Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life by Emma Grede - 11

You get in life what you have the courage to ask for.

—Oprah Winfrey

Besides scaling mentorship, one of the reasons I wanted to launch a podcast is because the business landscape is dominated by men—and I wanted to have public conversations with other women about money. But I’ve had a really hard time getting any of my female guests, many of whom are titans in their respective fields, to speak candidly with me about the subject. Whenever I ask about capital raises, compensation, and cap tables, they demur and deflect. Meanwhile, when I drilled Michael Rubin, founder of Fanatics (a $30 billion business), with money questions, he answered them all, to a one—with glee. No shame, no anxiety, no fear of judgment. Most women do not want to talk about money. I can’t get many women to be straight with me about one of the most important topics of all—even off the mic. I hate making things about gender— and yet , the following pages largely are, simply because men don’t seem to have the same hang-ups about scarcity and negotiation. I hope you don’t feel like I’m screaming at you on these pages, but all I want is for women to have access to more cash and capital—we need women to have more access to cash and capital—and I get really fired up about the topic. So bear with me and forgive me if you feel attacked by what’s to come. I promise, I just want you to be rich and successful so you can make other people rich and successful as well—or at the very least be properly compensated for what you do. My greatest dream is to ignite one million Emmas who hear my story and realize they can do this, too.

Meanwhile, there’s an unspoken rule among women in business, especially women who have some money—whether by dint of their own efforts, or family, or marriage—that they’re going to pretend like access to cash isn’t foundational to both the function and enjoyment of their lives. They don’t want to talk about it. Money is gross, it’s unspiritual, it’s inelegant. It’s beneath them, despite money being at the center of their lives (none of them are living in an ashram). They argue that money is not the only thing that matters. This is true—I’d argue time and energy have a higher value in many instances—but you will find your time and energy extremely hampered by lack of funds and financial stress, in part because you will spend a lot of both trying to get your basic needs met, which requires… money. Money buys space, ease, convenience, support, some types of physical security, access to opportunity, and a lot of really fun things—it’s not the only thing that opens those doors, but it sure is a shortcut. And yet, I consistently find that most women want to gloss over this. And that’s a problem, if not the biggest problem when it comes to women and our capacity to succeed.

I am a woman who has existed in every tax bracket. I’ve lived without two pennies to rub together, and I’ve lived as someone who makes the lists of the wealthiest “self-made” women. I spent years earning less than I should working for other people. What I want to stress is that money is important. While it’s true that money can’t solve all your problems, money sure will solve all your money problems.

Money is not bad or unspiritual. It is foundational . We live in a capitalist society that runs on money—and the power this money buys. You don’t need to worship money or pray at its altar, you don’t need to sacrifice all meaning in your life just to earn security, but you do need to manage your relationship between the two. Consider the section of the book on trade-offs: This is not an either/or equation… it’s both/and. You can be a good person and make a really good paycheck. You can create culturally significant work and be compensated well for it. You can care deeply about money and a lot of other things, too. I recognize that our society doesn’t always value the right things—our teachers, our essential workers, our nurses, as some examples, should be paid a fortune for the care they deliver, and they are not—but you can’t wait for the culture to shift before you work to meet your own needs. And to meet your needs, you’re going to need money. Plus, it’s a lot easier to shift the culture when you’re not worried about feeding yourself or paying your bills. Start with yourself. And if you really want to shift the culture, it’s good to have some levers to pull. Money talks, often louder than everything else in the room. Women are great at making money, often for other people; we need to be better at taking money for ourselves.

1. Old Thought: Nice girls don’t speak about money publicly. (Or think about it.)

Every morning you have two choices: Continue to sleep with your dreams, or wake up and chase them.

—Carmelo Anthony

Many of us—most of us likely—have a somewhat distorted relationship with money based on our family of origin and lived history. There are very few people who seem to have neutral feelings about cash. Most of us see it as something that’s loaded with story. And many of us see it as a “necessary evil,” as something that we want to avoid. In that sense, business for many of us becomes about creating enough wealth so that we can avoid money altogether, which is kind of ironic. My feeling is that we are never going to stop thinking about money. Yes, it’s true that if you make enough money, it won’t rule your emotional life in the same way and you might not experience as much money-based fear, but money is an ever-present reality. You can’t escape it. You can ease your relationship with it though.

This is why it is so important that we heal our relationships with money and begin telling ourselves a different story about what it means. Otherwise, we’re going to think the same thoughts about money that are based in trauma, scarcity, and lack—or just avoidance altogether. And we’re going to continue to make that story come true. In my experience, if you don’t do the work of looking inward and interrogating the way you’re thinking about money, you’re not ready to take control of it in your life. Even in the best of times, the economy is uncertain and risky and will tip you into a place you’re not ready to take on if you can’t stay balanced and grounded in reality. I was watching Pinky Cole, founder of the restaurant chain Slutty Vegan, at Masters of Scale one year, and she said it best: “Scared of money? You’re going to make no money.”

