More Than WE Know

Ask yourself: Are you earning all you can with your small business?

Do you give as much value (or more) as your competitors but consistently charge less than they do?

Do you fantasize about starting your own business or expanding the one you have, but stop yourself from doing it because you worry you might fail or look foolish?

Do you have so many projects and ideas that you don’t know which one to start on? Or you work on all of them at the same time, never really finishing any of them?

Do you put everyone else’s needs ahead of your own - Spending only your spare time and left-over energy on building your business and advancing your skills?

Do you dread looking at your financial statements, bills and invoices? Do you hate following up on overdue payments and deadbeat customers? Do you avoid negotiating for better deals with suppliers and distributors?

If so, you are probably not earning all that you can with your business.

You may recall that recently I wrote an article on negotiating fees in which I reviewed the book Women Don’t Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation–and Positive Strategies for Change

That book pointed out that our tendency to ask for less during negotiations translates to hundreds of thousands of dollars lost in income over a woman’s lifetime.

Similarly, Barbara Stanny’s book Overcoming Underearning(R): A Five-Step Plan to a Richer Life and her companion CD Guided Exercises for Overcoming Underearning point out that many of the reasons that people underearn are due to habits and beliefs about money.

Barbara Stanny’s father was one of the founders of H&R Block (he was the “R”). As a result, Barbara inherited a sizable trust fund. You would think that Barbara, of all people, would have no money issues; but the opposite is the case.

Barbara had many of the same challenges that the rest of us do - believing it was somehow inappropriate for a woman to focus on money, feeling that her contribution was not valuable enough to be compensated for, and having difficulty distinguishing between intelligent and foolish risk-taking.

It was only after Barbara suffered financial setbacks due to her beliefs about money that she realized she could help other women ovecome the same challenges. She has written several books, including an interesting study of high-earning women,Secrets of Six-Figure Women: Surprising Strategies to Up Your Earnings and Change Your Life that help women overcome their issues with money. She has become known as the Leading Authority on Women and Money.

This is powerful stuff. It’s especially relevant to Women Entrepreneurs. Despite a more even playing field, WE still tend to earn less revenue, make less profit, set smaller goals, take fewer risks and sell our companies for less than our male counterparts.

This is in spite of the fact that WE know WE work just as hard, have just as much passion and just as much talent as the next guy.

I’m determined to get to the bottom of this puzzle. Over the coming weeks, I’ll continue to research the differences in the way women and men approach our business, our finances and our life.

WE work too hard to earn less than WE deserve.

What about you? Are you an underearner? Do you think you should be earning more than you do? How is your relationship with money holding you back from earning your full potential?

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