Cameron Herold breaks down CEO pay at $10 million revenue companies. It depends on ownership and goals: some reinvest to grow and exit, others extract earnings for personal use. The choice is strategic, not fixed.
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So one of the questions we had recently was, how much money does the CEO, right, the chief executive officer of a company doing approximately $10 million in revenue earn? Well, it depends. You can actually decide as the CEO if you run 100% of the company. If you own 100% of the cap table, you might not be trying to pull money aside. You might be trying to build the company to exit. So maybe you're not pulling much money out of the company as salary or bonuses. Maybe you're actually reinvesting everything you can to drive revenue, to drive growth, to drive profitability, to drive your expansion. Or maybe you've got your business to a stage where you're really happy with where it is, and now you want to extract as much money from the organization as you want so that you can actually invest it differently. Because the CEO owns the company, their goals are very different from an employee that works in a company, right? When there's an employee working in a company, their entire job is to try to get paid as much as they can for the work that they're doing. But when you're the CEO of the company and you own the company, you might be preparing to exit the company or to scale up the company, or maybe you're actually hiring three or four people to free up time so that you can have 20 weeks vacation a year. The goals of the CEO are very different from the goals of an employee. Now, if you like this content, check out the advanced leadership lessons below. You'll love that as well.