Furthermore, unless you’re taking your cash and sequestering yourself on a remote island somewhere, you don’t get to escape money once you’ve made it. For much of my early life, I just wanted to be someone who didn’t need to check prices on menus. After I checked that goal off my list, I wanted to be able to fly in whatever class of travel I chose. What I’ve imagined for myself financially has expanded over time along with my bank balance—and as businesses have scaled, so have expectations. Once you have a successful and vibrant company, you’re employing more people and ensuring those people have good benefits, best-in-class pay packages, and viable futures. And once you have multiple successful and vibrant companies, you get to multiply those concerns as well.

You can’t run away from money; it’s a baseline reality of business. Money continues to matter, in increasingly consequential ways. The people who think, “I’m rich now, I’m excused from looking at my bank balance” are often the ones who run out of cash—or see their business valuations vanish overnight.

This holds true even if you are not entrepreneurial. You still need to do the work to excavate your stories about money and get more comfortable with it. There was a hilarious TikTok meme recently of a series of women telling their partners that they didn’t think they’d be able to pay their rent or mortgage that month—and the joke every time was that their boyfriends and husbands laughed in their faces that they wouldn’t even know whom to pay, or for what amount. About fifteen friends sent this to me with a laughing face emoji because I’m the one who tells them constantly that they need to learn the basics of their finances instead of relying on said boyfriend or husband to make it all invisible. I’ve seen too many women in my life get fucked over for one, but also: Start getting comfortable with money by digging in right there. Despite having people who take care of this for us in my marriage, I am in all the paperwork and in all the details; even though Jens and I are fifty-fifty partners in most things, I still have my own lawyers look at everything. This might sound extreme, but then I know exactly where I’ll stand should my circumstances ever change.

I learned about the careful stewardship of money from my mum, who would sit at our kitchen table at night and budget—she was meticulous with money. While we didn’t have much to go around, when she was able to work full-time, we never went without because of her vigilance. I’ve heard stories from other daughters of single mothers that their mums would stuff bills in the couch cushions or toss them in the trash unopened because they couldn’t bring themselves to look at them, but my mum treated them like a basic reality. Every month, she would sit with a stack of bills, writing checks and balancing her accounts, and teach me about the price of heating and gas. At eight or nine, I knew exactly how much everything cost, which gave me an understanding of market value in the world. I

My mum watched every single pound and knew where every penny went, which is why I’m still known in my house as a careful bitch—and why I insist on giving my kids an allowance in physical cash rather than ephemeral Apple Pay. I will take their money off of them when they want to buy an app or spend money on Roblox. I want them to transact in real dollars and understand that money is concrete and not a vague digital concept. They think I’m tight, but I don’t care. Jens would tell you that I measure the amount of my moisturizer he uses and get after him if he’s being wasteful. I’ll cut a bottle of body lotion in half with scissors so I can scrape the last bit out of the bottom. And if he tosses a piece of moldy cheese, I’m right there to dig it out of the bin, cut away the mold, and finish it off. I don’t like waste. It offends me. I don’t let prices determine what I order on a menu, but I still look, and I respect the underlying value. It means something to me.

