We’ve all been there. As business owners there was a start to your business journey. Day one, that first full week in your work and the initial month running the company. Whether it feels like a lifetime ago or it was actually just a few months, you need to start paying yourself. Otherwise, what are you running your business for?
You can sometimes feel like you shouldn’t take any money out of your business to pay yourself. Maybe you think you haven’t earned it yet or the business isn’t doing well enough for you to take a wage. The fact of the matter is though, that in order to pay your own bills you need to take a wage.
Many of us decide we won’t take a wage for a few months, to give the business the best possible chance of getting off the ground. Reinvesting that money you make instead of taking it out. Living on savings for a specific time to help the start-up get moving along. However, when you get into the habit of not paying yourself, when do you actually start transferring yourself some cash?
You spend a lot of time, sometimes pushing 100 hours a week, building a new business. If you’re not getting anything to show for it, it’s very easy to get disheartened, very quickly. You need to start paying yourself a wage, even a small nominal one. You work too hard to not get any reward. Soon
you’ll start to resent your business and the reason you set it up will soon pass you by.
Mastering your numbers and figures isn’t everyone's number one key skill. This is where getting a professional bookkeeper involved with your business can help you out. Get a grip on the revenue streams flowing into the business. See where the money you’re paying you is actually going. Decide if the business actually works and can turn a profit. Good bookkeepers are worth their weight in gold as they can show you things you perhaps didn’t see and use their knowledge to actually save you money.
If you set you in business to have a better life away from the corporate world of answering to a boss, doing all the work with no reward is pointless. The extra stress, the enhanced workload and the inevitable sacrifices needs to be for a reason.
It’s also worth reading a business book called Profit First by Mike Michalowicz. It’s a mindset change but can help you to allocate pots to your funds and enable you to pay yourself regularly and at a rate that will support your lifestyle requirements.