Why you should pay yourself and how to do it!

Unfortunately many entrepreneurs don’t pay themselves. They invest time and money into their business and remember to pay everyone except themselves. While this may provide some short term relief over cash flow concerns, especially when the business is young, long term, this is a recipe for disaster.

While there are many reasons business owners may choose not to pay themselves in the short term, in the long term this is not a sustainable business practice. In this post we’ll talk about why it is important to pay yourself as a pole-preneur.

Boosting your own morale. As the leader of a business, especially a new one, you might be doing all the jobs. It’s tough to continue cheerily doing all the work without some sort of reward. When you’re employed by someone else you may receive verbal or even financial appreciation but when it’s just you and you’re working for zero pay and tons of work, it can be challenging to keep working as hard. Give yourself a morale boost and reward yourself for a job well done! If you can’t pay yourself a salary yet, is there some other way you can reward yourself through your business?

Understanding the full financial picture. If you don’t pay yourself, you don’t have the full financial picture of how much it costs to run your business or how much it would cost to replace the time you spend on your business. As much as you might believe that you’re irreplaceable or that you won’t ever need a break, life happens if you need go step away from your business, you need to know much much it will take to keep it going. Even if you’re not able to pay “market rate” for your own services, start budgeting something.

Avoiding potential burnout. Unless you’re independently wealthy, it’s common that you’re working more than one job as you get your pole business off the ground. The quicker you can pay yourself, the sooner you can stop working all the time to pay your bills and support your new business. The more time you can spend recovering in whatever way that means for you, the more you will be productive in your business. “Burn out” doesn’t always mean the inability to work, it might mean that you do lots of bad and inefficient work.

Being an entrepreneur is tough! Working in the pole industry can make this even tougher. It’s common for pole-preneurs to work multiple jobs as they build their businesses and in many cases, it’s common not to pay themselves at all for their work or to pay themselves less.

Are you paying yourself in your own business? We asked pole business professionals if they were — check out the results of the first pole industry financial survey!

What other reasons do you have for paying yourself as a pole-preneur? Share them with us!