This is partly why I’m an excellent merchant: I know what every single component on a pair of jeans costs and how that might negatively affect either the margin or what the customer needs to pay. I am fastidious about pricing because I understand its psychology and people’s relationship with money. I know the price of everything. I know how much lettuce costs. I know how much milk costs. I know how much a newspaper costs. It’s a grave error in business to lose connection to your customers’ value system, even after you get rich and decide you don’t need to think about money anymore. This is very fallible thinking. While you don’t need to worry about money in the same way—or let scarcity dictate the choices you make for yourself in a way that it might have early on in your career when you didn’t yet have a lot of optionality—if you’re going to be successful in business, you can’t pretend like money doesn’t exist. You can’t see money as something that needs to be escaped or ignored—or as something that has little value once you have a lot of it. If you can’t tell, I really like to talk about money—and I want everyone to do the same. We must stop pretending that it’s off-limits or impolite. “Emma, you talk about money too much.” I hear this all the time. This is the feedback I get from all my rich female friends. Some of them have made their own cash, and some would have not a sausage if it weren’t for their husbands. “Your obsession with money is really not elegant.” “When we feel like it’s inelegant to talk about money, money has a way of elegantly passing us by,” I like to offer in retort. “Also, know what is elegant? Buying your first house, traveling on your own dime, and not having to ask for shit… and while you might not have had to pay for those things, somebody did.” At this point, they typically shake their heads and chuckle and move on: What are we going to do with her? But I know underneath it all, many of them are terrified. Many of these women have educations, intelligence, wit, and social power—yet they’re entirely unwilling to have a conversation about the one thing they don’t have under control: their own cash and the financial security that comes with it. I get invited to a fair number of business conferences, and I’m frequently asked to sit on panels, though my tolerance for this type of conversation is increasingly low—in part because the advice that’s dispensed is largely PR-driven platitudes. I’m uninterested in skirting the issue. (If you can’t tell, I can’t get over this, so I’m going to really hammer it home.) I believe we don’t like to discuss it because we think it’s inelegant, as my rich friends like to tell me—that money is not for us, that it’s impolite, that it’s not the provenance of nice girls and good women to really think about it, much less discuss it at length. Case in point, a friend who is a powerful female venture capitalist told me she was recently at an event where a female investor on a panel said something to the effect of: I don’t invest to make money; I only invest in things that are good for the world and good for women. My friend pulled her aside after and told her that she can’t say that again. Making money is the point of investing. Even though it sounds good and more palatable to suggest that you do it out of the goodness of your heart, it’s a massive disservice to women to suggest that making money in business is secondary to caring about women and the world. It just confirms the same unhelpful story that so many of us carry around about money being unsavory and bad. We need to be able to get down to the crux of it—after all, you’re holding a book about business in your hands! What are we doing here? We need to take some responsibility for the fact that we’re not in the conversation, and that women are only getting 3 percent of VC funding. It’s not because we’re not competent, and hardworking, and brilliant, and full of fantastic ideas. And it’s also not because the world is misogynistic. There might be some of that, sure, but we need to own that our refusal to speak plainly about the investable opportunity around money—to put profitability and financial achievement at the center of our plans—does not serve. We often shove the hope to build a big, powerful business under statements about helping the world and helping other women, and this means we are missing out. II Start with the money. Start with the business proposition. No investor is going to pat you on the back and write you a check for your warm, cuddly idea.

I sat on a panel recently with some very impressive women engaged in different sectors. While the moderator called me out as being invited for the “cool factor,” I realized that I was the only one who had actually made hundreds of millions of dollars myself. (And yes, that is cool.) As we talked, I felt my impatience rising, because we weren’t talking about what mattered. We were vaguely discussing inequity at the office, sexual harassment, and whether fertility treatments should be a corporate benefit. We weren’t giving the women who were listening in the audience or watching the video back after the fact what they actually needed to know about negotiating for their value at work or driving better outcomes for themselves or women in the wider world. That all came out after the tapes stopped rolling and the mics weren’t hot—and mostly because I’m a pushy bitch and I will ask. I wanted to know how much each woman was being paid. I wanted to understand how one woman’s deal structure had shifted pre- and post-IPO. I wanted to know how, when the VCs rolled in, one woman had changed her deal, and which lawyers she had used to structure her contract—as well as how much she had paid them. Many of them shifted uncomfortably at my questions.

The next day, one of the women reached out to me for coffee and said, “Never in my life have I disclosed what I am paid on any of my deals. And as a result, I’m pretty sure that I’m the lowest paid CEO of any of the other highly visible companies in my industry.”

I told her that she is living proof of exactly what I’m talking about, and that I would refuse to be the lowest paid if I were her, specifically because she is arguably the most accomplished. For the past few years, this woman had been murdering her competition and driving up considerable and measurable shareholder value—all while likely being undercompensated. As she told me, “I’d love to have a coffee, because clearly I have a lot to learn.”

I’m not telling you this story as a flex (though if I could teach women one thing, it’s this). I’m telling you that even the most admired and successful women in business today stumble when it comes to talking about money. They avoid the conversations and try to navigate around them, even as they themselves are dealing with vast budgets and decisions that affect legions of employees and stakeholders. They cannot extend their competence with money to themselves. Their concern is only for everyone else. They will advocate for everyone else before they advocate for themselves. Mellody Hobson, co-CEO and president of Ariel Investments, has had similar experiences to me, explaining, “We’re loyal, and we’re team players, and we expect good things to happen us. I think I’ve been naive at times, too, so I’m not saying this in a condescending way, but sometimes it will work out, and at other times, you have to ask and put people on the spot.” 1 Sometimes you have to ask, i.e., you have to talk about money.

