Life has a way of interrupting our best-laid plans. As this episode of She Counts begins, co-host Nancy McClelland is racing to handle another family crisis. Her mother must be moved from her nursing facility with just two days’ notice after Medicaid refused coverage. It’s the kind of real-life emergency that women in accounting juggle daily while trying to run businesses and serve clients.
Stepping in to help is Candy Bellau, CFE, co-host of the Unbalanced Podcast and a fraud expert who knows firsthand what it’s like to manage a parent’s care from another state. “While I was in it, it was hard. It was so hard,” she shares. “I got a lot of insight afterward. What am I doing with my life? What am I doing with my family? Why am I running my business this way?”
The two had a raw conversation about how chronic underpricing affects women across accounting and how to break the cycle.
From Six Figures to Financial Ruin
Candy’s story sounds impossible until you realize how common it is. At 16, she was already supporting her entire family, negotiating a full-time salary for part-time bookkeeping work. “They hired a full-time person to do the job, and they couldn’t do it,” she recalls. When asked to fix the mess, she saw opportunity. “Why don’t you pay me what you were paying her? I will come in every day after school. You should send a car to pick me up.”
That teenage negotiator became a New York powerhouse. “I would get bonuses that were 100% of my salary,” she explains. “I was making so much money.” Her credit was so perfect that a BMW dealership handed her keys to a convertible without even a down payment, telling her to “go show off to your friends.”
Then she moved to New Orleans for love.
“I immediately brought it way down,” Candy admits. Despite years of experience in turnarounds and investigations, she started charging $25 an hour. “I thought, oh, these people can’t afford New York prices.” Soon she was charging $350 a month to run entire businesses—handling bookkeeping, HR, compliance, even picking up mail. “I did everything.”
The financial collapse was swift. “I did everything I would never let a client do. I depleted my retirement account.” Credit cards maxed out. Cash advances followed. While living in a 600-square-foot house with a baby, she maintained a 1,500-square-foot office she couldn’t afford. The breaking point came when she couldn’t pay the minimum on her credit cards while two mortgages loomed.
“I was lying about my reality,” she confesses, “trying to live the same lifestyle I had in New York without making the money.”
The $6,000 Wake-Up Call
Desperate for solutions, Candy enrolled in a $6,000 marketing course for accountants. What she found shocked her. “It was ‘tired of doing hair? Be an accountant. Don’t want to fix cars anymore? Be an accountant.’”
These complete beginners were using scripts to close $4,000-per-month deals while asking questions like “What’s QuickBooks?” and “What is a bank reconciliation?”
“Literal morons in this group,” Candy says, still incredulous. “And here I am charging $350 a month.”
Even more infuriating were her male colleagues. They’d invite her on sales calls, knowing she had the expertise they lacked. After she’d solve all the problems and outline the work, they’d ask what she would charge.
“I might say, I know what I’m doing. I would do this for like $5,000 a month,” Candy recalls. “And they’d say, ‘$5,000 a month? Are you insane? I wouldn’t do this for less than ten.'”
When she asked if they knew how to do the work, they answered, “I have no idea, but you’ll clearly do it for five and I’ll charge them ten.”
The Real Cost of Underpricing
The research confirms Candy’s perception. Women in professional services charge at least 25% less than men, sometimes up to 50% less. “The median woman in an online labor marketplace in the US sets a bill rate that’s 13.5% lower than a median man,” Nancy notes.
But statistics don’t capture the human cost. When Candy asked her team what would make them happy, the answers broke her heart.
“I would love it if I could take my kid to the doctor when they were sick,” one employee said. “I would love to be able to go to the doctor when I get sick. I don’t have health insurance.”
Another employee, after receiving a raise, shared something that changed Candy’s perspective. She said, “This is the first time in my life that I’m living with somebody out of choice and not need. For the first time in my life, I am making enough money to leave.”
“Everybody needs to make a wage that they can live off of without a man,” Candy resolved. “That became one of my driving forces.”
The irony wasn’t lost on her. “I can’t help anybody if I have to shut this place down and get a job. The person I wasn’t helping was me or my team. I was helping everybody else buying second houses, boats and stuff. And here I am thinking we’ll just have spaghetti again tonight for dinner.”
The Day Everything Changed
After the marketing course revelation, Candy did something drastic. “I fired every client I had.”
Her husband was stunned. When he asked about the office rent she couldn’t afford, she told him, “I no longer have low-priced clients.” His next question: “Do you have any leads?” Her answer: “Nope, but now I can take them.”
Within 24 hours, she got a call about a potential client. “I said, sounds to me like it’ll be $3,500 a month. She just paused and said, ‘That sounds fair. Where do I sign?’
She replaced all her fired clients with just two new ones, each paying what dozens had paid combined.
Breaking the Cycle
The conversation reveals five essential strategies for escaping the underpricing trap:
- Reframe from cost to value. “Because it’s easy for us, we price that way,” Candy explains. “Instead of charging for what we are bringing to the table: the education and the years of experience.”
- Practice raising rates incrementally. Start with specific client groups rather than everyone at once.
- Build community. “Don’t just go at it alone,” Candy urges. “Call somebody you respect.” During the episode, co-host Questian Telka realizes she’s underpricing a current cleanup. “I was underpricing it in my mind already,” she admits.
- Model confidence for others. Show other women what’s possible through your own pricing decisions.
- Recognize the long-term impact. When women underprice, they perpetuate industry-wide disparities and create businesses too fragile to provide security for their teams.
Candy now uses specific language that commands higher prices. When prospects aren’t ready, she tells them, “You’re not ready for a firm like me. Here’s where you need to be. When you hit this point, I’m the exact firm you want.”
For cleanup work, she tells clients, “If you need 12 months cleaned up and my monthly rate is $3,000, it’s the same monthly amount for the cleanup. If I discount it, you’re going to say, why did I sign on monthly?”
And always, “If you don’t pay me up front, I don’t lift a finger.”
No Margin, No Mission
Nancy shares a piece of wisdom she heard from a client: “No margin, no mission.” Without sustainable pricing, there’s no health insurance for teams, no living wages, no ability to weather crises like caring for aging parents.
Candy dropped her own family’s health insurance until everyone on her team could have it too. “Until we all have health insurance, nobody has health insurance,” she announced. The urgency drove her to find the revenue quickly.
“These things that are important to me,” she says now. “If clients don’t want to work with us the way we’ve got things set up, they’re not our client.”
Your Next Step
This episode strips away the polite veneer covering pricing discussions in accounting. The gender wage gap isn’t just about employment. We recreate it every time a woman undervalues her expertise.
As Oprah says, “You get in life what you have the courage to ask for.”
The conversation already changed Questian’s pricing. It just might change yours too.
Join the conversation by following the She Counts Podcast LinkedIn page and comment under “Marking Ourselves Down.” Do you struggle with pricing and asking for what you’re worth? The hosts want to hear from you about topics for future episodes and would love your reviews to help other women in accounting find this community.
Find Candy on LinkedIn and learn about her firms, Kramerican Business Solutions for controls work and Vandelay Forensic Group for fraud investigations. Yes, both are Seinfeld references, and yes, she just passed her private investigator exam.
Listen to the full episode to hear more of Candy’s story, including details about her financial recovery and the specific strategies she uses to maintain sustainable pricing today.