The Financial Patterns That Are Keeping Your Business Stuck
And why they're not really about money - and how to do something about them.
I’ll be honest with you.
For years, I avoided opening QuickBooks until what seemed like the last day of December. Every single year, I told myself it wasn’t going to happen again. And every single year, I found myself sending a frantic message to my accountant: help me, I broke it.
The panic. The shame spiral. The convincing myself I’d deal with it later — until later became an emergency.
I used to think this was a me problem. A discipline problem. A time management problem.
It’s not. And yesterday, during The Jefa in Training Circle’s February Finance Panel, I got to sit down with two of the people I trust most with this — Viridiana Ponce, business consultant and finance expert who has spent 11 years helping Latina women build sustainable and profitable food businesses, and Vanessa Duran, founder of MAGDA (formerly DCC Accounting), who has been supporting founders from pre-revenue all the way to multi-million dollar enterprises for 16 years. What they said confirmed what I’ve been sitting with for a while.
The financial patterns that hold us back aren’t really about money. They’re about something much older than that.
Pattern 1: Avoidance, and the shame cycle it creates
Vanessa named it first, and she named it clearly: avoidance is the number one financial pattern she sees.
But here’s what makes it a pattern instead of just a habit — it compounds. You avoid looking at your numbers once. Then a month passes. Then six. Then you’ve gone a year without real clarity, and now the avoidance isn’t just about the numbers anymore. It’s about the shame of not having looked. The embarrassment of not knowing. The weight of time passing and the story you’ve told yourself about what that means about you as a business owner.
It becomes a vicious cycle: you don’t do it, so you feel shame, so you don’t want to look, so more time passes, so there’s more shame. And on it goes.
The reframe — avoidance is not always coming from where we think it is.
Sometimes it’s trauma. The money scripts we inherited — that money doesn’t grow on trees, that asking for help is weakness, that looking at the numbers means confronting something scary. Those messages get into us early and they don’t leave without intention.
Sometimes it’s an education gap. Nobody taught us this. We were handed a business and expected to figure out accounting, tax law, profit margins, and pricing strategy on top of everything else we were already figuring out. That’s not a character flaw. That’s a systemic gap.
And sometimes — and Viri named this one — it’s capacity. When you’re a solo founder wearing every hat, the things that feel hardest get pushed to last. Finances feel complicated, so they get scheduled for someday. Someday becomes December 23rd.
Knowing why you’re avoiding doesn’t automatically fix it. But it does change the conversation you have with yourself about what it means — and that matters more than people realize.
Pattern 2: Underpricing, and the ripple effects nobody talks about
Viri laid this one out in a way that I want everyone to hear.
Underpricing isn’t just a pricing problem. It’s a whole-body problem.
When you undercharge, you have to overwork just to cover your costs. When you overwork without seeing the results you expected — because the numbers never quite add up — you burn out. When you burn out, your confidence drops. When your confidence drops, you price even lower, because now you have even less to stand on. It’s not just a pricing spiral. It then becomes an identity spiral.
The reasons we underprice are familiar: I’m new. My community can’t afford this. What if they say no? What is the competition charging? Who am I to charge that much?
Every single one of those questions is understandable. And every single one of them is costing us.
Viri’s framework for breaking this: know your costs first. Then do your market research — but don’t let it be the ceiling. Then ask yourself what makes you different, what you do that nobody else does, what your clients are actually paying for when they work with you. Because people will pay for what makes you unique. The job is to communicate it clearly enough that they can.
Pattern 3: The myth of the CEO who knows everything
This one is quieter, but it might be the most damaging (and the one I learned some hard lessons from).
There is an expectation — unspoken, relentless — that if you’re the founder, you should know all of this. You should understand your books, your taxes, your profit margins, your cash flow projections. You built this thing. You should be able to run every part of it.
No. You shouldn’t. And the belief that you should is keeping you from getting the help that would actually move your business forward.
