Do you sometimes feel like everything in your business is going well, but the numbers don’t reflect that? The product you sell might be flying off the shelves or your sales have gone way up in terms of the services you off. Your expenses are right on track for where they should be and you’ve streamlined everything so efficiency is maximized. But your numbers, and by that we mean the salary you pay yourself, doesn’t seem to say all that?
Well, ladies and gentlemen, here’s what we have found to be the main reason for this: as a business owner, you haven’t properly priced your product or services. Unfortunately, we as humans tend to downplay what we have to offer other people and this tends to be the case in a lot of female business owners.
Isn’t that just plain crazy? Women business owners also encounter other issues such as balancing their work life with their personal ones, especially if they have a family, fear appearing too aggressive, and struggle to not feel intimidated by their male counterparts. Clearly our time and skills are no less in value than our male colleagues, and yet we tend to undervalue and underprice what we have to offer.
What’s even sillier is that women entrepreneurs make up more than 9.1 million businesses within the working world, yet we still undervalue ourselves at times. In fact, California has the highest number of women owned firms, holding strong at 1.3 million. These are some pretty impressive figures, right? So why do we bother with under-pricing?
Well, it’s pretty simple, really. One explanation is that standard gender roles factor in. Men in business tend to take work ‘on the offensive.’ By this we mean, they don’t fear appearing too aggressive and openly discuss their earnings, might even boast about it, and what big deals they recently closed. Women, however, don’t typically do so unless they feel pressed to do so. Women don’t like to talk about what earn for fear of hurting someone else’s feelings or have a greater fear of being told that they, in fact, make too little.
Another factor is that women fear losing clients because of higher pricing. Further, women are also more likely to not call on clients when their invoice is overdue and tend to give discounts more often than not. They feel that if they charge too much, then the business they worked so hard to build will suffer due to clients going elsewhere for a cheaper service or product. When in fact, their business is already suffering because they aren’t making the money they should be.
It basically boils down to women’s lack of confidence. It could come from a lack of business experience and knowledge or, it could come from something else, like low self-esteem. But there is hope! The more we talk about this, the better it gets and women start to really value themselves and their businesses. Further, thanks to the millennials, regardless of their seemingly greedy tendencies and me attitudes, they are much more likely to close the gender wage gap and know what their skills and time are worth (or at least that’s what studies are saying!).
So how about we do a little bit of research and start rethinking what we’re charging and make changes if necessary!?
You’re bank account will love you for it!
