I Cut My Own Checks

Money is something that takes up such an unparalleled amount of our brainspace. How much we have, how little we have, when and where we’re going to spend it. When hardships arise, thoughts of money ride in with it, often alongside an urge to contract or reconsider what we’re spending. 

I’ve lived through two economic crises so far in my lifetime. I know from both experience and data that while womxn do the majority of transacting in the western hemisphere, nothing gives us more pause than spending money on ourselves. The kids need new shoes? Spend. The house needs a new dryer? Spend. We need a new anything? Pause.

Then the questions begin.  

Is it really worth it? Do I really need it? Is it too expensive?

And the biggest question that hangs over us all––am I really worth it?

Because deep down, if we’re able to spend money on everyone and everything else except ourselves, this is really the question that needs answering. 

Let me explain.

A few months back, I had a conversation with an incredible insurance advisor who was introduced to me by a member of my network. An absolute powerhouse and dynamo in business, she struck me as fearless and focused, and when I asked her about the clients she aims to serve, she said something that blew me away.

She said:

“I only work with womxn that cut their own checks.”

The words bounced around in my brain and I knew there was something in this statement that I needed to know more about. 

“Tell me more, I need to understand what you mean by this.”

She told me a story of how, early on in her career, she noticed that after meeting with potential clients in New York, these womxn would always end the meeting in one of two ways. If they wanted to move forward with working with her, they would either tell her that everything sounded great and that she could go ahead and send over the paperwork, OR that everything sounded great and that they should set up another meeting to talk with their husband.

“Don’t you see," she explained, "the second woman wasn’t ever going to cut me a check, her husband was. The woman I ended up working with was empowered. She cut her own checks.”

And then I got it. Something that had been dancing around in my head for months suddenly clicked into place. My company had recently launched a new community group specifically for womxn, and I had been scratching my head wondering why more womxn hadn’t jumped to sign up for a program they’d seemed so eager to participate in. At first I thought it was the cost, but even when we cut it in half we still didn’t see the response we had hoped for.

Now I saw it clearly. Even the womxn we were aiming to attract should have felt empowered to join as womxn business owners. Instead, they were still struggling to cut checks if the spending was going toward themselves and something intangible like their own personal development. Meanwhile, the men in our other community groups were happy to spend twice as much and show up half the time. They believed they were worth investing in.

How could we change this perception? 

It wasn’t just about my business and driving  sales. I wanted to find an answer when another question started to gnaw at me:

Why are we as womxn––with all our accolades, accreditations and accomplishments––still unable to believe we’re worth it?

I say we because it’s something I still struggle with all the freaking time. I’m working on it, but I’m also human. I grew up as a girl who regularly reinforced that my greatest worth was being pretty and my greatest skill was being quiet. That’s a lot of shit to undo.

I see it come up periodically as I scale my companies and I notice that it never ever once comes up when I’m growing someone else’s. When I’m playing the game of business with someone else’s pocket book, I clearly see the moves that are necessary in order to grow. But the second I put “me” into the equation, it clouds my ability to see things clearly because I wonder if me and my company are worth investing in.

I saw it come up when I was investing in my first business coach: this mindset of scarcity and feelings of selfishness. Hiring a business coach was the right move and helped me double my income in a matter of two months, and yet still I couldn’t get out of my head enough to stop questioning my intuition.

I saw it come up again when I was making a move to invest in new back-end operations and technology to power my business to a new level. The software wasn’t even more expensive, although it cost a bit to implement, and it was so plainly the right move for the business model and our team. The doubt still surfaced.

More recently, it came up when I was making online purchases for the new office we’re outfitting. Having a scarcity mindset amplified by coronavirus truly didn’t help matters, and I was hoarding things in my online shopping carts unable to click purchase. I had built the company up in the past year to have over a month’s operating budget in cash and saved up to build out the space and was sticking to my well-allocated budget, and still I wondered:

Am I worth it?

And for the first time in a long time, a voice piped up in my head and said back:

Hell yes you are.

You know what you’re doing. You’re not just cutting your own checks, your cutting other people’s checks. You are a badass boss bitch that has built a successful and scaling company. You are absofuckinglutely worth it.

And I stepped back for a moment and wondered where the hell that voice came from, and instantly knew.

It came from my director of marketing, who never misses the opportunity to tell me and our team that we are queens that should be proud of our work and our worth. It comes from the community of fierce womxn in finance that I’ve built that never waiver on their support and encouragement of each other and embracing being ambitious entrepreneurs. It comes from watching the work of other amazing womxn out in the world building, scaling and celebrating the successes of their companies loudly and proudly, reminding all of us of what we’re capable of.

And that we’re worth investing in.

The other night I was sitting on the couch rewatching the first episode of Mrs. America only to realize that one of the main characters, southern as she was, had to ask for her husband’s permission and signature to be able to use his “charge card”. She didn’t have the power or the pocketbook to be able to make those purchases on her own. I shook my head, reminded of just how far we as womxn have come just in the last fifty years.

If there is one thing I know to be true, it’s that money equals energy and energy equals power.

We as womxn, need to harness that energy and own that power by using it as a force to invest in ourselves and the people and causes we care about. If we are in the privileged position of being able to leverage that power by transacting amongst each other and only with the companies that embody our values through action, we will truly have the ability to level the playing field. We’ve got to cut our own check, ladies, and we’ve got to do it proudly.