneurship, she could buy something instead of building it from scratch? And so when we're, yes, I know.

Adrienne Garland (13:37.77)
Okay. Wait.

I'll stop. Okay, I don't know that I've ever heard what you just said, honestly, because women are not talking about buying other women's businesses and that is brilliant, especially for women that are maybe a little bit.

Alisha Pennington (13:50.319)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Alisha Pennington (13:58.01)
Yep.

Adrienne Garland (14:08.382)
older, they've spent the last 10, 15 years building something that maybe they don't want to continue doing for whatever reason. But if they sold it to somebody who was their younger self that had the same vision and energy and everything as they did 10, 15 years ago, what a beautiful legacy. Where is this marketplace, Alisha?

Alisha Pennington (14:16.315)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Alisha Pennington (14:21.625)
Yes! Yes!

Alisha Pennington (14:33.787)
We need this marketplace. We need this marketplace. Maybe that'll be the next iteration of what I do. But this is the point, right? Like women, we are so invested in legacy, in mentorship, in altruism. Like that is who we are. And so this is the version of allowing the next woman, like you said, the 10 to 15 years you're a junior that is curious about these things, give her that mentorship.

Adrienne Garland (14:39.435)
Yes!

Alisha Pennington (15:00.283)
And I think that as women, would feel so much more confident selling our businesses if the branding of selling your business looked more like this than private equity. I don't have to go further. All I have to say is private equity. That is what the brand of sell your business is put out as right now. I'm advocating that we completely rebrand that, that as women.

Adrienne Garland (15:06.146)
Yes.

Adrienne Garland (15:10.338)
Mm.

Yes.

Adrienne Garland (15:17.076)
Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (15:23.949)
Yes.

Alisha Pennington (15:28.335)
We are having these conversations amongst ourselves. We have our own marketplace. We're transferring IP. You know, this doesn't have to involve business brokerages and &A lawyers. It doesn't. It can be a single lawyer that is transferring IP from one woman to another for a specified sale price.

Adrienne Garland (15:34.019)
Yes.

Adrienne Garland (15:38.904)
No.

Adrienne Garland (15:46.222)
I'm speechless because I love this so, so very much. And I do think that more and more women, and I've talked about this a lot, this is something that I circle around all the time and I always say, but I don't have the answer and I wish I did. I always thought to myself, even after going through the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Swell Businesses Program, which was awesome, and having my MBA and blah, blah, blah.

Women built businesses that looked like men's businesses because those were the models of success. So here we were, building businesses that looked like the businesses that didn't lead us towards success. We were building the same thing, just a different person was building a bit. We were building the same thing. And then we asked ourselves, well, why isn't this business scaling? Why is this business not successful? Because we built something

Alisha Pennington (16:25.435)
Mmm.

Alisha Pennington (16:34.533)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (16:44.75)
that was not meant for us to take to that level of success. So why didn't we, why couldn't we build different? I just don't think that we knew how to do it. And what you're saying is the exact same thing. Here we are thinking that we need to have these billion dollar unicorn businesses, these high tech businesses, these businesses where the VC bros and the PE dudes are

Alisha Pennington (16:47.609)
Right? Yep.

Alisha Pennington (17:10.554)
Mm-hmm.

Adrienne Garland (17:13.608)
are talking about all of this stuff that is just, it's almost too complicated, too much for what we're trying to do. And there is so much validity in doing things maybe smaller, but more often, right?

Alisha Pennington (17:16.123)
Thank

Alisha Pennington (17:22.779)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Alisha Pennington (17:33.667)
Yes, well, and that's the other thing. So I do want to go back to one point you were asking me, how does a woman know when she's ready to exit or ready to sell? other thing that women uniquely encounter is that because, again, culturally, we are the default caretaker in this society. And caretaker is everything from children to aging parents to friends to spouses, whatever it is.

Adrienne Garland (17:40.576)
Yeah, so let's go back there.

Alisha Pennington (18:03.255)
And so often what I see is a woman runs into a life experience, a life situation. And we all know life comes at us fast. It could be a chronic illness. It could be, you know, debilitating something with someone close to you. You get pregnant. You have to relocate for a spouse's job, whatever it is. And the first thing that we do is pause our business. Again.

Adrienne Garland (18:28.311)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (18:29.345)
A man would never do this, but even a man aside, we take on those caretaking responsibilities and we want to continue to be able to do that. So my advocacy here is that we are setting our businesses up from the very beginning that they could run without us. Right? So it's not that they have to, you can continue to be involved to the extent that you would like to, but you have the option that you could step away.

