You may be flower farming for many reasons, and not all of them will mean that you need to be taking out a salary from your business. However in this lesson I want you to work out what you should be paying yourself.
There’s a saying that "A self-employed person is someone who will work 80 hours for themselves to prevent them working 40 hours for someone else" but as we've already discussed, if you are your business, you need to keep yourself in good health, and valuing yourself is one way of making sure that you keep wanting to do what you do.
How much are you worth?
Minimum wage in 2019 in the UK for all those over 24 is £8.21 per hour (this changes each April)
If you’ve been in paid employment before, what did you earn per hour in your last paid job?
(You may have been salaried, so do work it out)
This year, while flower farming, how many hours did you do on average each week ? ( you do need to take into account doing your admin and marketing) If you are starting this year, how many hours have you planned to do each week?
What should you be paying yourself as a minimum per month?
= £8.21 x number of average hours per week multiplied by 52, divided by 12.
If you're working on your flowers a couple of days a week, that figure should be just over £500
If you're working on your flowers a normal office week 35hours that should be £1,137.50
If you are working all daylight hours on the field and......... well you work it out.
if you've worked in a paid job at more than minimum wage, work out that rate as well.
“NO I AM NOT SAYING IF YOU DONT PAY YOURSELF THAT AMOUNT YOU HAVE FAILED!!!”
Apart from thinking that no-one would employ me any more!, I am self employed because
I can choose the hours i work
I can choose the customers i want to work with and tell them the hours i want to work
It means i don't have to have paid childcare (and havn't had apart from holiday clubs that my son Wanted to go to since he started school)
I can work longer hours in the summer, and less in the winter
Which means i can take time off at Christmas and half terms and when my sales are naturally low (the weeks round bank holidays are naturally lower sales periods i've discovered - Hurrah)
But I want to know that I am not doing this for nothing, It isn't a hobby, it's a hard work job, and so my way of valuing myself is to ensure that even from the beginning I have paid myself a monthly "Salary"
It automatically comes from my business account to my personal account every month on the 1st.
Sometimes (rarely actually as it's very precious to me that i pay myself, but it does happen) the business "needs" that money urgently, so i pay it back into the business as a loan, and make sure i earn some more to be able to pay it back. But i make sure that there is a standing order that transfers the money each month, and that is wonderful at clearing the mind and making sure there is enough money coming in to pay my staff, my bills, and me (in that order) at the end of each month.
How much are you going to pay yourself? - even if it's a couple of hundred pounds each month, I recommend setting up that standing order to ensure you get the money not the business