let’s talk about money, pt. 1
thoughts from running a business ✨
As someone who works for herself (and a daughter of immigrants of the non-affluent kind lol), I think and worry about money constantly. Especially when I first started freelancing seven years ago, I had an unhealthy relationship with money: I was stressed when no client projects were coming in, I was stressed when too many client projects were coming in and I couldn’t juggle them all, and most of all, I was stressed about spending any of it because I was worried whether the next paycheck would come at all.
The result was that I was working around the clock, trying to do absolutely everything. I can read, so I should just read my own contracts. I can write, so I’ll respond to and take care of every email that comes in. I studied business in university, so at least in theory I know how to market and brand myself, and I definitely know how to follow a template and invoice a client. The only thing I did outsource was my taxes, because if my undergrad accounting classes taught me anything it was to not fuck with U.S. (business) tax law 😂
And sure, all of this meant that I was keeping my operating costs so low that almost everything was profit (which is not necessarily a good thing from a tax perspective but I won’t get into that). But that also meant that by year two, I was dragging my feet on every part of operating the business I didn’t enjoy: reading contracts, writing emails, invoicing clients. Some weeks I’d be dragging my feet so hard that I’d spend more than half the week on these administrative tasks, which cut drastically into the time I got to spend on the work I really do enjoy. And because the work I enjoy is also the work I can bill for, it was then cutting severely into my annual revenue.
Isn’t it ironic, that my trying to save/maximize my earnings was actually actively lessening it?
That was when I learned about the term “scarcity mindset”. I’ve since learned that a lot of us who grew up (even partially) poor experience it, and the way it manifests for me is that I’m always scared of a looming future where I lose everything, where I don’t have enough, because I haven’t saved enough. So I hoard and hoard and make decisions based on this fear.
Like trying to take care of every part of my business just to save money.
Around that same time, a dear friend shared with me something she learned from her financial therapist (I love this idea of a financial therapist, I feel like for a lot of us there’s some deep trauma tied to money): when we cut costs, there’s a limit to how much we can cut and save. But when we choose to spend and invest intentionally back into ourselves, our potential earnings are infinite.
Since she told me that, I’ve been trying to shift to an “abundance mindset”, where I reframe spending money (which for me has a negative association) to re-investing (positive association with potential to grow). So I ask myself two questions when I’m about to part with a big chunk of money:
Will it help free up time for me to instead do what I love?
Will it get me closer to my goals and dreams?
I now work with a fantastic virtual assistant, whose mission statement is to support women entrepreneurs. She helps me with the lengthy and/or difficult emails that’d have easily taken me an hour, takes care of all the logistics of onboarding with a client (because sometimes a client has a lot of paperwork), and follows up with the invoices (and chases after them if she needs to). The number of hours and amount of stress she’s saved me—insurmountable.
I also now work with a lawyer and a business coach. And I’ve learned that working with them doesn’t just mean more time freed up, but a psychological relief that I don’t have to hang onto everything so tightly anymore—that even if I relax, that I have a team that will help me catch the things that fall through the cracks.
And sometimes it’s not about spending money, but about intentionally not earning it. I used to vigilantly go for every opportunity I saw, and I’d stack obligation after obligation to keep myself working and busy. But after this summer of slowing down, I have come to realize that there is a lot of good in the quiet in-between. The almost complete lack of external obligations meant that I got to ask myself a lot of questions about what I want to do, and I’m now looking forward to the next time I can be in that quiet in-between and what I’ll discover about myself then.
I get asked a lot about how to get started freelancing, how to find clients, and sometimes even how much money to charge. But I don’t think we talk enough about the emotional side of money. We certainly don’t talk enough about when to intentionally spend, invest, and grow, and when not to.
Or maybe I just haven’t stumbled into the right spaces to have these conversations. It certainly took me a few hard years to learn these lessons, and that’s only because I was lucky enough to stumble upon a small group of amazing friends that were really open to talking about it.
So I’m curious about your thoughts and experiences, if you’re willing to share them.
(And I also want to add a disclaimer: I’m by no means advocating for spending money I don’t have, or getting into debt I can’t handle. I’m just trying to get better at not unhealthily hoarding money.)
I want to end with this Ethics Statement I was assigned to write in my “Writing the Artist Statement” class last semester. The prompt was, “what [does] success as an artist means for you, as well as what the ethics/rules are for you in pursuing that success, and what their relationship might be”.
Success is staying true to myself. It is resisting external/cultural/funding sources that tell me how I should be, and operating by my internal compass of how I want to be. It is unlearning all of my habits that no longer serve me (or never served me)—the scarcity mindset, “Time is money”, making myself small. It is creating without bowing to the pressures of capitalism, to toxic productivity, to efficiency, to comparing and competing. It is enjoying and taking my time. It is being gracious and generous with my time, supportive and collaborative, and operating with an abundance mindset. It is working with integrity and paying people fairly.
And it is holding my ground, because we do operate in a capitalistic society, and art is a business. It is being firm that I will not create for free, and establishing within myself a foundation of what is a fair price. It is negotiating prudently so that I can pay fairly.
💖,
Shirley