Jesse Pujji explains why he started Bootstrapped Giants after meeting Bob Chapman of Barry-Wehmiller. Chapman told him that without majority ownership and profitability, a leader cannot make culture-centric decisions. Staying private and bootstrapped became essential to building a people-first workplace.
You guys know who Simon Sinek is? Simon Sinek has a Start With Why thing, right? And apparently he was getting challenged by people going, dude, yeah, Start With Why, that's great, but you use Apple as your example. Like, it's the biggest, most successful company in the history of the planet and one of the sexiest companies. Like, show me a company that has a very compelling why, like a compelling culture, but it's a boring company that no one's ever heard of. And show me that that actually still works both to make money but also a really inspirational place. It ends up being a very inspirational place to work. And people, whatever. So Simon was like, all right, and he like went out to look for one, and he stumbled upon a company, and it happens to be headquartered here in St. Louis, in Clayton. It also happens to be a Holt Co. It's called Barry-Wehmiller, and the guy, he wrote a book. The guy's name is Bob Chapman. He wrote a book called Everybody Matters, and the story he tells basically was at his daughter's wedding, and he kind of like he had this almost like enlightenment moment where he realized everybody's somebody's daughter. I should be treating everybody a certain way, and and business can be a force for good. And and so Dave. Gets me a meeting with Bob Chapman, and the first thing I do when he walks in, he goes, "So what do you do? What's your business?" I'm like, "Oh, marketing services." He's like, "What does your balance sheet look like? Do you have assets? Do you have cash?" Like he starts asking me, like walk me through what is your current balance sheet, and I'm like, "Okay." And luckily I'm good with numbers, so I'm like, "We have this much in cash and this much in accounts receivable." Like we don't have any hard assets. He goes, "What's your cap table look like? What's your PNL look like?" He like starts quizzing me for 25 minutes, and then he paused me and he said, "Do you know why I asked you all that, Jesse?" And I was like, Not really. He goes, because I couldn't do what I do with my culture if I didn't own the majority of the company and it wasn't profitable. If I was public or I wasn't making— if I needed other people, I couldn't make the choices I make around my own company in terms of making the culture about the people, essentially. And so that story for me, that's like me. I'm like, okay, I get that. That makes tons of sense. You have to stay private, you have to stay profitable, and that's how you can actually build great cultures for people. where you can show up like a human. And if we're behind on our goal, we're not berating each other or beating each other up, but we're like, let's feel our feelings and move on and get better tomorrow. And like, that's what I want to build. That's what I want GatewayX to be, what I want to stand for. And I want this to be like the media arm of that, that inspires others to do the same thing. And I think part of it is I do think not always, but I think more often than not, it's much easier when you're bootstrapped.
