Having two children has cost my career £308,000 so far.
I’d make the same choice again, without hesitation. But I’d never have known the number if I hadn’t sat down and actually worked it out. And most owners have never done the equivalent sum on their own business.
I don’t mean the cost of the business.
I mean the cost of it to you.
The hours. The missed weekends. The salary you didn’t take in year two so the business could keep the cash. The holiday you cancelled because a client needed you.
The running cost of being the owner.
When I saw my own number, something shifted. The question I’d been quietly asking for years, “why am I not further ahead?”, finally had an answer.
It wasn’t that I’d lacked ambition. I’d been carrying more than I’d ever counted.
Owners carry exactly the same load, and because it’s uncounted, it reads as a personal failing.
“I should be doing better by now.”
That feeling is almost never about ability. It’s about a cost nobody ever added up.
So here are three numbers worth working out this week:
The hours you worked last month that nobody else in the business could have done.
What you’d have to pay someone else to do them.
What you actually paid yourself.
The gap between the second number and the third is what your business currently costs you to run. Not in theory. In pounds.
The reason to count it isn’t to feel worse. It’s the opposite. A cost you can’t see runs quietly in the background forever, and shows up as a vague sense that you’re falling short. A cost you’ve named is just a number, and a number is something you can design around.
Mine was £308,000. I’d still make the same call. But I make it now with my eyes open, which is a very different thing to making it by default.
What’s yours?
For anyone curious how I got to £308,000, it’s based on three things: reduced income during maternity leave, the months working part-time after returning, and lost career acceleration, the promotions and pay rises I’d been tracking before kids.
For context, the average financial loss for mothers is £65,618 by the time their first child turns five. That’s for one child.
And my number doesn’t include the pension gaps, the missed compounding, the senior opportunities that never came up, the emotional and cognitive load, or the small matter of starting a business while parenting two young children.
The point isn’t regret. It’s recognition. Especially on the days you question yourself.