[00:00:00] Fi Johnston
Young girls are taught that their role within the family and within the societal structure. Is to take care of others, to seek approval, to be liked, to please others. So of course, we want our clients to like us. We don't wanna cause friction. We don't want to rise above our station. And we definitely don't wanna be seen as greedy, needy, or bossy.
Intro
But if we want to be able to tip the scales towards the favor of marginalized people, we need to understand the secrets. To making money in small business. The more we talk about money and the secrets that usually stay at the golf club, the more likely we are to be able to make money. My mission is to get more money into the hands of good people, specifically good business people like you. This is Money Secrets, the place to learn about the money, secrets of successful small business owners. Let's go.
Acknowledgement of Country
[00:01:00] This podcast episode was recorded on the lands of the Wie people of the Koan Nation, and I'd like to acknowledge them as the traditional owners and custodians of this land and water that I live, work, and play on. I'd like to pay respects to elders both past and present, and notes that sovereignty has never been seeded. This always was and always will be. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land.
Women business owners are not making enough money. Female founders have been lied to. We've been told that we can have it all and never feel uncomfortable. Somehow, we expect it's gonna be easy to build a company with value to build sustainable revenue and pay ourselves well, but it's not easy. And if we're really honest and we look within ourselves, we don't even want it to be easy.
International Women's Day [00:02:00] is approaching, and again, we are gonna hear the same tropes. We're gonna hear about the gender pay gap. We'll hear about the gender funding gap. We'll hear about the burden of unpaid care carried by women. We'll hear about the fact that we are still being asked to speak for free, even at International Women's Day events.
And of course, we'll be reminding people that we don't want cupcakes. Now we need to talk about these topics 100%. There's still a gender pay gap of around 14% in Australia, and that data is based on employed people who are paid a wage. So it's a little complicated to try to draw from that as to what's happening with female business owners.
Let's go to the next one, the gender funding gap. Now 2% of venture capital is invested into women-led startups. It's appalling. It totally needs to [00:03:00] change, and I think there is a lot of focus on it, but it impacts a minute percentage of women founders. Most women founders don't need funding. We need revenue.
What we're not talking about enough, in my opinion, is that women business owners earn less than male business owners. The gender revenue gap is rife, I think anecdotally from 25 years experience looking at the books, the numbers, and the bank accounts of small business owners. My anecdotal experience is that the gender revenue gap is much, much worse than the gender pay gap, but it's not even being measured, so we can't even, uh, sort of calculate it yet.
Side note, if anybody is interested in tackling this with me, how do we actually measure the gender revenue gap and the gender pay gap within small business? [00:04:00] I would love to talk to you about that. Let's talk about the next trope that comes up in the International Women's Day conversation. Women are carrying a huge burden of care, unpaid work, and unappreciated mental load.
A lot of women are caring for their children, they're caring for their parents. They might also be caring for other people within their lives. There is a huge amount of unpaid work being done in the home and related to the family. And something that women talk about a lot is the underappreciated mental load, the load of carrying everything around in your mind with you at all times.
And as somebody who is not a mother, sadly. Um, a side note, I tried very hard to become a mother. I went through IVF. Multiple rounds and was unsuccessful. So I'm one of those [00:05:00] women who really wanted to be a mother and isn't. So perhaps I have a unique perspective on, you know, what I see happening with women who are both parents and business owners.
There is this huge unappreciated mental load. Even when you are not caring for children or parents, there is an assumption that it will be the women. Who do the work to create events for the family. You know, we could go on for hours about the unfair burden of care, unpaid work, and mental load. I also wanna speak about this topic of it.
It gets very inflammatory at this time of year, and it's this point that we don't want to speak for free, but we do want to raise our profiles. So as somebody who is now a conference or event organizer, I have a completely different perspective about [00:06:00] paid and unpaid speaking gigs. I think it is absolutely atrocious that so many women are being asked to speak for free, especially at International Women's Day events.