Men have no problem talking about money. I overhear these conversations all the time. Just the other day, I was having what was supposed to be a lunch date with Jens when we were interrupted by some big, powerful bankers. One of them carefully outlined how he had just pulled off a major real estate deal. Now, listen, I was annoyed, and my first instinct was to be grossed out that this man interrupted my hot lunch date with my husband to flex about his business acumen. But Jens was listening carefully, and as they walked away, he turned to me and told me that he now knew what to do with a commercial building we had just bought. I was so busy being grossed out, I hadn’t followed the breadcrumbs to see what this man was offering that I could apply in my own life. Men don’t get grossed out; they pay attention. Men disclose deal structures, pay packages, and trade intel about bankers who are jerks and should be avoided, or the lawyers who are creative thinkers and can get any deal over the line. If you ask a bunch of women about their banking relationships, they will demur from disclosing or they will lie. I’ve thought a lot about what stops us from telling the truth in public, and I don’t believe it’s because women intend to mislead or want to be dishonest—it’s because the truth can sometimes be perceived as “mean” in a culture where we women are determined to be seen as nice, gracious, and good. I was standing backstage with a female business paragon a few months ago who unleashed about a banker who had done her dirty and all that she had learned in its aftermath—but as we stepped onstage her whole demeanor shifted to present as someone who has it all nicely under control. In turn, she had nothing meaningful to share. When this happens, we all end up leading each other down a garden path.

Money is not negative. It’s a neutral tool. And it needs to be explored—and explored thoroughly—from that perspective. You need to speak about money with your partner. You need to think about money with your kids. You need to think about it from a professional point of view. How well are you spending your money? And on what? Every angle needs to be explored. Because money is neutral and it’s important. And what it can buy you—freedom, optionality, space, time, support—can be fucking great. The more comfortable you can get talking about it, asking questions about it, and handling it without projecting a bunch of stories onto it, the more effectively you can make more of it. Here are my requests:

New Thought: Take the fear out of money by facing it and thinking about it constantly—it’s a type of exposure therapy that will build comfort over time.

2. Old Thought: Scarcity is real, and if you ask for more, someone will get less.

If you don’t sacrifice for what you want, what you want becomes the sacrifice.

—Anonymous

At the beginning of my work experience in fashion, it was clear that I was different—an interloper in a world that was all about being an insider. For one, I was the only Black girl. But the bigger deal in London, at least, was that I was the only poor girl. I’d sit at my desk with my sad deli sandwich while the others would head out for lunches. I had no cash and no connections; it was clear to everyone that I did not know anyone in the office, and I had written a letter to get a job. I was always a little destroyed when I realized whom I was sitting next to—the owner’s friend’s son, the niece of someone, such and such’s daughter with a treble-barrel surname. Once I got over my self-consciousness about how I was not supposed to be there though, I realized that being different gave me an opportunity to see the playing field more clearly, an advantage in perspective-taking that I’ve maintained for my entire life. I also reframed these differences not to be disadvantages, but to help me stand out. For one, I took nothing for granted and worked hard, maximizing every opportunity. And for two, thanks to my East London accent and big, curly hair, nobody ever confused me for anyone else in person or on the phone.

I quickly became comfortable in multiple worlds—an outsider who could behave like an insider or at least understand the operating system enough to navigate it well. I also seemed to be the only one who could clearly see the office politics at the fashion production company, where the owners too often made attention and praise a scarce commodity and pitted us against each other to try to win it. We would regularly compete for both their affection and the plum assignments that would come with being the chosen one for a few weeks or maybe a month. This kept us squabbling like a group of hungry dogs, rushing to get the L’Oréal job or the Zac Posen show. As I saw it, it was incredibly effective at making a hostile work environment, where we would see each other as foes before friends. It was very formative in helping me determine the type of leader I did not ever want to be.

At my level of the business, there were two of us—me and Lauren—who had to continually face off against each other, though this wore on me quickly. Finally, I went to Lauren and said, “Listen, why don’t we not do this? Let’s stop fighting it out in this fake competition. You do one job, I’ll take the next one, and so on. We don’t have to fight for attention like this—we can figure this out amongst ourselves.” It took her a minute to concede that I was right, and then we moved peaceably on. It not only gave us emotional energy back but worked out better for us and the business—and gave me early insight into how the perception of scarcity incites so much fear in women. Most importantly, it showed me that all you need to do to make it end is to break the spell: Scarcity is a magic trick; it’s not real. I think that the owners sometimes kept us running around mainly for their own amusement and sense of importance. Perhaps, they got their power kicks out of making us beg for crumbs. The irony is that it did not serve their business well.

As I’ve been working on this book, I’ve been thinking a lot about scarcity around money, and how this is the most insidious story we carry. I’m fortunate that I don’t have it, and I believe it’s because I saw early on that engineering scarcity is a type of game. Historically, it’s been one of the primary marketing levers companies pull—and it works in the limited-edition sneaker world, too. Scarcity is mostly created. You might feel like you have less today, but then you suddenly have more tomorrow—time, money, opportunity, and energy are all liquid, they shift and move. The story of scarcity that we’re led to believe, though, is that there’s a finite amount of money, or time, or attention to go around, and because it’s limited, if I get more, you get less. Philanthropist Lynne Twist, author of The Soul of Money , describes scarcity like this: “When we believe there is not enough , that resources are scarce, then we accept that some will have what they need and some will not. We rationalize that someone is destined to end up with the short end of the stick.” 2 From where I stand, women are the first to raise their hands, not only in support of this story of not enough , but to believe that the short end of the stick belongs to them. You hear variations of this all over the place, whether it’s Anne Lamott writing about her mum always taking the worst piece of cake or the broken egg, or the female founder who refuses a paycheck and works for free because it seems to her to be the “right” thing to do.

