Episode 201: Why Hustle Culture and Bro Marketing Are Failing Small Businesses and Female Entrepreneurs
In this episode of the Small Business PR Podcast, Gloria opens up about a $5,000 business event that left her with more questions than answers—and why she believes it’s time for small business owners to redefine success on their own terms.
After investing in travel, accommodations, and the ticket itself, she expected a transformative learning experience. Instead, she was met with high-pressure sales tactics, lack of diversity, and a singular definition of success rooted only in revenue and acquisition.
If you’ve ever felt out of place in the “bro marketing” world—or wondered whether scaling at all costs is really worth it—this episode will resonate with you.
Why Growth at All Costs Is Not the Only Path
Gloria shares what she experienced at the event:
Diversity gaps: out of 120 attendees, she was one of just a handful of women and women of color.
Sales-driven agenda: the entire conference centered on selling businesses to private equity, not holistic growth.
Pressure tactics: upsells, velvet ropes, and exclusivity designed to push a $20K offer.
Redefining Success Beyond Revenue
Through this experience, Gloria reflects on a deeper truth:
Success isn’t always measured by 7-figure topline revenue.
Impact, balance, and freedom are equally valuable.
Small businesses can thrive by focusing on relationships, healing, and alignment—not just numbers.
Takeaways for Small Business Owners
Question the spaces you invest in: Does their definition of success align with yours?
Redefine growth: Expansiveness, healing, and time with family can be just as valuable as financial KPIs.
Bring humanity back to marketing: Customers crave authenticity, not templates or pressure.
Final Reflection
This episode is not about calling anyone out—it’s about opening a conversation. Gloria invites you to think critically about the business gurus you follow and the strategies you adopt. Is it your definition of success—or someone else’s?
👉 If you’ve ever questioned the “hustle harder, scale bigger” model, this episode is your permission slip to redefine growth on your own terms.
Resources Mentioned:
Join the PR Secrets Masterclass
Join the Small Biz PR Pros Facebook Group
DM the word “PITCH” to us on Instagram to get a pitching freebie https://www.instagram.com/gloriachoupr
Connect with Gloria Chou on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gloriaychou
Join Gloria Chou's PR Community https://www.facebook.com/groups/428633254951941
Additional Resources:
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TRANsCRIPT
00:00:00 Gloria: Hey, small business 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. 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 and invitation for us to think about business differently. Because 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?
00:00:49 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, 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 without even thinking, and I went. And I wish that I had nothing but wonderful things to say. It left a bad taste in my mouth. And the whole experience, even though I did meet some people, I felt like I was misled.
00:01:30 Gloria: I'll preface this by saying that on my healing journey and on my journey of building my business and also deconstructing what success means for me, this year has been a tremendous year of shifts for all of us. It's asked us to really recalibrate what is true for us. If the things that we're doing is no longer working, then what is it that we still want to do? What do we want to do to create? How do we want to innovate? 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.
00:02:19 Gloria: So I went and immediately, I looked around the room. I was probably 1 of 10 women in a sea of over 120 white men. Out of the 10 women, there were probably only three or four women of color. So immediately, from the diversity point of view, definitely really lacking. And everybody was an able-bodied white marketing bro around the age of 25 to 35. So it's very kind of one type of individual. 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, 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 stuck out to me.
00:03:10 Gloria: The second thing was that the whole event was really around getting your business to be sold. Even though 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, and 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.
00:03:47 Gloria: They did it very strategically in a very direct and high pressure way where, at the end of each day's 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, we had five guys with clipboards walking into the room, 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's literally the point of it.
00:04:19 Gloria: I also felt a little bit misled because 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. 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. But it wasn't really a breakdown of how many minutes do we get with each person or how many people are going to be in the room with me.
00:04:44 Gloria: And I actually was told that there was going to be X number of people, and there were actually more than double the amount of people that they told me on the phone they 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 the most valuable part of it because you got to ask questions.
00:05:04 Gloria :I felt like every time when we did have those breakout rooms, everyone was shuffling to different rooms. Everyone had maybe ninety 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. I felt like a lot of the answers were very generic because there just wasn't enough time. And, actually, there were two times where the same woman, and 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.
00:05:46 Gloria: I also felt like there was a level of exclusivity that they built to make the sales funnel very attractive. So 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 was a lunchroom. 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. There was, I kid you not, a velvet rope set up where the lunch area was because they had turned that into 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. And so I just thought that was really funny.
00:06:21 Gloria: 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. They're like, “Yeah, bro. 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.
00:06:44 Gloria: And 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. Because a lot of the people who are making 7, 8 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 subscribed to who signed up for the workshop is just something that I no longer believe in anymore.
00:07:32 Gloria: I was reflecting on it, and 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, 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. 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.
00:08:25 Gloria: It's just a reminder that there's a tribe for everyone. But I do think that this kind of extreme capitalism of 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, at least the people in my community. The more people that I talk to, the more they say, 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.
00:08:58 Gloria: 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 in a direct way. 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.
00:09:27 Gloria: Is their 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? 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 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.
00:09:58 Gloria: So hopefully, you can give yourself that permission, too, if maybe you see your numbers going up and down, but 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. That's just a little reminder. And thank you so much for letting me share my experiences with you.
00:10:17 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 twelve months what I've learned and the person I've become and how I'm just continually evolving. So thank you for allowing me to evolve, seeing my journey and being along with it. 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. 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.
00:10:56 Gloria: Hey, small business hero. Did you know that you can get featured for free on outlets like Forbes, The New York Times, Marie Claire, PopSugar, and so many more even if you are not yet launched or if you don't have any connection? That's right. That's why I invite you to watch my PR Secrets Masterclass where I reveal the exact methods thousands of bootstrapping small businesses use to hack their own PR and go from unknown to being a credible and sought after industry expert.
00:11:23 Gloria: Now if you want to land your first press feature, get on a podcast, secure a VIP speaking gig, or just reach out to that very intimidating editor, this class will show you exactly how to do it. Register now at gloriachoupr.com/masterclass. That's gloriachou, C-H-O-U, .com/masterclass so you can get featured in thirty days without spending a penny on ads or agencies. Best of all, this is completely free, so get in there and let's get you featured.