Just like many disabled persons are asked to speak for free at all kinds of events, people of color. You know, of all genders are being asked to speak for free, especially to, you know, do the labor of explaining things like systemic racism to, you know, the other people at the event. So this is a kind of tried and true or a trusted kind of trope or expectation of a lot of conference organizers is that women are speak.
An expectation from women in business that we will be paid to speak. I suppose the little bit of nuance we have here is you've got to start somewhere. So the first speaking [00:07:00] gig that you do will likely be unpaid, and to expect to be able to be paid for your very first speaking engagement is completely unrealistic.
In some cases, there actually are a lot of benefits in being able to get in front of an audience and speak that aren't about being paid. So, for example, I'm gonna use the word exposure, but I mean good exposure. I mean, being able to get great content of yourself speaking. Being able to practice speaking in front of a group of people, being able to elevate your brand, being able to meet the right people in the room, those are currencies beyond money.
So in a lot of cases, there actually is a reason to speak at an event for free. However, by the time you have actually built up your cache of public speaking engagements. And you might even consider yourself to be a professional public [00:08:00] speaker. Things change that is now your career and your livelihood.
So of course, you need to work out what is the fee that you need to be paid to speak at these events and work with conference organizers and events people to get you matched up with the right audience and the right topics and the right crowd, et cetera. I absolutely vehemently disagree with conference organizers who charge thousands of dollars for tickets and then don't pay really established speakers.
However, I have less of an issue with conference organizers who are looking to put women into positions of opportunity where they actually can benefit from speaking at an event beyond just. The financial gain. So for example, with Ripple Festival, which is the business festival that me and Mia FileMan, my [00:09:00] business bestie, are now putting together for the second year in a row.
Now we pay our speakers. We don't pay the same kind of keynote rates that you would get at a really big corporate event. But we made a decision early on that we wanted to compensate speakers. Sometimes that will be. Compensating you for your travel costs. Sometimes it will be reimbursing you for your travel costs and a fee to speak or participate in a panel for some of our bigger names where they already have a lot of experience and track record being on a stage, we absolutely paid them more than just a travel reimbursement, but we had so many people ask us to speak for free.
And it was a really difficult decision for us to make because some people really need that opportunity to get in front of their first audience, and it's a real, it's a real battle for [00:10:00] conference organizers. Mia and I are still working out the right balance of. Paying big speakers as opposed to paying smaller fees for speakers who we think are fantastic, but either don't have the track record or they don't have the audience.
Yeah. It's a moving thing and it's something that Mia and I are constantly, uh, debating between ourselves about what is the right approach. We also make sure that our speakers get a lot beyond. A financial return. We make sure that there's incredible photos of them. We take them out for a beautiful dinner that's just for speakers.
You know, we made sure that we promoted them all the way in the lead up to the first Ripple Festival. So it wasn't just about their time on stage. We wanted to spread the amount of spotlight that was on them, you know, across months rather than days. But back to my original point, which is [00:11:00] that. Around International Women's Day there, there will be a lot of discourse on the internet of women talking about the fact that they are still being asked to speak for free.
So we need to really get our minds aligned to this concept that we don't wanna speak for free, but we do want to raise our profiles and I think we need to have nuance and flexibility when we are looking at. What is this opportunity that's in front of me and what are the benefits I might receive? The benefits may be financial, but they may be other benefits like visibility, a bit of practice, confidence building, getting in the right room, et cetera.
So I think we need to keep the nuance there about this concept of working or speaking for free. The next trope that we often hear around. International Women's Day is that we don't want any fucking cupcakes, but we'd love somebody else to organize them for us. [00:12:00] We love cupcakes. Who doesn't love cupcakes?
I think it's more just that sort of visual representation of all of the things that, um, not having gender parody cannot be summarized down into a photo of a fucking cupcake. So those are the tropes that you'll hear a lot around International Women's Day, and a lot of those discussions do need to be had.
They are being had. They have been had for years. I think we are making progress on some of these topics, but what I'm really interested in is talking about something different. I wanna talk about the fact that women in business who make up a huge part of the small business landscape. Are not making enough money, and what we need as women in business is to make more money, and we need to be able to do it without working harder, but definitely working [00:13:00] smarter.