Adrienne Garland (18:31.853)
No.

Adrienne Garland (18:47.65)
Yes.

Alisha Pennington (18:57.901)
And it is not until you have certain layers of optionality that you're really ready for an exit. I would argue that just about anything could be sold. But when we talk about structured assets that can be transferred and sold like in a very traditional exit understanding.

you're thinking more so about something that is systematized, it has processes, there's SOPs, there's probably people working in the business that can execute without you, all of those kinds of things. Even if maybe you're still the face or the brand or the CEO or whatever it is, there still is transferable asset. So you ask me, when is a woman ready to exit? Number one, it's when there is a distance from a logistics and operations perspective between her and the business.

But then the layer deeper than that is often when she is able to emotionally, spiritually, psychologically detach from it. And that process looks different for everybody. Some women it is easier to get to than others. But what I also want to encourage is what you just brought up, which is this is not the end of the road. And

Adrienne Garland (19:48.952)
Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (19:58.083)
Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (20:12.098)
Right.

Alisha Pennington (20:12.557)
It's another piece that we need to socialize with women is that we think we start a business and we have to strangle, you know, every piece of life out of it when sometimes starting that first business and getting rid of it and starting over again, whether you're buying another business or you're moving on to another venture, that's where your real success is going to occur. And you see this across the board that

Adrienne Garland (20:37.005)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (20:39.803)
The people who you see as wildly successful now, the Gary Vaynerchuk's, the Mark Cubans, I mean, even, you know, women, women examples, that's not their first business. They've had multiple iterations before and we forget that, right? We're trying to strangle the life out of the first idea that we were trial by fire with instead of saying, I took this as far as it can go. I'm going to release it to someone else to something else.

Adrienne Garland (20:51.853)
No.

Adrienne Garland (20:55.96)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (21:06.104)
And I've got this other thing that I'm going to start working on, take all that experience and lateral it over into there. But I also think that women, when we're not selling it, we internalize a message that is about denial and shame. And there's these stories that we start telling ourselves about why we weren't successful. And it prohibits us from ever being able to move on to the next thing, which

Adrienne Garland (21:11.982)
Mmm.

Adrienne Garland (21:31.448)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (21:31.555)
is wild. Like, none of that is true. It is a story that you're telling yourself. And the other gender does not tell themselves that stories. And I hate to keep making that comparison. But it's just such a simple understanding of this is how we're trained. It is a social and a cultural piece that we can unwind and like you were saying, untangle ourselves from.

Adrienne Garland (21:33.794)
Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (21:49.95)
Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (21:55.65)
Yeah, you know, I do think it's very important too. And I appreciate the comparison, not because we don't love men or think that they're brilliant too, but when you kind of show those two things right next to one another, you can see how far away they are. And then you start to use your logical brain and you say, well, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. None.

Alisha Pennington (22:05.242)
Right.

Alisha Pennington (22:20.697)
Any sense? Exactly.

Adrienne Garland (22:23.222)
And I often say that to colleagues, friends. I say, why are you even speaking like that? Do you think that those words would ever fall out of a man's mouth? And it's not to say anything negative about men. It's just to look at them and say, look what they're doing. Why can't you do that too? Why can't we do that as well? And yeah.

Alisha Pennington (22:34.777)
right? Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (22:47.355)
It's to bring awareness to the fact that there are cognitive differences in how we approach stuff. And so it's for me, I say it because the last thing I want a woman to feel is like she's not good enough or that she doesn't have the capacity. And just comparing it to a man, it makes you realize you do have the capacity. isn't a personal problem. This is a systemic problem.

Adrienne Garland (22:52.952)
Yes. Yes.

Adrienne Garland (23:10.977)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (23:16.057)
Right? So it's not, there's nothing wrong with you, ma'am. You know, this is a systematic thing that keeps us trapped in this thing. And if we want to change that, these are the awarenesses that we need to have. Cause otherwise she just thinks that's this uniquely personal situation, which it just isn't. It just isn't. Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (23:16.376)
Yes.

Adrienne Garland (23:29.475)
Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (23:36.142)
No. And I do see often, mean, everything that you're saying, I'm really taking it personally and to heart because I can see so much of myself in what you're saying and I'm aware of it. And yet I also am somebody that defaults to this maladaptive behavior. it's really strong and it's bizarre.

Alisha Pennington (23:44.827)
Aww.

Adrienne Garland (24:02.702)
And I could see it in other people. I see it in myself as well, but it's just very difficult to sort of act on. I also, a couple of things that I wanted to circle back to. So when women are sort of in this position and then they are aware and then they say to themselves, okay, I need to move from founder mentality to more of a CEO type of mentality. I need to put the systems into place and everything like that.

