Episode 152: Why I Hate Bro Marketing and Hustle Culture
As a child of immigrants who was taught to work hard and value money over everything else, I've spent a lifetime unlearning the narratives that lead me to live by other people's definition of success, and measuring my worth through external measures. From burnout to my healing journey with my mom, I have shared very openly my relationship to re-defining my relationship with money, success, self worth, and how I believe our marketing should be a reflection of our core values. Recently, I attended an event that was very bro marketing which not only lacked any diversity at all, but prioritized MORE IS ALWAYS BETTER and this made me want to record an episode on my reflections on this. Although we live in a world where sometimes the loudest voices get heard or valued, may this episode be an invitation to give yourself permission to define success on your own terms.
Here’s What We Cover and More:
Reflection on a $5000 business event experience
Diversity issues and lack of representation at the event
Focus of the event on selling businesses, not just growth
High-pressure sales tactics and lack of transparency
Personal misalignment with extreme capitalist business strategies
Value in a more nuanced definition of success
Importance of balancing revenue growth with personal well-being and impact
Emphasis on bringing humanity back into marketing
Encouragement to reflect on personal business goals and values
Attending a high-cost business event full of aggressive upselling and lacking diversity was a wake up call— authenticity and integrity in business far outweigh any superficial revenue growth. The event’s narrow focus on preparing businesses for sale, while sidelining valuable voices, only solidified my belief that success isn’t about relentless hustle but about genuine connections and meaningful progress. Let’s ditch the cookie-cutter capitalist paradigm and embrace a more nuanced, human-centered approach to business growth.
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Transcript
00:00:00 Gloria: Hey, Small Biz Heroes. Welcome back to another episode of Small Business PR where we make marketing and PR super accessible, simple, and actionable for the everyday small business underdog. Usually on this podcast, we talk all about PR and marketing strategies. Sometimes, talk about my own healing journey. But today, we're going to do, a little bit, something different. And I honestly hesitated before recording this because I don't like to spread negativity or say anything bad about anyone.
00:00:26 Gloria: So I hope that you take what I say today with a grain of salt. I'm simply sharing my experiences and opening up a space for curiosity, an invitation for us to think about business differently. Because after all, what is the point of having a business if we can't be empowered to decide what is the outcome of success that is true for us? If we are living by a definition that is dictated by other people, then our business is no longer ours, is it?
00:00:51 Gloria: So just to backtrack a little bit, I recently spent $5,000 and plane ticket and accommodation to fly across the country to go to this business event. And it was all about growing your business, right? Which everybody wants. And these were viral marketers that had incredibly valuable free content. I've been following them for years. Their books, their podcasts, their content, and I just really resonated with the value that they brought. So I signed up, and without even thinking and I went.
00:01:25 Gloria: And I wish that I had nothing but wonderful things to say, but honestly, it kind of left a bad taste in my mouth and the whole experience, even though I did meet some people, I felt like I was misled. And so I'll kind of preface this by saying that, on my healing journey and on my journey of building my business and also deconstructing, like what success means for me. This year has been a tremendous year of shifts for all of us and it's asked us to really recalibrate like what is true for us and if the things that we're doing is, no longer working then like what is it that we still want to do? What do we want to do to create? What do… how do we want to innovate?
00:02:08 Gloria: And so this year being the wild wild west of online marketing, a lot of people are finally revealing their authenticity and in turn attracting their tribe. I always say that your vibe attracts your tribe and we're at a point in marketing where customers are more sensitive and discerning than ever and the templates that have been used by the same five or six marketing bros are just no longer working anymore. And so we're seeing a lot of nuances in marketing and I think that's a good thing. Right?
00:02:37 Gloria: So I went and immediately I looked around the room. And I was probably one of 10 women in a sea of over 120 white men. And out of the 10 women, there were probably only three or four women of color. And so immediately, okay, from the diversity point of view, like definitely really, really, really, really lacking. And everybody was an able bodied white marketing brow around the age of, I want to say 25 to 35. So it was very kind of one type of individual.
00:03:11 Gloria: And so immediately that stuck out to me. And I know for a lot of people, maybe you don't notice that, but for me as a woman of color, as a daughter of immigrants, I do notice that because it is not something that is guaranteed that, like, I walk into a room and I see myself reflected. Actually, I spent my whole life walking into rooms where I was the only person who looked like me or maybe had parents who didn't speak English. So that really stuck out to me.
00:03:38 Gloria: The second thing was that the whole event was really around getting your business to be sold. And so even though, you know, for me, like I wanted to grow my business, it wasn't immediately clear that the event was all catering towards getting your business sold and acquired by, let's say, a bigger company or a private equity group. It was all about figuring out the valuation of your company. I realized that the reason why they did this is because at the end of every single day, it was a live sales funnel trying to upsell you to their $20,000 event, which basically would try to help you increase your valuation multiple, which is what you could be acquired for.
00:04:21 Gloria: And so they did it very strategically in a very direct and high-pressure way where, like at the end of each day session, it was about calculating, okay, well, here's where you are now. If you join this event and if you get the upsell, you will be able to three, four, five times that multiple. And then at some point, like, you know, we had five guys with clipboards walking into the room, like literally signing you up, going up to you in a very direct way. And I just wasn't used to that kind of live, pressured sales tactics. It was just every single day, that was literally the point of it.
00:05:00 Gloria: I also felt a little bit misled because on the call, on the original sales call where the guy took my credit card, which I also thought was very aggressive too, I should have known then because I really didn't get a lot of information about what this was going to be about. So there wasn't an agenda, there wasn't a breakdown of what was going to happen. It was like, okay, here's this event, here's who you're going to hear from, topics we'll cover, right? But it wasn't really like a breakdown of like, what, like how many minutes do we get with each person or how many people are gonna be in the room with me?
