---
title: "Running A Small Business Across Three Currencies"
url: "https://economistzone.com/insight/running-a-small-business-across-three-currencies/"
author: "Lilach Bullock"
published: "2026-09-25"
updated: "2026-09-25"
---

# Running A Small Business Across Three Currencies

### **Three currencies before I've touched a penny**

My income lands in dollars, pounds and shekels before I've done anything with any of it. UK clients pay in sterling. The US non-profit I work with as fractional CMO pays in dollars. My husband still works in the UK and commutes, so his salary is another pound line. We live in Israel, so almost everything we spend, from groceries to household bills and subscriptions, goes out in shekels. Some months lean more towards the non-profit, some months more towards consulting clients, but the currencies themselves never change. Most of the money starts outside the country we live in.

### **I stopped trusting my bank statements**

For a long time I tried to keep track of this in my head. Three bank accounts, three currencies, exchange rates moving every day, and I was supposed to just know how we were doing. I built a folder system instead, with subfolders for income, bank exports, cards and household bills, and had AI pull everything into one base currency, categorise the spending and flag anything that changed. It's how I noticed I was still paying for an AI tool I'd stopped opening, and while I was going through the flags I cut my browser extensions down from twelve to five. Now the dashboard produces a one-page review every month, so the flagging happens on its own instead of me hunting for it by eye. That's the practical use of it, catching the small leaks rather than producing a grand forecast.

### **What a £4,000-a-month pricing model taught me about currency risk**

In year three of running my consultancy I got tempted by the idea of fewer clients on bigger, deeper retainers instead of a wider mix. I ran the actual numbers rather than the fantasy version. Each retained client would have needed to pay roughly £4,000 a month for me to cover costs and pay myself a reasonable salary. I checked that against my existing client base and pipeline and had no clients at that price point, no case studies to support charging it, and no realistic route to landing any within six months, so I refocused on financial stability instead. What the exercise also exposed was currency risk sitting inside the pricing model itself. A £4,000 figure isn't fixed when your costs are partly in shekels and partly in dollars; it moves every time the rate does, and I'd been treating it as solid ground.

### **When a dollar income stream disappears overnight**

For about ten years my site earned somewhere between $5,000 and $7,000 a month from sponsored posts, mostly through directory listings that brands used to find and pay for placements. It was steady enough that I stopped thinking about it as risk. In late 2025 it stopped almost overnight.

I don't watch exchange rate charts. What the dashboard showed me, once everything sat in one base currency, was simpler and less comfortable. The shekel side of my spending doesn't wait for the dollar or pound side of my income to catch up. When the sponsored post income disappeared, the shekel spending kept going exactly as before, because groceries and bills don't pause while you work out what happened to a revenue line.

### **The rule I now apply before any recurring cost or client contract**

I set floors in one currency and hold to them regardless of what currency the client pays in. When I quote SEO work across multiple markets, I won't go below GBP 3,000 to 5,000 a month per market, because under that you're paying for template activity rather than regional research and auditing. Before I sign anything now, I check which currency the cost or the contract is exposed to, the same way I check the dashboard once a month for what changed.

---

[Lilach Bullock](https://www.lilachbullock.com) is an AI implementation consultant and fractional CMO with 21 years in marketing. She helps business owners put AI to work across content, SEO, social media, email marketing, automation and lead generation. Her work has been featured in Forbes, the BBC, The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, WIRED, HuffPost and the Content Marketing Institute, and she has worked with Twitter, IBM, Dropbox, monday.com, Hootsuite and Greenpeace. Forbes named her a Top 20 Social Media Power Influencer worldwide. Based in Israel, she works with US, UK and international clients.