I don’t know if it’s because we are raised to be more relational—and to caretake, nurture, and put other people’s needs above our own—but this idea of scarcity grounds many of us before we’ve even begun to take flight. It’s hard for us to think about our needs and wants and our value in the marketplace as discrete—our tendency is to contextualize it against the needs, wants, and value of other people, or to assume that there must be a relationship to the group. We don’t want to be an outlier or to stand apart. In watching many men move through business, men are not concerned by this at all. They have no problem openly competing with each other, for one, in very direct ways, but they also seem to see their value and worth as distinct and related more to objective facts and less to subjective fairness . They don’t take it personally. As women, we often take it all personally. We love to talk about fairness, and in reality, “fair” does not exist. Fair is always looked at in comparison to other people or situations—it’s not a helpful concept in business. In my experience, you do not get what you deserve; you get what you negotiate.

I see this most clearly when we determine pay raises at our companies. Every year, the male leaders take their budget allocations and distribute it to their teams without comment; the female leaders come back to me, before they’ve allocated any of it, totally bent out of shape on behalf of their teams. It doesn’t matter what the facts are, or that we pay team members at the very top of market (often establishing new market values for roles in the process), my female leaders feel a lot of feelings about it—and when I dig into it with them, we often arrive at the same place: They feel badly that as thirty-year veterans, they make a lot more than their most junior hires and worry that it’s not fair. They feel uncomfortable with their own compensation and want to balance it out. They want to be closer to the group so they don’t stand out, even though their experience and wisdom is unparalleled in the organization and a huge asset to our success.

It’s not that wanting parity is wrong , but it means that women are in a constant comparison play, wondering how we stack up against everyone else—and we feel terrible about the idea that we might be outpacing the group or distinguishing ourselves in any way. In my experience, this means women invariably earn less . (We will talk about negotiating shortly.) Take the story at the beginning of this chapter: My bosses at the time were pitting us against each other, leveraging scarcity to suggest that any opportunity, affection, or money that went to one of us was being taken from someone else. In reality, the performance of my peers had absolutely nothing to do with my ability to drive dollars to the bottom line—what they were up to was literally none of my business.

It’s not lost on me that scarcity is so big for women in business because we also have so few models of success. Men look around and see a world built for them, and men killing it in every industry with plenty to go around. Women are fed a constant diet that when it comes to us, it’s winner-take-all: You’re either in the seat at the table or you’re nowhere to be found. I don’t think we should underestimate how deeply this sits in the minds of women—and how we need to get behind each other rather than against each other to create the shift change we want to see in the world. Men do not see their pay, or their bonus, or their opportunity as coming out of some other guy’s pocket. They look at each other and say, If him, why not me as well? Women on the other hand think quite differently: If I do that or get that, I’ll be taking it from her. Men see opportunity; women see limitation. If you are carrying this story, you need to make it really visible to yourself. Look outside of the company you keep for models—and look to the men as inspiration, too. Because of scarcity for women, men are better exemplars of what’s possible. They are our competition, not each other.

While I don’t carry the scarcity story about money, I do have a money story that drives my husband nuts. My story is that what goes boom can also go bust. This is a pattern I experienced in childhood, not so much with my mother but with my extended family and the community at large in East London. Someone would hit it big and go big… and then have nothing again. When Jens and I started dating, I told him, “I don’t go backward in lifestyle.” And I meant it. He would tell you I am deranged about this, and I concede that I probably take this to an unhealthy level, but I am fastidious about understanding every facet of our financial lives. I do mega long-term and short-term budgeting and planning. I trust my husband implicitly, and yet I can trust him because I know I am taking care of myself rather than blindly relying on him to do it for me. While it’s arguably extra work and expense for me, it takes the stress of dependence out of our relationship.

I still laugh at the lines in Chris Rock’s 2008 special, Kill the Messenger : “I had to make miracles happen to get that house. I had to host the Oscars to get that house. And to this day, I don’t even believe it’s my house. That’s why I keep a bag packed right by the door. Just in case the white people that really own the place show up one day. Time to go, blackie. Hey, I knew this day would come. Good thing I’m packed.” 3 I feel like this sometimes, like I’m an interloper in my own life, even as I recognize that if I’m going to pack it all up, it’ll likely be to move into a nicer house.

