The blog ·
Everyone gets paid before you do.
Payroll, super, the ATO, the subscriptions nobody has reviewed in two years. Then whatever is left, and some months that is nothing. Here is why that ordering is a structural problem rather than a discipline one.
Ask most founders how they pay themselves and you get a version of the same answer. Whatever the business can spare, when it can spare it.
Nobody would design it that way deliberately. It happens because owner pay is the only cost in the business with no invoice, no due date and nobody chasing it.
Why does it never fix itself?
Because there is always something more urgent. A supplier with terms. A staff member with a mortgage. A BAS with a deadline. Your own pay is the only line item that can be quietly deferred without anything visible going wrong.
So it gets deferred. Every month. And because nothing breaks, the deferral stops feeling like a decision.
Owner pay is not a reward you earn after everyone else has been looked after. It is an economic requirement of the business model.
What changes when you flip the order
Paying yourself first is not about taking money the business cannot afford. It is about finding out whether the business can afford you, which is a genuinely useful thing to know.
- If it can, you have been underpaying yourself out of habit rather than necessity.
- If it cannot, you have found a pricing or capacity problem, and you have found it while there is still time to fix it.
Either answer is better than not asking.
A rich business with a broke owner is a bad business model, however good the revenue looks.
Where to start
Work out what the business actually paid you last year. Not what you invoiced, and not drawings you intended to repay. What reached your personal account and stayed there.
Divide it by the hours you worked. Then decide whether that is a number you would accept from an employer.