Alisha Pennington (24:27.951)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Adrienne Garland (24:32.707)
I would think that you would suggest doing that before you need to, before life throws you the curve ball.

Alisha Pennington (24:41.849)
Yeah, mean, readiness is is so when you think about exit readiness, that's a word that gets thrown around a lot. But one of the models I love to live by is be ready so you don't have to get ready. Readiness readiness is about the opportunity to take action when it is presented to you. It is not about waiting until it's presented to you to

Adrienne Garland (24:56.077)
Yes.

Adrienne Garland (25:05.534)
Mmm.

Alisha Pennington (25:11.493)
think about taking action. I also think about like luck. Luck is something that we create. We have to be ready for luck to find us. And I know inherently you build a business differently when you're thinking about could I ever sell it? Could I ever exit? You build it differently. And

Adrienne Garland (25:13.614)
Mmm.

Adrienne Garland (25:19.33)
Yes.

Adrienne Garland (25:23.66)
Hmm.

Alisha Pennington (25:38.773)
In that building it differently, you're opening yourself to completely different conversations, completely different opportunities. And so the woman who is building this out of necessity, thinking I just have to keep this as a job. I just have to run this thing forever. It is going to keep her in a version of herself and a version of that business that will never present an opportunity, probably for selling, for exiting.

Adrienne Garland (26:04.194)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (26:05.843)
And it's a self-fulfilling prophecy of I'm not good enough to sell. don't have something worthy. This isn't a real asset. Well, if you don't believe you're worthy and don't treat it as an asset and don't think it has value, that's never going to show itself. And so for me, my mission here is to normalize the culture and conversation around women exiting their business. And that's it. Normalizing the culture and conversation. It's not around

Adrienne Garland (26:21.005)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (26:35.427)
I don't necessarily want to say now 3 % of women sell their business. That's not the effort here. If that happens, fantastic. The effort is that she has the option to which we are completely closing ourselves off from right now because we're not conscious of it. We're not thinking about readiness fast enough. Think about readiness before you even start building. Not to say that you ever will exit it so that you could, so that you

Adrienne Garland (26:47.244)
Yes.

Adrienne Garland (26:56.363)
No.

Adrienne Garland (27:02.338)
Yes.

Alisha Pennington (27:03.033)
have the option so that the readiness is there when the opportunity presents itself.

Adrienne Garland (27:07.33)
Yes. I mean, I think that's the same exact mission that I'm on to help women get past the million dollars. I often say that we build these businesses, we get to a million dollars, we never even thought that we were going to get there. So it's sort of like, now what? I thought this was, yeah, what happens next? Exit comes next.

Alisha Pennington (27:15.951)
Right?

Alisha Pennington (27:24.601)
Right? Now what? Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (27:31.704)
You one of the things that I also read about what you were doing is that you are focusing, and you mentioned it, on diverse exits. So they don't need to be these, you multi-million dollar exits. They can be smaller exits and more diverse. You're also putting together stories of different women. So can you talk a little bit about that? Because it sounds so exciting.

Alisha Pennington (27:39.642)
Yes.

Alisha Pennington (27:44.687)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (27:49.679)
Yes. Yes.

Yeah, and I also would like to share a little bit of my own story related to this, because what you just said around encouraging women to reach for a million dollar years, right? And who she has to become in order to achieve that, whether that's leadership, whether that's belief, whether that's systems and processes. One of the components that I experienced and why I wanted to sell my business is because it got way bigger.

than I ever expected it to. Like you mentioned, the top, it's an agency. So, and it's a staffing agency specifically, which means their employees. When I sold it, I was at six management level employees and 54 hourly workers. I don't want that kind of responsibility. know, like people talk about, you know, multimillion dollar company and yeah, that's fantastic. But what is the responsibility of the CEO who runs that?

Adrienne Garland (28:24.59)
Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (28:41.196)
Right. Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (28:51.277)
Right?

Alisha Pennington (28:51.351)
understanding that you're providing livelihood for 60 people and how they feed their families and go on vacation. That was too much for me. That was, you know, from a responsibility perspective, I was like, you know what, I don't need to be responsible for that. But then secondarily, the logistics and what starts to get involved and nuanced and complicated with having employees in different states and

Adrienne Garland (29:01.63)
Yeah. Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (29:07.799)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (29:19.363)
running a business of that size, I said to myself, this isn't fun for me anymore. I don't want to do this. And so the permission for that to be okay, that I took this as far as I wanted it to go, it scaled and got way bigger than I ever expected. I am proud of myself for that, but I don't have to keep it going. Just because I got it this far doesn't mean I have to hang on to it.