We need the skills and the support to build valuable companies with sustainable revenue streams. We need the strategy to make clever choices about how we position ourselves, when to stay strong and when to pivot. How to hire the right people. Perhaps most importantly, we need the right support around us.
Good Money Club Ad
Making money and managing money as a small business owner is hard. The really cool thing is it gets so much easier when you have the right mindset, the right strategy, and the right community around you. Good Money Club is that community. It's a place where women in business come together to learn about, talk about, and get support with making money decisions that make their business better, that lead to higher revenue, more take home pay, and a better business.
The Doors to Good Money Club are open right now, so if you are a woman in business. Who wants to make more money [00:14:00] and impact through her business, you need to come and join the other 40 Good Money Club members who are excellent female business owners just like you making more money because of Good Money Club. Hope to see you in there.
There's this term cheerleader or kind of coach or supporter that gets. Bantered around in the small business world, and I wanna unpack it a little. I think having the right kind of support around you is critical to being able to make more money in your business for the long term. We don't need the kind of cheerleading that tells us that everything is okay.
We don't need the kind of coaching and community that tells you everything you are doing is great. Just to keep going. I think that what the kind of support that we do need as women [00:15:00] in business is the kind of coaching and community that sees you, hears your excuses and doubts, and helps you to actually work through it, working through it with love, patience, and time.
Trying to rush, moving through a really big sort of stuck moment in your business is a mistake, but so is continuing to do something that is not working. I think we need to have the kind of humans around us who help us to make better business decisions. We need people around us who help us to be bold enough to charge premium prices and to help us improve ourselves as a leader and a business owner.
This is what I think that we need this International Women's Day and every day, by the way, we need to be able to generate more revenue and to pay ourselves more. That means that we can pay for help with our homes, our children, and our parenting. It means that we can get more help [00:16:00] in our businesses with a budget high enough for us to hire keepers.
We wanna be able to hire talent, not somebody that fits within our two hour budget of support for the week. When we make more money as female business owners, there are so many ways that we can use that money to make our lives better and to make the lives of our whole families better. When you have more money in your pay packet, you can afford to get better help with your home.
You can also afford to invest into your own superannuation, which might mean that you have a chance of, you know, retiring with somewhere close to your male counterparts. Women end up with a huge gap in superannuation when we retire. And to be frank, so many women in business are not paying themselves superannuation.
It is such a mistake and it's something that we need to look at [00:17:00] seriously to say if our businesses that we are putting so much heart and love and effort and sweat and time away from our families. To create. If they're not able to generate enough money for us to invest in our superannuation, something is systemically wrong.
We are not gonna get closer to gender pay, gender funding, or gender revenue parody if we don't change the conversation. What women in business need is the right mindset. Fold, an effective strategy and community that lifts not coddles. The reasons that women aren't making enough money are layered. We underprice and overservice our clients because we were socialized to take care of others.
From a really young age, a lot of young girls are taught that their role within the family and [00:18:00] within the societal structure is to take care of others, to seek approval, to be liked, to please others. So of course, we want our clients to like us. We don't wanna cause friction. We don't want to rise above our station, and we definitely don't wanna be seen as greedy, needy, or bossy.
This is part of the systemic issue that I see with female and women and also LGBTQIA plus business owners, is that one of the structural reasons why we are not making enough revenue is because we have these layers sitting on top of our prices, and I just don't see that in the male or men business owners that I work with.
They make their pricing decisions based on a much more logical, market responsive kind of decision. Whereas women make pricing decisions from their [00:19:00] emotions and from their feelings, and it means that we are making less money. We also need to admit that we as women in business underprice and over service our clients because.
We would rather burn ourselves out than have the difficult conversations we need to. Putting your price up isn't easy, but it's essential. If you want work-life balance, your pricing can make that possible over servicing your client. Feel so much easier in the moment then honoring your boundary or reiterating the scope you both agreed on, but that awkward conversation now.
