This week, I paid myself for the first time.
Yes. For the first time. In five years.
The first year in business, I was in the red. The second, I broke even. In years three and four, I reinvested everything back into the business because that is what growth requires. Last year I thought I might finally be able to do it, and then the tariffs hit.
This year, it is not like my sales are suddenly skyrocketing. They are roughly on par with last year. But something shifted in me recently. It might be the vision board I put together in March, saved as my desktop screensaver so that every time I open my computer, I see it. At the center of it, I have the exact number I want to pay myself monthly. This week, I did it with only took a few clicks on my bank app.
I debated writing about this today. I kept asking myself, is it shameful that it took five years? Or is it a triumph? Well I landed on this: it doesn’t matter. The reason I show up here every week is to be raw and honest, however that lands.
For a long time, I have carried this feeling of being a hot mess underneath the surface. Like I was playing a role I had not yet earned. What I realized this week is that the feeling had a source. The metric I was using to measure whether any of this was real, whether KAEIU was a business or just a glorified hobby, was whether I could pay myself. Without even knowing it, that was the bar. And I had been falling short of it for five years.
Paying myself did not change the numbers. It changed the story I was telling myself about the numbers. That is the mindset shift. Success is not always a milestone you can point to from the outside. Sometimes it is an internal reckoning, a moment where you decide that what you have built deserves to sustain the person who built it.
In years three and four, I did not account for myself when reinvesting back into the business. I put everything else first. The inventory. The hardware. The production costs. And the person actually running all of it never made the list.
Have you seen those reels on social media, the ones that breakdown the true cost of a stay at home mom? The cooking, the childcare, the logistics, the emotional labor. If you were to pay someone for all of it, the number is staggering. We do not think of those things as having monetary value because they have never come with a paycheck. But the absence of a paycheck does not mean the absence of worth.
I had been doing the same thing to myself inside my own business. Running the operations, designing the product, managing the marketing, packing the orders, doing in person markets. The heart and the engine of everything. This week, by paying myself, I told me: I see you. And you deserve it.
With love,
Maria
Small celebration. Big moment.