Adrienne Garland (29:25.336)
Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (29:33.634)
Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (29:42.411)
No.

Adrienne Garland (29:46.648)
Right.

Alisha Pennington (29:46.791)
so I just, want to put that out there for the woman who did get to seven figures, who got to multi seven figures, who got to whatever level that she got to that was bigger than she ever expected. You also have permission to not keep going from there. You've, you've done enough, right? and then to, to answer your question about the stories I want to tell it's everything from the attempted exits to the successful exits to the regretful exits that

Adrienne Garland (30:03.116)
Yeah. Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (30:14.126)
Mmm. Mmm.

Alisha Pennington (30:16.851)
If we want to storytelling is one of the best ways to understand messaging that can help rewire our brains. And this is a movement as I've kind of alluded to here, like I can't do this by myself. I could sit and have conversation with you all day every day. And it is not going to permeate the social cultural norms of women. If there is not perpetual conversation, this has to have ripple effects.

So the people listening to this have to go talk to it talk about it in their circles and then they talk about it in their circles, right? And so storytelling is one of the most powerful ways for someone to see themselves in another person's experience and say That's what's possible or that's the lesson that I took away, right? So I can tell my story endlessly and I might find ten a hundred a thousand women but if I tell a hundred different stories that have

Adrienne Garland (30:46.72)
Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (30:53.378)
Mm-hmm.

Adrienne Garland (31:06.994)
yeah.

Alisha Pennington (31:16.247)
diversity in industry, in process, in sale number, even in ethnic diversity and cultural diversity, all of the things, we have a much better opportunity of actually achieving my mission, which is to normalize the culture and conversation around it.

Adrienne Garland (31:34.114)
Yeah. It's the, you can see it, you can be it. And yeah, and this is so important also for younger women as well. They need to understand that entrepreneurship is a very real path for them that has longevity. They don't have to just get jobs working in a corporate environment in order to be successful. And the idea that you can

Alisha Pennington (31:37.997)
You can be it. Right. That's exactly it. Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (31:45.413)
Yes.

Alisha Pennington (31:57.924)
Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (32:02.868)
move in and out of entrepreneurship, start a business, sell a business, maybe work for somebody else. It's all good and it all is dependent on what goes through your life. Your life goes through cycles and I think so too should your career without having to majorly sacrifice the things that we have had to sacrifice when life.

Alisha Pennington (32:18.458)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (32:22.383)
I agree.

Adrienne Garland (32:29.356)
gets in the way, and then we end up not having the wealth that we should have by the time that we're ready to step back and retire. I feel like, gosh, we could keep talking and talking and talking. I do know that you're also hosting an event at New York Tech Week coming up in June, the beginning of June. I don't know if you're selling tickets to that.

Alisha Pennington (32:48.613)
Yes, yes. Yes.

Adrienne Garland (32:54.794)
But we are all here in the New York area. lot of the listeners are from the New York metro area. yeah, so please tell us, yeah, how can they get tickets?

Alisha Pennington (32:57.371)
yes, let me talk about this for a second, please. No, the events are totally free. So I have three different events and they're aimed at three different audiences. So one of the events is actually a she builds hackathon. And what we're doing here is inviting women business owners to come in. And we are going to talk and be able to leave at the end of this with

How are you able to exit your business? It's an exiting hackathon, right? So even if it is in theory and it's a practice round, this is a rep that you put in so that you can start getting your mind around the idea of what would it look like to exit. So you can bring a hypothetical business, you could bring a real business, whatever it is. So we have an exiting hackathon. That one is gonna be co-hosted with UBS. So we'll be downtown right across from Rockefeller Center for that one.

Adrienne Garland (33:31.79)
Love it.

Adrienne Garland (33:43.832)
Amazing.

Alisha Pennington (33:55.803)
And I can send you links for all of these. The second one is actually aimed at wealth managers, family offices, because what I haven't mentioned here is in order to be effective in having this conversation, we need to not only be at the ground level talking to every woman, we also need to be coming top down. We need to be having conversations with the wealth managers, the business brokers, the M &A lawyers and saying she needs emotional readiness.

Adrienne Garland (33:55.906)
Amazing.

Adrienne Garland (34:15.714)
Yes.

