Shayna had been a professional singer and songwriter for over thirty years. Music wasn't just what she did, it was the only thing she did, no side job, no backup plan, just three decades of building a career doing the thing she loved. She was genuinely amazing at it, a fantastic voice, and a career traveling all over the world that many women in her industry could only dream of. And because she loved it so completely, she assumed that was enough. Like so many of the women I work with, Shayna was financially phobic. She was afraid to really look, and even when she did, she didn't fully understand what she was looking at or what questions she was supposed to be asking. She said yes to gigs because they felt right, because they were the work she was meant to be doing, and she never once stopped to ask whether any individual gig was actually profitable.

It turned out none of them were.

Shayna wasn't looking at the full cost of what it actually took to say yes to a performance. There was her own fee, yes, but there was also travel, and the musicians and orchestra members she needed to bring the performance to life. None of that was being weighed against what she was actually being paid before she committed. She simply said yes, because the work itself felt worth doing, and she'd never been shown that loving what you do and being profitable while doing it are two entirely separate questions.

When we sat down together and started looking at the real cost of her gigs, the picture became clear fast. Fee minus travel minus musicians, gig after gig, wasn't leaving anything behind. She wasn't failing at her business. She simply had never been given permission to ask the question in the first place, is this gig actually worth saying yes to.

Once she had that framework, everything shifted. She started running the full cost of a gig before ever accepting it, and for the first time in her career, she had the information she needed to say no. Not because she didn't want to perform, but because now she could see clearly which opportunities were actually building her business and which ones were quietly costing her to say yes to.

A year after we started working together, her gross profit alone was higher than her entire revenue had been the year before.

Because here's what I know for certain. The answers are always there, waiting in the financial information, whenever you're ready to look, even when the thing you love doing is the very thing you've never stopped to run the numbers on. If you're afraid you're missing something in your business, or you know it's finally time to start understanding your financial information, come join me at my next Where Is All My Money Going. https://www.audreyfaustconsulting.com/money.