Means less resentment, a better client relationship, and shared alignment to the outcomes that you are working towards together, not you working yourself to the bone and then blaming your client.[00:20:00]
I see this happening every day. So many women in business are working themselves to the ground. They're having so much difficulty being able to fit their client work into the rest of their life. That happens outside of work, and what I see happening is this huge scope creep. We are doing more than we are promising our clients.
They are not paying us for the more that we are creating and in a lot of cases they don't even want it. They can feel the resentment that builds when there's a project that is being overdelivered on. But what we do is blame our client in the back of our mind, or we bitch to our friends about it. But actually we need to look at what part of this over servicing or this resentment that is going on here, because I'm spending so much time delivering work to my clients and [00:21:00] it's more than I thought I would be doing.
We need to be able to look at it realistically and rationally and say. Am I actually charging enough for this work? Do I need to increase my prices so that I can include all of these things in the scope of this project? Or am I just overdelivering and over fiddling with this job because I am doubting my own ability and therefore I'm overworking it because I'm trying to prove to myself that I can actually do this job.
Being a business owner is much, much harder than being somebody's employee. Getting it right, unlocks time and career freedom, huge personal development and money that can change your life forever. But we can't complain about everything that's against us and expect to get anywhere without taking some kind of [00:22:00] action, strategy without action.
Might as well be a margarita. You drink it and you forget about it. What I see in my work is that women don't need more strategy. They don't need more advice from consultants. What they need is a space where they are supported and held and called to take the actions that are going to build their business for the better.
Being in a community such as Good Money Club, also Marketing Circle, which is my friend Mia's incredible marketing offer. Being in a community like that with other business owners who are there for the long term, who are going to love on you, but also hold you to account when they can see that you are getting in your own way.
Having the best strategy in the world is not gonna mean shit if you don't implement it. And that's what I see as [00:23:00] being a huge gap. For women in business is that we have all of these things happening around us in our lives, and they are really difficult. We're parenting, we're caring. We're managing our own health and wellbeing.
We're dealing with social media and all of the huge changes that are happening in the world. Some of us are experiencing war. Some of us have family who are experiencing war oppression and other, you know, horrible things happening in the world, and then we need to fit our businesses into the other parts of our lives that are available.
My belief is that if you want to be a business owner who is successful, you need to recognize the fact that it is not always going to be comfortable. Sometimes being in business is going to force you to do things that make you feel disgustingly uncomfortable, things that make you feel like you [00:24:00] are going to vomit.
But once you actually put those things in place, like putting your prices up, setting boundaries, making it a priority to pay your own fucking superannuation sis, when you have enough money coming into your business to hire real support. That actually helps you to run your business better. It's gonna make everything in your life better too.
So my thoughts for you are if you are a woman in business who is feeling stuck or frustrated, if you are feeling like you're not making as much money as you want to, you are feeling like things are just not the where you want them to be. Either in your business or in your life, because let's face it, the two are so interlinked.
It's almost impossible to separate life and business if that is where you are. I want you to consider where are my [00:25:00] excuses getting in the way? Am I actually doing the hard things now that will make my life easier in the future? If you know what it is that you think you should be doing, but you are not doing it.
Get some support. The Doors to Good Money Club are open right now. We only open them for a couple of weeks at a time, and I implore you to come and find out more about Good Money Club because getting yourself into the kind of room where women are making bold. Financial decisions that are setting them up for long-term success, knowing that it's not gonna be easy, but that they have a group of women who have got their back.
There is a safe place to land within Good Money Club for all of our members. And that means that you have the support and structure around you to be able to do the things in your business that feel [00:26:00] hard now. But once you've done them, they won't feel hard anymore. If you are a woman in business who wants to make more money, who wants to pay herself more and wants to do it ethically while making the world a better place, you need to come and check out Good Money Club.
I really hope we are gonna see you in there. Thanks for listening, and I will see you again next week.
Outro
Thank you so much for listening right up to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Money Secrets, where we talk about the money secrets of successful small business owners. If you enjoyed the episode, I'd love it if you subscribe to the podcast. But leave us a review or share this episode with one of your friends. I hope you learned something. I hope you got a new perspective, and I really hope you enjoyed the listening experience.
