This social entrepreneur wants to increase women’s earnings through mentorship

When Mt. Airy native and Drexel grad Jamila Payne was teaching a business skills workshop a few years ago, she quickly realized her students had incredible ideas as aspiring entrepreneurs, but little support in managing operations, such as billing and marketing.

The organization that hired her to run the workshop also mentioned to her that although 25 students enrolled in the cohort, only 15 would finish, party because of the time commitment required.

Since she’s been an entrepreneur for years in the digital marketing industry, she understood how difficult it can be to fit so many tasks and obligations into a single work day. That’s why she started testing a new methodology that would eventually blossom into her current work: The Daily Success Method, a small business Payne established in April 2015, sells planners to help users reach short-term, 90-day goals through daily planning, weekly reflections and monthly calendars.

Jamila Payne. (Photo by Javy Diaz)

“Unless you change your behaviors and thinking around how you are managing yourself, people are lead to believe they have a time management issue,” Payne said. “But time is the same for everybody. We only get 24 hours. The difference is how you think about those 24 hours.”

This business directly ties into one of Payne’s passions: helping more women succeed in business. According to a recent report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, women earn approximately 82 cents to the man’s dollar. The ratio is even worse for women of color, those with a disability and trans women.

“The entire [gender pay gap] conversation is really around women hoping the way the companies handle compensation is going to change,” Payne said. “That leaves women waiting around in hopes that someone else is going to do something different. Our approach is that we don’t believe women should wait another thirty years to have the opportunity to increase their income.”

Payne has trained over 15,000 entrepreneurs across the country and in Africa over the past decade through Goldman Sachs, Urban Outfitters, Drexel and African Leadership Academy throughout her career.

But she also runs a community for women, called Jamila’s Success Circle, of over 1,000 women with chapters in the the Philadelphia, New York City and Washington D.C. metropolitan areas. The Success Circle chapters meet monthly to discuss a financial literary topic as well as network and practice accountability for each other.

Payne is also launching a new women’s professional development program called She Leads on Oct. 16. Over the course of four months, a cohort of 30 students, including two women from Philadelphia, will convene online and twice in-person to learn strategies to increase their earning potential.

Participants will be matched with a mentor to interact with online during pre-scheduled office hours. Mentors include “Drop the Ball” author Tiffany Dufu and Tribe of World-Changers founder Jadah Sellner.

In addition to implementing work productivity strategies, the program uses money confidence — that is, the ability to build your own wealth — to help women develop a strong financial knowledge to earn, spend, save and invest smarter. And She Leads cultivates an empowering peer-to-peer community to support students and hold them accountable every step of the way.

“The goal is to help women increase their earning power,” Payne said.