I Thought My Year of Yes Would Lead to More Paid Work. How Wrong I Was.
Organizations only truly value what they pay for. The rest they dispose of easily and forget. Don’t let that be you.
Last year—2024—was the year I worked a lot and got paid too little. It turned out to be a major test-crash-and-learn year for me, with significant financial consequences.
In all, I took on 45 separate pieces of work, including presentations, webinars, conferences, seminars, workshops, articles, guest essays and reports. But out of those 45 projects, just 27% were paid, and only 7% paid well.
I’m an award-winning researcher, writer and consultant focused on equality and society. I have over 25 years of experience, two Master's degrees, and, if you add them up, well over 10,000 hours of leading research functions, advising companies, writing and presenting.
The nature of my work means I make most of my income through consulting, writing reports and articles or research-based projects. Because I’m an independent consultant (along with my husband, I count just six people on my team) it means I need to do a lot of hustling, pitching ideas, doing the circuit, making myself visible. And sometimes, often in fact, it means I’ll have to accept unpaid assignments—assignments that are delivered on the assumption that they’ll be repaid with connections, networking and the hard-to-measure visibility. Or so the logic goes.
At the start of 2024, driven by desire to be purposeful, I decided to accept all offers I received—both paid and unpaid. But by the end of the year, I was flat out frustrated with how things had gone. Let me explain: What I had not fully grasped at the start of the year but certainly realized by the end was that by agreeing to deliver unpaid engagements my labor and that of many other experts, especially women, was feeding the private and non-for-profit sectors—for free. My unpaid efforts were also fueling a global corporate event market whose value is forecast to reach a staggering $1.2 trillion by 2032, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 10.5%.
In a world torn apart by conflict, division and moral bankruptcy, I had become so determined to be an expert who offered solutions to make the world a better place, that when I was invited to deliver unpaid talks on causes about which I felt passionate, I kept saying yes. And then there was the equation I had established in my mind: that public exposure equals stronger personal brand, which in turn equals higher profitability. How wrong I was.
