Flexible Lifestyle vs. Making Money

Many women wonder: is it possible to earn great money AND have a flexible schedule? The lives of women are, in many ways, more complex than the lives of men. Women commonly need more flexibility in their schedules than men do. Often, this is to attend to family concerns—caring for children, taking aging parents to medical appointments and so on. Women feel the burden of this “second shift” very keenly—besides spending time with family, the house needs to be cleaned. The list goes on and on. (I won’t rant too long here about this “second shift”, but women still do about double the amount of domestic chores as men do.) And, in fact, some women chose self-employment as a way to balance the needs of home life with making money.

So the question arises—if you have chosen a more flexible schedule to accommodate all the other parts of your life, can you still make good money? Yes, but only if you are very smart about it.

First, you must make sure you charge appropriately for your time. Just because you don’t work full time, for example, is no reason to low-ball your prices and not take your business seriously. Remember, people are paying for the perceived value of what you offer. If you give them good results, that is enough to charge them good money! They don’t care, and likely don’t know, that your home desk is often covered with Legos and plastic army men.

When I had a toddler, I did not work full time. My clients did not know this. I saw clients two or three days a week. The other days were my “mom days”. But when I worked, I worked hard. And because I knew that I was not making as much money as if I worked full time, I made sure that I charged at the top of what I was able to command when I did work. This was imperative. Let me be clear: If you are only working part time, it is even more important that you make the most money possible in the time that you chose to work!

Which brings me to my second point—when I worked I really focused on my business. It is one thing to have a flexible schedule. But if you are so scattered that you can’t focus your time when you do work, this is a problem.

Remember, there are two kinds of work time, at least in the world of self-employment. There is the time when you work IN your business. This is when you do what you do to make money. It is when you see the clients or do the actual work.

Then there is the time you work ON your business. This is the time when you do your marketing, networking, administration, billing, email, professional development etc. Without this vital time, you can’t maintain a healthy business, let alone grow it when you want to. It is this second chunk of time that is often neglected when we overly focus on flexibility.

If you consciously chose to have a flexible, untraditional work schedule, for whatever reason, make sure that you charge for the value you bring. And make sure you create a schedule that gives you time to both work IN your business as well as ON your business. If you don’t make enough money, you won’t be in business for long.
——
Copyright © 2008 by Mikelann R. Valterra and the Women’s Earning Institute. Empowering women to earn what they’re really worth, www.womenearning.com.