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.