Profit Is Not Greed — It’s Wellbeing

by Anne Bishop | Nov 10, 2025

When I first changed my pricing structure, the loudest pushback didn’t come from clients. It came from my own staff. They’d been conditioned to think small, to believe that Pilates, massage, or any service-based career was destined to stay a side hustle or something that did not command career-worthy pricing and pay. Raising prices felt to them like crossing a moral line, as if seeking a real, stable income meant being greedy.

This isn’t just my studio’s story. It’s also a cultural script many women business owners carry.

The Cultural Script is that Profit = Greed

Who wins when women are scolded for raising their prices and earning a profit? Certainly not the women who keep their businesses small to avoid being judged. For decades, profit has been equated with corporate excess. And when women who run small businesses internalize that narrative, they undercharge, stay overworked, and forfeit long-term wealth.

In reality, they are conflating two ideas. Your small business is not a corporate behemoth. You do not have the economy of scale, at least not yet. More than anything, the smaller your service-based business, the higher your prices must be. It’s math.

When we avoid the math and compare ourselves with the private-equity-funded business down the street, we internalize the wrong message. We believe we have to be as cheap as them to compete—and it’s not true. And when we know we need to raise prices, we pause because we don’t want to leave behind the people who need our services most. So we stop and we don’t take action.

This belief—and the behaviors that follow—quietly keep women’s economic power small.

The Hard Math: What It Really Costs to Thrive

Middle-class life in the U.S. now requires about $140,000 in annual household income to buy a home with the same ease families had in the 1960s. For a service-based professional who sells time by the hour, that means at least $250,000 in annual revenue to create a truly healthy business.

A sustainable service business typically allocates 35% for owners and staff pay, 35% for operating expenses, and 30% or more for profit to pay down debt and reinvest. Yet most women-owned small businesses earn far less, and women still charge about 28% less than men for comparable services.

Undercharging compounds over time. Every year of “just enough” pricing is a year of lost retirement savings and long-term financial stability.

The Hidden Cost of Staying Small

The consequence isn’t only financial. Women are far more likely to live with chronic illness—57% compared with 38% of men—and they carry the majority of unpaid caregiving. With menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause added in, the need for flexible time and consistent income becomes a health requirement, not a luxury.

When profit margins are thin, stress compounds. Medical care gets postponed, sleep suffers, and overwork becomes a way to ignore growing health issues. Income volatility creates chronic stress, deferred medical care, and a life built around cancellations and catch-up.

And when women can’t earn sustainably, storefronts stay empty and local economies weaken. Research shows that local businesses recirculate 48% of their revenue within their communities, compared with just 14% for chains.

Profit as Collective Wellbeing

Profit is not greed; profit is profit. It’s a tool. And most small businesses reinvest that profit into their staff, their communities, scholarship funds, retirement accounts, and the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Small-business profit is an act of redistribution—shifting dollars away from giant corporations and into many smaller, woman-led enterprises.

Recurring revenue and better pricing are not luxuries. They are structural tools for economic justice and personal wellbeing.

Changing the Flow of Money

If you run a service-based business, design your model so that at least 75% of your revenue arrives on a recurring basis—ideally 95%. When the pandemic hit, 95% of my revenue was recurring, and I was able to keep my entire, women-led team employed.

That stability allows you to keep creating, mentoring, and living—not just working.

As a consumer, you also shape the system. Cancel one corporate subscription and redirect those dollars to a local woman-owned business, a community newspaper, or a neighborhood studio. Each choice builds a world where women’s businesses breathe, thrive, and redistribute wealth where it belongs.