A short YouTube monologue advising founders to prioritize their own compensation: pay yourself (or double your salary) because "profit is a decision," not an automatic outcome. The speaker shares a personal anecdote where increasing his salary improved his personal stability and enabled longer-term business thinking, arguing the owner is the company’s primary asset.
Hey, Ryan, my business is making money, but I'm not making money. How do I change that? Yeah, it's actually pretty simple. Double your salary, or if you're not paying yourself a salary, start paying yourself a salary. The reality is that profit is a decision. It doesn't happen naturally. The natural state of a business is break even or losing money. So if you want to start making money, you just have to make a decision that you're going to do it and work backwards from that. This happened to me quite a few years ago. Same deal at scale. Business was making money. I'm not making any money. Advisor came along and said, hey, just double your salary. I didn't think it was possible, but I made the decision to do it. What do you know? We found a way to make it work. And the thing that I didn't expect is the business was actually better for it because I was no longer worried about me. I was no longer worried about how I was going to pay my mortgage, how I was going to buy groceries for my family, which freed me up to the think longer term for the business. And that was good for me. It was good for the business. You are your company's number one asset. If you're not taken care of, then that's a problem. So, yeah, pay yourself more and your business is going to be better for it.
