G’day Gorgeous…
This week I experienced a bit of a low point in my financials in my business account. It got me thinking about the fact that as women in business, when you work in a service based industry and you are reliant on people turning up to pay for their hour of time with you, or connecting with you in whatever way that they agreed to, what do we do if they don’t actually meet that obligation?
These days, I do have a cancellation policy, but often what happens is that if people don’t turn up and then you send them a bill for your unutilised time, you often never see them again. I wonder how we should get around this issue as women in business, or as women who run businesses. This is an important thing to consider, I understand that you’re not all in business but maybe it will help you to understand what it’s like for those of us who are.
Just something to consider… If I take holidays these days, I don’t get paid. I might be going to speak at an international conference, like I am going to one at the end of June that’s in France, but that is more about the prestige of having your name on the bill – right? It’s not actually because you are getting paid for your time. I would have gone to that conference anyway, but it just got me thinking.
I was in training for three days last week and we were talking about all of the different things in media that it is possible to do and I started thinking about my time. I was thinking about how much time I put into developing a lot of things that people don’t end up having to pay for, and please don’t misunderstand me I’m not complaining about that – I love what I do!
It’s just that I find it quite amazing when things all seem to happen at once. This week was really ‘odd’ because it usually takes people so long to get in to my books, that they very rarely just don’t turn up! Right?! It’s quite an unusual situation, yet today, of all days. I have had three in one day… My brain is like ‘What’s going on? It’s not even a full moon!’
I just want to encourage any of you who work for yourself, and find it a little bit challenging and frustrating when you can’t get people to understand that you need to be paid or remunerated for your time. You know you don’t have that security of somebody just paying you, whether you’re at work or not! That is the luxury of big business or government, it’s really not the luxury of small businesses like me.
I hope this is useful to some of you and doesn’t just come across like a big raving rant! It’s not meant to be a rant, it just made me think about how much self-reliance we have to actually have as women in business.
See you soon…