I experience a lot of financial freedom right now, but I don’t think the reason I’ve had so much success is so I can be more successful—I’ve made plenty of money, and it no longer drives my decisions about where to invest my time. Instead, I’m 100 percent certain that the reason I’ve become so successful is so that I can share with other women how to be successful, too. I realize that my programming is different from other women and so I can be a model for a different way to behave.

I don’t take the financial lightness I now feel for granted. Everything around me in childhood was so heavy. People were depressed; they couldn’t make ends meet. It was a scary way to live. Everybody’s life was so hard. I realized—and it was incredibly motivating for me early in my career—that if you could take away the grind of not knowing where your next paycheck would come from and remove the pain of having to do utterly unenjoyable work, life looked really different. It’s been an incredible gift to find things I’ve been good at, and to make money doing those things. I wish this for everyone.

Like me, Michelle Obama grew up in tough financial circumstances, and we chatted about the survivor’s guilt you can feel when you make it, when others don’t. It can be incredibly tempting to try to rescue friends and family—it can also feel like an expectation or a responsibility—but you can’t do this effectively until you yourself are secure. As she explained to me on the podcast, “I have this conversation a lot with minority kids going to college in particular, because… the need to leave behind the people who need to be left behind gets a lot of young people in trouble…. We have kids who go to college, and they take their student loan money, and they’re trying to pay the light bill at home. They’re grappling with survivor’s remorse. And the thing that I remind them is that you’ve got to put your oxygen mask on first. And it’s a long climb to get to a place where you can really, really help others. And if you stop too soon and try to help too early, you’ll all fall.” She and President Obama’s combined student loan debt was larger than their first mortgage—and they didn’t get out of it until President Obama wrote Dreams from My Father and became a bestselling author while he was a senator. “It wasn’t until after we got out of the White House that we were in a position to buy my mom a safe place to live with a doorman, which she didn’t understand she needed. ‘You’re the former first grandmother. You can’t just live in the hood.’ But I say that to young people to explain that that’s how long it took before we really could afford to bring others along.” 4 This is coming from two of the most powerful people on the globe, people who do as much as they can for others. It’s not selfish to make sure you’re safe and secure before you extend your generosity to the world. It’s essential.

New Thought: Money is not relational—advocate for yourself first, then you can think about other people.

3. Old Thought: You should be satisfied with what you have, as there are people out there who have so much less than you. It’s greedy to want more.

When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two thirds of the time thinking what they want to hear, and one third thinking about what I want to say.

—Abraham Lincoln

“Stop having an employee mentality.”

When Jens first said this to me, it stopped me in my tracks. “Wait, what?”

“Your board follows your direction as the leader of the company—stop pretending like you have six bosses instead.” This idea of an “employee mentality” was a massive unlock for me, but when Jens first brought this phrase to my attention, it was in the context of negotiating my salary with the board of ITB Worldwide, the agency I had built in London. I had been running through scenarios in my mind, thinking defensively about all the ways they might counter my ask and tell me no, when Jens told me to cut the shit.

“So, what—I just tell them what my compensation package will be?”

“Yep. Go be Emma. Tell them what’s what. They are looking to you to lead.”

I walked into the meeting, laid out the plan, and told them how I’d be compensating myself and why—I didn’t pose this as a question but stated it as a fact. Nobody batted an eye, and we moved on to the next agenda item.

This was a breakthrough for me, if only because I started to do for myself what I had already been doing so effectively for other people. My entire livelihood and business came down to my ability to negotiate on behalf of designers and eventually a wide roster of brands and talent. I simply didn’t yet have a ton of skill in doing this on my own behalf, partly because there is no way to triangulate when you’re negotiating for yourself. When you’re playing the role of the third, or the broker, it’s not personal. You can take some distance and understand what both parties want and need to successfully close the deal without getting emotionally invested in an outcome or feeling offended when it falls short. This ability is why women tend to be the best negotiators for other people and businesses: We’re excellent at modulating emotional information, reading the room, and ensuring that everyone walks away feeling happy.

When I interviewed her for my podcast, Mellody Hobson confirmed that this has been her experience as well. When she negotiates, she tells her opponent across the table that she won’t ever ask for something that she doesn’t actually need—and she expects the same consideration in response, particularly because the negotiations she undertakes are massive, intense, and typically strapped for time. As she explained, “If you call me and say, ‘I need it,’ I believe you. But I need you to believe me, too.” 5 That is a powerful negotiating tactic—and my guess is that women are especially good at it. In my experience, we tend to not domineer or bully or take a win-at-all-costs approach, which generally ensures that everyone is satisfied.

