Turning down a $250,000 contract.
26 Apr 2024

Tracy Thain turned down a $250,000 contract because it didn't align with his core value of working on cool things with cool people. Sometimes the money isn't worth the compromise.

Tracy Thain turned down a $250,000 contract because it didn't align with his core value of working on cool things with cool people. Sometimes the money isn't worth the compromise.
But when I say I'm not doing this alone is I have a trusted partner, Tracy Thain. He and I have more than a decade relationship and I can honestly say he's a kindred spirit. We think very differently in how we process information, but we get each other. We're not afraid to have hard conversations. And then before we even started, we said, let's really define what we want. And first and foremost, our prevailing statement is we want to do cool things with cool people. That was put to the test immediately when we started the agency where we ended up walking away from a close to a quarter of a million contract that was in our hands. It was non competitive, everything looked great. And then at the 11th hour, there was just a lot of different red flags and we got together and said, all right, how much do we believe in what we're saying? Cool things with cool people. And we just emailed them and said, hey, we need to withdraw. We're not going to pursue this. Not the way you want to start a business. But we held so firmly to that.