Cameron Herold explains that job title alone doesn't determine pay: in large enterprise companies (thousands of employees) higher titles typically pay more, but in entrepreneurial companies (roughly $1M–$10M revenue) CEOs often take smaller salaries than key executives. The CEO may prioritize growing enterprise value (for exit, traction, or market share) and invest in higher-paid talent rather than extracting salary. The clip closes with an outro prompting viewers to watch more videos.
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Often these entrepreneurial CEOs are taking a lot less money out of the company than some of the key executives that they're bringing in to help them drive the company as a whole. So don't get fooled by titles. So who makes more money, the CEO or the CEO? Now, you might be thinking that the CEO is going to make more money because they've got the bigger title in the organization, but it's not always true. It probably does tend to be true when you're in an enterprise level, right? If you're the CEO of a major enterprise company, like 5,000 or 2,000 or more employees, then for sure the title titles bear and bring in more money, right? The higher you are in the org chart, the more money someone is going to be paid. But if you're in an entrepreneurial size company, let's say you're in the 1 million to $10 million size company and you're the CEO of that company, you're often not taking as much out of the company as you're paying some of your key people. The reason is you're investing in those people to attract more talent in to build the whole organizational value of your company. You're not looking to just take out money as a salary every year. You're looking to actually grow the entire enterprise value. Perhaps it's for an exit. Maybe it's to gain more traction, maybe it's to buy up market share. But often these entrepreneurial CEOs are taking a lot less money out of the company than some of the key executives that they're bringing in to help them drive the company as a whole. So don't get fooled by titles. Quite often the entrepreneurs aren't taking as much money out of the company as we think they are.
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