But when you’re negotiating on behalf of yourself, you can’t get any perspective because it’s you versus someone else, and your ability to take emotional distance tends to collapse or at least get very cloudy. It feels personal and scary and, for many of us, like it’s more important to please the other party than yourself. Unless you build your negotiation muscle, it’s likely you will constrain yourself out of the gate—until your resentment and anger about doing yourself dirty forces you to move your butt, either to advocate on your own behalf or take yourself elsewhere.

While negotiating on my own behalf is now a superpower, my inability to do it for myself launched my career. Back at the fashion production company, I asked my two female bosses to double my wages, which seemed like a great deal for them (I made £26,000, or about $35,000), as I created a lot of revenue for that business. They essentially laughed in my face, we argued about my value to the bottom line, and I walked. I didn’t have a financial safety net, but my compensation was thankfully not golden handcuffing me to my job (a real risk for some people), and I was pissed . While it didn’t feel like I had any leverage in that moment—no competing job offer, for one—I knew I should bet on myself and my ability to build the same business somewhere else. More importantly, I knew I couldn’t afford to stay—not in wages and not in the opportunity cost, i.e., my time and energy were becoming far more valuable than my current compensation. I’d already been there for six years, starting as an unpaid intern, slowly building my network and my reputation. I had paid my dues, and it was time I more directly benefited from my experience.

My friend Sara, who was the hottest fashion publicist in town, had recently been hired by these two very cool Swedes named Jens Grede and Erik Torstensson, who had a company called the Saturday Group. They were in the process of acquiring all these fashion companies. She put us in touch, and I met Jens at the Shoreditch Soho House, where I told him what I’d been up to—putting designers together with brands to underwrite fashion shows, special projects, and collaborations—which was still a novel form of business development at the time. I told him about the dollars I’d been able to drive and the potential value of the business I could build if I were properly supported, as well as what I could see coming down the pike in terms of influencers (at that point, we still called them bloggers). I didn’t reveal my measly salary or ask him for a specific amount. I wanted to understand how he would size the opportunity first. On the spot, he wrote out a deal for me in a little MUJI notebook—a notebook I still have—and I told him I’d have a think about it even though, honestly, I was desperate for a job. The offer was good—commissions and a fifty-fifty stake in the business line I would build, with full back-office infrastructure and support—but I emailed a follow-up and asked for a more significant salary guarantee up front. I knew I needed cash and security (he didn’t need to know that, so I didn’t tell him), but I also wanted him to understand that I knew how to drive a deal. I got what I asked for, and I started at the Saturday Group shortly after.

For the first six months, I ran my hustle inside a PR agency that the Saturday Group owned. I worked intensively, and soon after, my business unit started to blow up. I was making a ton of commissions. They didn’t know me from any of the other girls in the office, but I was killing it, so Jens and Erik asked to meet—they wanted to make my business its own entity, divorced from the P&L of the PR agency, and they believed I could take it far. They had so much faith in me, I could feel myself borrowing their faith in the meeting, convincing myself I could and would go all the way. We aligned on a vision—an agency built around collaborations and brand deals that extended beyond fashion to encompass celebrities, influencers (i.e., bloggers), and cultural figures. Erik and Jens predicted I’d stay with them for three years while I built the business, after which we could sell it or spin it off, and I’d be free to do my next thing. Jens is now my husband, and we’ve built businesses together, though he believed in me as a businessperson well before there was any inkling of romance, and that meant a lot. One of Jens’s genius points in business is that he knows it when he sees it, and in that instance, he saw me.

When women ask me for negotiation advice, I tell them that on the face of it, it’s super basic: (1) You are almost certainly being paid less than you are worth, so start from that assumption and ask for more. (2) Do not overexplain, just state your ask or expectations and leave it there—including space for silence—as sometimes shit is really simple. Don’t rush in to justify. (3) Never take the first offer, always negotiate. (You also never want the other party to think a fast and easy “yes” means they’ve overpaid.)

These sentences may sound simple, but this advice seems incredibly difficult to take.

Every time HR approaches me at one of our companies about approving an offer for a potential hire, it’s always, always because a man is asking for more and they need sign-off to lift the salary band. He’s negotiated his way up to me.

The biggest stumbling blocks women seem to face are low self-worth ( Who am I to think I deserve that? ) and a fear of displeasing other people or making them uncomfortable with an ask ( Am I going to make this other person feel bad? Am I asking for too much? Am I taking this from someone else? ). Mori Taheripour, a professor at Wharton who wrote a great book on negotiation called Bring Yourself , tells her students that before they can become effective negotiators, they need to heal their stories about themselves. As she explains, “You can’t be the person who diminishes your value—others will too often do that for you.” 6 This is hard and deep work, and sometimes the best way to understand your value in the context of business is through experience. The more you move around in your career, the more you’ll be able to feel into the market and ground your expectations in reality. I know this entire section is about how difficult it is to get other women to talk about money, but do your research. (And ask men! They’ll tell you!)