00:05:30 Gloria: And actually was told that there was gonna be X number of people and they're actually more than double the amount of people that they told me on the phone there would be there. So what does that mean? It just means that there was less individualized attention for when we did have those breakout rooms, which for most people was like the most valuable part of it, right? Because you got to ask questions.
00:05:51 Gloria: And so I felt like every time when we did have those breakout rooms, everyone was shuffling to different rooms. Everyone had maybe 90 seconds to ask a question. The answers were often one to three minutes max. And there's no way that you can understand the nuance or context of a person's situation in those few seconds. And I feel like a lot of the answers were very generic because there just wasn't enough time.
00:06:16 Gloria: And actually, there were two times where the same woman, she also happened to be one of the only other women of color. She actually got skipped over because they didn't have enough time, and she was the last one sitting at the edge of the table. I just felt like it was a little bit unfair when I was told that it was going to be X number of people. It was more than that, and there's just not enough time, period.
00:06:38 Gloria: I also felt like there was a level of exclusivity that they built to make the sales funnel very attractive. I'll give you an example. If you didn't buy the upsell for $20,000, then you couldn't step into a certain area of the room that it was the lunch room. And I'll never forget, at the end of the day, I wanted to get a bottle of water before we left because it was really, really hot. And there was, I kid you not, a velvet rope set up where the lunch area was because they had turned that into like a VIP cocktail hour for the people who had special wristbands who decided to upgrade. And so I wasn't allowed in the area to get any water.
00:07:15 Gloria: And so I just thought that was really funny. And I also actually sat next to two men, nice guys, but at some point, they were talking about how they were so relieved that after they had kids, they told their wives to stay at home so that somebody can take care of the mess. And that, you know, they're like, Yeah, bro, like, after we had our second, I was like, No, you're staying at home. There's nothing wrong with that if it's a consensual decision between a couple, but somehow it just sounded strange, it landed weird.
00:07:46 Gloria: So for all of those reasons, it made me realize there's always going to be that old guard of marketing where it's like, more is better and more at all costs and growth and numbers, and the loudest person in the room wins. But I'm really in an era where I'm defining it differently. I actually wrote a post about this on reflecting on my birthday, the 10 lessons. One of the things I've learned is that it actually can feel really rich to make less top line revenue.
00:08:13 Gloria: Because a lot of the people who are making seven, eight figures, they actually get to keep very little of it for themselves. And they are doing this at the expense of their relationships, the expense of showing up for family, for themselves, for health. And so this, grow and scale and make money at all costs paradigm that everybody, I guess, subscribed to, you know, who signed up for the workshop. It's just something that I no longer believe in anymore.
00:08:39 Gloria: And, you know, I was reflecting on it. And I think there was nothing inherently wrong about what they did for that audience. But for people who want to have a more nuanced definition of value, which is not just an external measure of a number, whether it's revenue or profit, but how do you measure the impact that you create? Or how do you measure the expansiveness, you make someone feel because you make them feel seen? Or how do you measure the moments that you get back with your family?
00:09:08 Gloria: Or how do you measure the amount of healing that you've done because you finally realized through your business all of the generational stuff that you're here to unravel, whether it's money trauma or self-worthiness trauma or imposter syndrome. Right? So all of those things are valuable, if not more valuable, but because it's not a part of this very linear, logical capitalist paradigm that we subscribe to, which has to be quantified and measured and KPIs, all of a sudden it just is no longer valuable. There was no space for us to recognize that.
00:09:37 Gloria: So it's just a reminder that, like there's a tribe for everyone. But I do think that this kind of extreme capitalism of like one size fits all marketing, that more is better. And the more revenue you make, the more successful you are. It's just not something that I want to subscribe to. And I think people are waking up to that.
00:09:57 Gloria: At least the people in my community, the more people that I talk to, the more they say, you know, I'm really happy that you actually got on a call with me or that you're willing to help me out, even though I haven't technically joined your program or that the CEO would show up. And I think that we just need to bring humanity back to marketing.
00:10:16 Gloria: And so, for me to record this episode is not to say that these people did anything bad, they still create a lot of value, I've learned a lot from them. But I just feel like it's time, it's time to have a more nuanced definition of what growth means, because there's so many flavors and contours of growth that cannot be measured, you know, in a direct way.
00:10:44 Gloria: So I invite you to also think about your business and the people that you follow, whose books that you read, and the people that you go to see on stages, you know, is there like marketing or capitalism or success definition, something that truly aligns with you, or are you just blindly following it like we all have because that's just what we've been told.
00:11:05 Gloria: And so that was really a good reminder for me after the event of the things that I wanted to follow and give my attention to and the spaces that I am currently creating, which is very different than the space that they were creating. And to realize that even though, you know, having more and more revenue every single year is not the goal. It doesn't mean that there's no growth or that there's no richness. In fact, there's so much richness and abundance.
00:11:29 Gloria: So hopefully, you can give yourself that permission too if maybe you see your numbers going up and down, but that there's still so much growth and progress in other ways. And it doesn't mean that you're somehow failed or that you've plateaued or that you're somehow not doing great. So that's just a little reminder. And thank you so much for letting me share my experiences with you.
00:11:52 Gloria: At the time of recording, we're close to the second half of the year and I'm kind of in a reflective mood as I celebrate my birthday. And it's always a time where I look past, in the last 12 months, what I've learned and the person that I become and how I'm just continually evolving. So thank you for allowing me to evolve, seeing my journey and being along with it.
00:12:14 Gloria: If you know any others who also can resonate with this message, please tell them about this podcast. It's the only way that this podcast gets out and just, tell them to search for Small Business PR and to subscribe, like and rate this podcast so that we can get it out to more people. Thank you so much.