The Question Beneath the Question
This week I was looking for something to write about when I remembered a question I had seen on an Instagram story
A woman had asked a photographer, “How do I know what to charge?”
Between 2021 and 2026, I mentored women creating businesses. We talked about pricing, marketing, confidence, how to find clients and hundreds of decisions that come with creating something of your own.
From my very first client, I knew our conversations were never just about business.
I recognised these conversations deeply with other women because I was asking the same questions myself.
At the time, I was working 8 days a fortnight doing shift work while building my own business. Like many of the women I mentored, I was trying to create choices, and something of my own.
I wanted the flexibility to be present as a mother, a wife and a woman, while earning an income that reflected my work. I wanted to build a business that could support my family without asking me to sacrifice myself in the process.
The women I worked with were wanting to build businesses that gave them more of life.
They wanted the freedom to be at a school assembly without asking for leave. To be able to care for ageing parents, to attend appointments without asking permission. To earn an income doing something they wanted to do.
The irony is that many women leave employment to create more flexibility, then build businesses that ask even more of them than their jobs ever did.
Today, my work looks very different. I manage business continuity for a large public hospital.
On paper, those worlds don’t appear to have much in common.
One is deeply personal. The other is a complex health service made up of thousands of people, hundreds of departments and countless interconnected systems.
However, the same questions come up for both the one woman show and the large organisation.
What happens when life interrupts the plan?
Business continuity is often misunderstood as planning for disasters, but that’s only part of the story. At its heart, it’s about understanding what allows an organisation to continue delivering its most critical services when something unexpected happens.
One of the first things I look for is where too much depends on one person.
Hospitals employ thousands of people, yet I still discover single points of failure. Sometimes it’s knowledge that sits with one person, or it’s a process only one person understands, one piece of equipment, one person to answer the questions.
I don’t identify those vulnerabilities because someone has done something wrong.
I identify them because understanding them is how we make the organisation stronger.
When I first moved into business continuity, I didn’t expect it to change the way I thought about the women I had mentored.
But it did.
The more I learned about vulnerabilities, dependencies and resilience, the more I realised I’d been seeing those same patterns in small businesses for years.
I just didn’t have the language for them yet.
Women don’t build fragile businesses.
Women become incredibly good at carrying them.
They answer emails after dinner. They work while the children are asleep. They fit client work around family life, become the marketing department, customer service, administration, social media manager, finance and the person delivering the work.
Without noticing, they are the business.
For a while, that feels like success, it feels like they are able to make the choices they want to.
Until life asks something different.
A child needs them.
A parent’s health changes.
They become unwell.
Someone we love needs more of us than they did yesterday.
Or perhaps nothing dramatic happens at all. The women business owner wakes one morning to realise she has been carrying too much for too long.
That’s when different questions begin to surface.
Can I step away?
Would my business keep going if I couldn’t answer my phone for a week?
Have I built something that supports my life, or something that only survives because I keep sacrificing mine?
Those are business continuity questions.
They’re also questions about motherhood.
About partnership.
About health.
About ageing.
About being human.
Deep down the women I mentored were not asking how much they should charge.
They were asking whether it was possible to build a business that could hold a full life.
Before I worked in business continuity, I never once stopped to think about resilience. I was too busy living it.
I was working, raising my family, building a business and trying to create a life with more choice and more flexibility. I wasn’t thinking about resilience as a theory. I was making decisions every day that helped me keep going.
It wasn’t until I began working in business continuity that I found the language for what I had already lived.
That’s when I began to understand that resilience is about creating enough capacity for life to happen without everything you’ve built falling apart.
One of the things I’ve noticed in business continuity is that people rarely avoid planning because they don’t care. They avoid it because they’re busy doing the work.
I see it every day in the hospital.
Departments are focused on caring for patients, leading teams and keeping services running. Writing a business continuity plan sits on someone else’s list because today’s work feels more urgent.
Then a disruption happens.
Suddenly we’re trying to think about dependencies, critical activities and recovery while we’re already in the middle of the disruption.
My role is manager of the business continuity progam and working with staff to prepare before they’re forced to respond.
The deeper I get into business continuity, the more I realise most people don’t think about resilience when they are building something new.
Why would they?
When a woman starts a business, she is usually thinking about possibility.
She is thinking about how much she can charge, the creativity of starting a business, website, logos, business name, finding clients, creating an income, building something of her own and proving that she can make it work.
For many women, especially those building a business alongside a 9–5 job, the goal is freedom. The hope is that one day this business will give them the flexibility they were looking for when they started.
Business continuity is rarely part of that early conversation.
Neither is dependency, capacity or what happens when the one person everything relies on needs to step away.
Those questions often only surface when disruption shows up one day.
When a woman becomes unwell. When family responsibilities change. When income slows. When life demands more than she has capacity to give.
It is in those moments that she can find herself asking whether the business she built for freedom can support her through uncertainty.
And sometimes the answer feels harder than she expected. It can feel easier to walk away from the business and return to a 9–5 because she never had the opportunity, time or knowledge to build the foundations that would allow the business to continue without everything depending on her.
Not because she wasn’t capable, or the business wasn’t valuable. But because resilience was never part of the plan.
Perhaps the business we’re trying to build deserves the same care we’re so willing to give everyone else.
The women I mentored were never looking for perfect balance. They were looking for work that could grow alongside a full life.
The more I learn about business continuity, the more I know resilience isn’t something we add to a business later.
It’s something we build into it from the very beginning.
Continuity Question
If life interrupted your business tomorrow, what would continue and what depends entirely on you?