Mellody Hobson has experienced people coming to her in what she calls “the right way”—and also the wrong way—to advocate for themselves. The wrong way, in her estimation, is when “you really don’t know what you’re talking about. You have overstated your significance or your value. That’s the biggest thing. It’s a killer. If you do that, [your boss] will never look at you the same way. When this happens, I think, ‘Well, you don’t know anything. How valuable can you be?’ ” This sounds harsh, but Mellody works in finance, and she relies on her team members to understand market value—including their own. “There’s nothing worse than the person who is asking for something that literally doesn’t exist. They’re like, ‘I want to be your chief of staff, and I want five hundred thousand dollars.’ That’s not going to happen anywhere. If you can get that job, go get it!” 7 Instead, Mellody recommends going to questions rather than statements if you’re in a difficult negotiation for yourself. She likes to hear questions like, “What do you think I could be doing better, or what do you think I could do more of to achieve my long-term goals?” Then you need to take the feedback and not argue. If the feedback doesn’t feel valid, if you disagree, it might not be the right place for you. Or you might learn something valuable in the process.

If you’re negotiating in a space where there is no reliable information to level-set against, you need to blindly adopt the belief that you are worth more until your belief catches up with this assumption. Remember: By the time you’re at the point of negotiation, it’s because both people want a deal. You need to ask for more.

This brings us to fear. Worst case, someone tells you no. Or maybe laughs at your entitlement. (See above.) Both might sound like terrifying outcomes, but when you think deeply about this, Who really cares? Who are you trying to please if not yourself? For one, even if you have a bumpy or contentious negotiation experience and you end up with the job, everyone moves on. And even if you don’t end up getting everything you ask for, you’ll still end up with more, including the self-respect to know that you didn’t sell yourself out. If you don’t get what you want, you have agency: You can accept the offer and look for leverage down the line or you can always walk away. But don’t let your fear cut off your ask. As Taheripour writes, “Fear takes up so much room in our psyche that we don’t want to put ourselves in the position where we hear it at all. We either don’t ask for what we should, or we rush to fill up a silence that we fear will lead to a negative response. Think of how often we end conversations or emails that contain an ask with ‘If it doesn’t work for you, I understand,’ or ‘This is of course negotiable.’ Why? Why do we immediately offer an easy out? Because we’ve already told ourselves they’ll come back and say no, and we’re so afraid of that word that cushioning it makes it less scary.” 8 We modify emails all the time with statements like the ones she outlines—and then some. ( No worries if you don’t have time… You’ve probably already thought of this… I was just wondering… Sorry to bother you, but… ) Start building your muscle for difficult conversations like negotiations by striking all this language from your everyday email vernacular. Say what you think and make your asks on the daily without offering easy outs. Practice with the discomfort of asserting yourself. It gets easier over time.

I wanted to lay the groundwork on scarcity in the last chapter because negotiating from a place of scarcity sucks. And it rarely works. To be an effective negotiator, you need to approach conversations from a place of abundance—that everyone can get what they want and get their needs met. A good negotiation is effectively relational, but not in a way where one party subjugates everything they want and need so that the other party wins. I’m good at negotiation because I’m able to see all sides. When I sit down with someone who is making their ask of me, I take their position to understand where they’re coming from. What does this person ultimately want? What are their nonnegotiables versus their nice-to-haves? What does success look like for them when this negotiation is over? I try to see the entire map from their point of view. My goal is always the same: Find something mutually advantageous. Nobody wins and nobody loses. I never want to push someone’s back against the wall.

Keep abundance front and center when you set out to negotiate, think first about yourself, what you want, and what you’re bringing to the table. Do not prioritize the other party. And do not think too deeply about how you might be received or how they might rebuff your ask. As Taheripour writes, “Those who have a healthier sense of worth… start their preparation by identifying their value and strength of their asset(s), then devising the argument that will persuade their counterpart. They do consider the counterarguments. But they don’t consider them first. That order of thought makes a huge difference. They don’t start from a point of fear and weakness but rather confidence and leverage.” 9 While you can fake confidence, leverage is real—and ideally, you have some. This might be another job offer, one that confirms a higher market value and is compelling enough to take if your current employer won’t match their terms. This might be enough cash in the bank to guarantee some runway for you to find a better fit or deal. This might be the pull of going out on your own as a freelancer, consultant, or entrepreneur if you can’t find the right FT situation. Your leverage might be a staunch belief in your own value. I always recommend looking for and creating optionality so that you never feel stuck. That way you’re not backed into a corner where you must accept an offer. If it’s a bad deal, you can walk away. If it’s a bad job, you can quit. You don’t want to cling to a bad outcome out of fear that nothing better will ever come your way.

New Thought: You need to think about yourself first; nobody else will do this for you. Everyone else is too busy thinking about themselves.