The Boss of You

The Writ­ers Revealed online chat yes­ter­day was fan­tas­tic. It was so great to engage with Michelle in women’s ques­tions around run­ning their busi­ness. Unfor­tu­nately we ran into a bit of a tech snag that blocked both Michelle and I from post­ing at the end of our time (and strangely all my posts from yes­ter­day have cur­rently van­ished, but they’re com­ing back I’m sure). To be per­fectly hon­est it was also really invig­o­rat­ing to be talk­ing about busi­ness with women in a new way, cause frankly as we’re a few weeks out from our final book dead­line we’re suf­fer­ing from a bit of malaise around read­ing the same old chap­ter for the 20th time.

Because I ended up being blocked from post­ing, I wasn’t able to post my answer to Thien-Kim’s last question:

What are other com­mon problems/issues that you have seen with self-employed women? How do these issues keep us from being successful?

So, I’ll jump in and post my thoughts here. If any­one else out there has ideas, please hop on the comments.

Fun­nily enough I think my answer to this, after nearly 8 years of run­ning a busi­ness, is the same as it was when Lau­ren was inter­viewed by Alex for the Another Girl at Play site oh so many moons ago (holy old photo bat­man!). Namely: unfor­tu­nately we women tend to under charge for our time and ideas. Whether you are run­ning a ser­vice or a prod­uct based busi­ness, ulti­mately your pay­check is about pay­ing you for the time, energy and ideas you put into the com­pany, and while I shy away from too much gen­der abso­lutism I do see a lot of women under­charg­ing. Not valu­ing your time can come in a few forms. It can mean you are sim­ply not charg­ing enough for your goods/services to pay you ade­quately or it can mean that you do a lot of addi­tional work — book­keep­ing, emails, phone calls etc — that you aren’t ensur­ing you get paid for. While in most cases you can’t bill your clients and cus­tomers for that time specif­i­cally you need to make sure you’re get­ting paid for it in the time you do bill them.

I already men­tioned your time being pre­cious and valu­able in my responses yes­ter­day (which will hope­fully reap­pear) but I want to reit­er­ate that time you take away from relax­ing, look­ing after your health, spend­ing time with your fam­ily and friends or heck just clean­ing your house is valu­able time and you should be prop­erly paid for it. When our book does come out in Spring 08 (wow that seems like for­ever from now) we do walk you through sce­nar­ios to fig­ure out how to account for that time and pay your self/cost your goods accord­ingly, but for now I’ll sum it all up by say­ing: don’t sell your­self short. When you’re the boss of you, you need to set the stan­dard for your worth and I’m pretty sure it’s a lot higher than you may first think.