The shift Viri offered: let go of the expectation that you need to be as fluent as a CPA. Replace it with something more honest — I can learn enough to manage my business like a CEO. That means understanding what the numbers are telling you, knowing when something is off, and knowing who to call when you need more than you can see yourself.
This is also where community matters more than people admit. Vanessa said something that resonated: she has been doing this for 16 years and still second-guesses herself before posting a question in a forum. The am I going to look stupid voice doesn’t go away when you get more experienced. It just gets quieter when you have people around you who make it safe to ask.
Which is actually why we hold events like the one this week but connecting. Building the circle of trust that means when you’re stuck at 8am on a Tuesday, there’s someone you can call.
What actually helps: The 3 R’s and a few honest habits
When I asked Viri what habits would make this easier, she offered the most practical framework of the whole conversation. She calls it the three R’s: Register, Review, Reflect.
Register means getting your numbers into a system — whether that’s QuickBooks, Wave, Xero, or a well-organized spreadsheet. The system doesn’t need to be fancy. It needs to exist. The goal is that when money moves, you’re capturing it.
Review means actually looking at the output. Not just your bank balance — your profit and loss statement. The full picture. How much came in? How much went out on what? What’s the pattern over time? Vanessa made the point that clients who meet with her team monthly — even when they don’t want to — come away with something more than organized books. They come away with confidence. The knowing-that-everything-is-fine that trickles into how you show up everywhere else.
I’ll add my own example here: in 2022, I had almost $200 a month going out to software subscriptions I had completely forgotten I was paying for. Trial offers that became autopay that became invisible line items bleeding out of my business for months. A monthly review would have caught that in week two. It took me almost a year.
Reflect is where strategy lives. It’s the step most people never reach because they’re still stuck on Register. But this is where you ask: what led to this incredible sales month? What happened when I tried that experiment? What needs to change? This is CEO work. This is the part that makes all the number-looking actually worth it.
One more thing Vanessa said that I want you to carry with you, especially if you’re in a season of growth:
Budget isn’t a diet. It’s not a restriction. It’s a resource. It’s the document that tells you what you have to work with and where you’re choosing to put it — and it should have your salary on the first line. Not as an afterthought. Not as a when the business can afford it item. You started the business. Pay yourself from the beginning, even if it’s small. It changes your break-even, it changes your pricing, and it changes what you believe you’re building toward.
The real question underneath all of this
Everything we talked about in this event comes back to one thing: clarity.
Not perfection. Not a flawless set of books. Not knowing every accounting term or understanding every line of your P&L on day one.
Clarity. Knowing what’s coming in and what’s going out. Knowing what it costs to deliver your work. Knowing what you need to sell each month to cover your life and your business and still have something left. Knowing, as Vanessa put it, that your T’s are crossed and your I’s are dotted — so that when you walk into a room, you walk in with the confidence of someone who isn’t carrying a secret dread about what her numbers might say if she looked.
That confidence, she said, trickles into everything. The way you price. The way you negotiate. The way you speak to your clients, your vendors, your family.
That’s not a finance lesson.
That’s a power lesson.
And that’s exactly what we’re here to reframe.
Watch the full replay:
Connect with this week’s guests
Viridiana Ponce is a business consultant and finance expert specializing in helping Latina entrepreneurs build sustainable, profitable businesses. Learn more about how to work with her on her website.
Vanessa Duran leads MAGDA (formerly DCC Accounting), supporting founders from launch to scale with bookkeeping, tax strategy, and financial planning. Visit https://www.magdafinance.com/ for more info.
This event was hosted by The Jefa in Training Circle (my membership community for Latina entrepreneurs). We are currently accepting applications for new members. Join us?
Not a Latina entrepreneur but feel like other business communities and resources aren’t built for you? Think you could benefit from a strategist and thought partner in your corner? Consider becoming a paid subscriber of The Reframe. Masterclasses, group coaching and more coming soon.
Until next time,
Ashley
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