For four years now, I've run my own bookkeeping practice, helping business owners with their bookkeeping, accounting, and operations — foreign and local clients alike. Somewhere along the way, I built a story about myself that I repeated so often I stopped questioning it: I was good at almost everything in business except one thing. Selling.
Systems, easy. Software, easy. Training people, delegating, understanding the full financial picture of a business — all basic to me. But sales? That, I told myself, was my one real weakness. It was the story I gave whenever someone asked why my past business ventures never survived. It was comfortable, because it let me hold on to being "good at everything else" while explaining away the one part that wasn't working.
I didn't expect that story to fall apart over lomi with a classmate. But it did — and what replaced it wasn't just a better answer about pricing. It was a moment of realizing how long I'd been avoiding a harder truth about myself.
The Night Everything Started to Loosen
I'm currently based in Laguna, where I'm also a second-year college student. Early into the semester, a few classmates invited me to a local fiesta in town — a concert, with a couple of local acts opening before the main act everyone came for. I'm not really a concert person, but I went anyway, mostly for the chance to explore the area since I hadn't had time to do that yet.
Before the show, our group stopped to eat. That's where I first really talked to one particular classmate — someone noticeably older than the rest of our block, already in his 30s, with real years of work experience behind him. Up to that point, we'd only exchanged small talk. But once the music started and everyone else drifted toward the crowd, the two of us ended up on the side instead, talking about life. It became a surprisingly long, honest conversation — the kind where you sense you're on the same wavelength as someone, age gap or not.
That conversation didn't resolve anything that night. It just left something open. It picked back up almost a week later, on an ordinary Thursday after our morning class.
The Question That Reopened Everything
I was groggy that morning — the specific kind of sleepiness that only shows up in a 9-to-12 class, never at night. Right as class was dismissed, this same classmate — I'll call him Brad, since that's what I called him that day — caught up to me and said we should grab lomi for lunch. I agreed, hopped on his motorcycle for the short ride, and we got to the lomihan.
He ordered two servings of jumbo overload lomi — enough for four people, easily — and paid for both without making it a thing. While we waited, he asked me directly: "You're a bookkeeper, right?" He'd seen my content on Facebook, where we were already connected, and had reacted to a few of my videos before.
I told him yes — I run a bookkeeping practice, that's what I do, and that's what I build content around. He shared a bit about himself too: he does massage services, bakes and sells cakes on the side, and keeps taking NC2 and NC3 certification exams because he genuinely likes upskilling. Then he brought up something I'd mentioned once in class — that I'd tried several business ventures in the past, and every single one had folded.
He asked me plainly: why do you think those businesses failed? Why didn't you push through?
It wasn't the first time someone had asked me that. So I gave him the answer I always gave — the well-worn one. Systems, easy. Software, easy. Training, delegating, accounting — all basic to me. My real gap, I told him, was that I never caught up on sales, the part that actually keeps a business's cash flow alive. "I'm weak at selling, Brad," I said. "Pair me with someone who can actually sell, and I'm confident we'd take off — because everything else, I already know."
He looked genuinely confused. "You're weak at selling? You talk in front of the whole classroom. You present. You vlog. You clearly have the nerve to speak and to sell." And honestly — in that moment, it landed on me too. I don't struggle to talk on camera. I don't struggle to pitch ideas or hold a conversation with strangers. So why had I been telling myself, for years, that selling was my weak spot?
Sitting With Being Wrong
I didn't have an answer right away, and I told him so — that his point was actually making me think. Then the lomi arrived, exactly as jumbo as advertised. While I prepared my bowl — onions, chili oil, a bit of calamansi — the question just sat there, unresolved, refusing to let me eat in peace.
Right as I lifted my first spoonful, it hit me: it was never about selling or marketing. It was about charging — paniningil. I actually said it out loud between bites, half-laughing at myself: "Hindi pala ko sa pagbebenta, hindi pala ko sa marketing mahina — mahina pala ako sa paniningil."
That was the real discomfort underneath four years of repeating the same story. It's one thing to discover a new skill gap. It's another to realize you'd been misdiagnosing yourself the entire time — and that the misdiagnosis was actually more comfortable to live with than the truth.
What Made This Hard to Admit
I told Brad something I don't say often on camera: the real reason I hesitated to charge properly wasn't a pricing formula I hadn't learned yet. It was that I didn't want to come across as arrogant. In my head, if a task felt easy for me, it somehow didn't deserve a real price tag — like I hadn't "earned" the right to charge for something that didn't cost me visible struggle.
Brad offered his own angle. His boss in the massage business once told him: never be shy about charging what you're worth, never be shy about pricing high. He used the word "gahaman" — greedy — and that word genuinely didn't sit right with me. It felt like it painted fair pricing as something predatory. I told him I couldn't accept that specific framing, even while admitting the underlying point still made sense.
There's also a life-stage layer to this that I don't think I can separate from the mindset shift. I'm 23, single, not the breadwinner in my family — my mom and sibling are resourceful enough to manage on their own, though I still worry about their expenses from a distance. I live alone here, covering my own costs, supported emotionally by a close circle of entrepreneur friends, some of them through a Discord community that's been a genuine blessing. Because I haven't yet felt real financial pressure, I also haven't felt urgency around charging more. Some friends have told me, half-joking, that I'd understand it better with a spouse or kids depending on me. I don't reject the logic. But I'm also not going to treat marriage or having children as a shortcut to feeling urgency — those deserve real intention, not a lesson-learning device.
The Advice That Reframed My Next Steps
Before we finished eating, Brad gave me one more piece of advice — the one I keep coming back to even now:
Charge low, intentionally, for your first five clients. Let them consume your time fully. Pay attention to how much of your energy and hours they take, and notice if that cost never quite gets reflected in what you're charging. If you feel that mismatch — what you gave versus what you were paid — that's the exact signal that you're ready to charge more for the next client.
You come to understand your own value once your time actually starts to feel scarce — once giving hours to an underpaying client clearly means taking those hours away from your family, your growth, or your own life. That felt cost is what eventually lets you ask to be paid properly, without guilt and without over-explaining yourself.
Still Learning, Still Becoming
I'll be honest — I don't have this fully figured out. I'm still a student of pricing, still a student of paniningil, still a student of a lot of things after four years in this industry. What surprised me wasn't the advice itself. It was realizing that after all this time, I could still be fundamentally wrong about where my own weakness actually lived — and that admitting it took a random lunch, a confused classmate, and a bowl of overpriced lomi to finally surface.
If you've been stuck for a while, telling yourself the same explanation over and over for why your business isn't growing, it might be worth asking a harder question than "how do I sell better?" Ask instead: have I even correctly named what I'm struggling with?
Sometimes growth doesn't look like learning a brand-new skill. It looks like finally being willing to be wrong about yourself.
To know more about my services, writings -- connect with me here --- here's my website: https://www.kylenelsonomac.com/