How Much Should You Pay Yourself From Your Business EP 113

Too many business owners are paying everyone in their business except themselves, and somewhere along the way they stopped asking why.  Podcast Club is where the conversation continues. If this stirred up questions about your own pay, I would love to keep talking. Come hang out in the Podcast Club, a free community that meets most Thursdays. You can join us at consciousedge.com/club.  Get full show notes at www.consciousedge.com/ep113 Instagram:@aleciastg You built this business. So why does it pay everyone but you? For a lot of women, owner pay is the problem they have stopped questioning. There's payroll, there are contractors, there are a dozen things that have to happen before there's anything left, and somewhere in there their own pay became the lever they pull whenever money gets tight. For others it runs the other way. The business did well, the lifestyle leveled up to match, and now there's a number they have to hit every month or the whole thing wobbles. In this month's Monthly Money Talk, Alecia St. Germain sits down with fractional CFO and financial strategist Jenn Baas to look honestly at both. What owner pay actually is, how to tell whether your business can really afford you, and the simple financial-plan math that shows where your money is going. They also go underneath the numbers, to the big assumption that keeps an owner underpaying herself even when the business could support her, and the entitlement that can creep in on the other side. This one is warm, practical, and a little bit of a permission slip to look at the number you have been avoiding. 📝 What We Cover in This Episode: In this episode you'll discover: - What owner pay actually means, from salary to draws to distributions, and why how you pay yourself matters less than whether you do -Why most owners pay everyone else first and reach for their own pay as the lever they pull when money gets tight -The simple financial-plan math that tells you whether your business can really afford you, and where the money is actually going -The big assumption hiding under "there's just never enough left for me," and why more strategy won't move it on its own -What overpaying yourself looks like, and how leveling up your lifestyle too fast can leave your business fragile when the market shifts -Why "if I'm working this hard, it has to be worth it" deserves a closer look before it sets your salary -How emotional capacity, not just the numbers, decides whether you can hold and enjoy what you have built