Adrienne Garland (34:25.422)
Hmm

Alisha Pennington (34:25.539)
And if she's talking to you about selling her business, but she hasn't crossed that threshold, you're probably going to be dealing with somebody that gets all the way to the end zone, or the red zone, I should say, and can't put it across the line. And so that conversation is directed at wealth managers. And it's the intention there is let's have a

Adrienne Garland (34:37.134)
Oh, oh, yeah.

Alisha Pennington (34:48.141)
honest conversation around why she isn't selling. You maybe need to change your marketing. You maybe need to change your messaging because again, we're responsible for $3.3 trillion a year. So it is in their interest to get us to sell, right? But they need to they need to meet us where we're at. So that conversation is there. If anybody in the audience is in, you know, wealth management, family office, anything that supports the woman reaching the exit.

Adrienne Garland (35:02.69)
Yes.

Love it.

Alisha Pennington (35:15.387)
I would love to have them in that room to be sharing the research that we're finding. That's essentially a market briefing that we're going to be sharing. And then the third line is aimed at FinTech. What are the different systems and tools and resources that we need to have greater access to and barriers lowered in order for us to feel like we have the literacy to exit, right? what are, where are we getting business valuations done?

Adrienne Garland (35:22.584)
Love it.

Adrienne Garland (35:41.486)
Hmm.

Alisha Pennington (35:45.295)
Where are we understanding what the wealth components are, the financial implications of this? Where are places that we should be borrowing money from or what does that look like? And so that is sort of bringing both sides of the table together of who is creating these resources for the woman business owner that are fintech specific and what is she saying that she needs access to? So again, forging that conversation forward,

beyond just the social emotional component of it. That one's a little bit more tactical and logistics specific. So again, if anybody in the audience is anywhere, I know FinTech is a massive industry, but somewhere in this space that is related to the tools and resources that she needs in order to effectively exit, that's gonna be the conversation there.

Adrienne Garland (36:36.236)
Absolutely incredible. I'm like, want to go to each one of those. And I'm going on an epic, I will send it out to everybody. I will not be in town. I'm going on an epic trip with my son to Japan. yeah.

Alisha Pennington (36:38.807)
Yes!

Alisha Pennington (36:42.467)
Yeah, I'll send all the links. Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (36:48.836)
No worries.

Alisha Pennington (36:52.871)
I was born in Japan. I love Japan. Yes. Yes. I know right. All right.

Adrienne Garland (36:58.496)
for her to talk about. Amazing, amazing, amazing. Well, listen, and also how can people just get in touch with you?

Alisha Pennington (37:06.647)
Yes. So the other thing I want to mention is that I have a free community where we're having this conversation every single week. In the first week, I already had a hundred women join it, which is so exciting, but it's got to keep going. A hundred women is fantastic. And I don't want to dismiss this, but there has to be thousands and tens of thousands of women that are participating in this conversation. So the you can find me, find me on Instagram. It's at it's Alisha MP ITS.

Adrienne Garland (37:18.765)
Yes.

Adrienne Garland (37:27.235)
Yes.

Alisha Pennington (37:34.977)
A-L-I-S-H-A-M-P. That's where I talk about this a lot. Otherwise, exet.co, E-X-E-T-T-E dot co. And I just want to mention, exet is the exit made feminine. It is E-X with the feminine E-T-T-E at the end. Exet, yes. Yes.

Adrienne Garland (37:50.624)
Except I love that so very much. Well, I hope that every single person that is listening to the show joins because it's so important, even if you're not ready to be part of the conversation.

Alisha Pennington (38:00.176)
Yes.

Right? Be calm and be a fly on the wall, please, because maybe someone in your circle will be ready or prepare yourself for when someone in your circle says, this is interesting to me, right? Or a thought process around that. This is how you start to prepare yourself for who in your circle might need that conversation for them.

Adrienne Garland (38:07.746)
Yes. Yes.

Adrienne Garland (38:13.015)
Yes.

Adrienne Garland (38:28.922)
I love this so much. I have spent so much time listening and enjoying every single thing that you have said. I am joining the community. I'm going to share it with everybody. And I just absolutely love the work that you're doing. So hopefully you can come back on in another year or so and talk about how much the community has grown and share more stories of women that are exiting.

Alisha Pennington (38:31.535)
Yeah.

Alisha Pennington (38:39.109)
Thank you.

Alisha Pennington (38:42.789)
Cool.

Alisha Pennington (38:46.213)
Thank you. Yes. Would love that. Yeah.

Adrienne Garland (38:56.546)
Thank you so much for spending time with me here today on the She Leads Podcast.

Alisha Pennington (39:02.181)
Thank you, Adrian, for having me.

Adrienne Garland (39:05.23)
Yay!