A short transcript excerpt from the Business Entrepreneur Podcast (YouTube) where two speakers discuss founder compensation. The speakers weigh reinvesting working capital into growth versus paying themselves enough to cover personal expenses (e.g., mortgage). Speaker A reflects that underpaying himself early left him feeling ‘left behind’ despite hiring valuable, better-paid staff; both note the difficulty of balancing growth capital needs with adequate personal pay and the need to rebalance over time.
I think that's one of the other really important lessons of the journey, is to make sure that you pay yourself well whilst you're growing the company and it will pay yourself enough. It's quite tempting, I think, to try and hire people and they're good people and you want them to come and help you grow the company. And I had the situation where I was. Well, I wasn't the best paid. I had a few people around me that were much better paid than I was because they were worth it. But actually, in hindsight, I guess personally that meant nothing. I got left behind a little bit. So I had later.
So looking at that again, would you have paid yourself first rather than maybe being a bit tighter across the purse strings for the first few years and actually enjoyed the fruits of your labour, as it were, from this, it's really.
Tough because you need all the working capital you can get in order to grow the company, but you've got to find a balance with also paying yourself and, you know, paying your own mortgage. And I don't know, I don't know if I answered that, but I think probably initially I got that I was doing too much growth. Meaning. Yeah, I had to rebalance that a bit later on.
Yeah, it's an interesting discussion point, actually, because I was. Met up with one of my mentors and he's. I think his business and his net worth is over £100 million. And he was, he was talking to me about how I'm growing my business and he was saying how it's very important to always pay yourself well. Don't just keep plowing your money and money back in, back in. Because before you know it, you're five, six, seven years in. You haven't had the luxury holidays that you wanted, you haven't had the finer things in life and actually enjoyed why you're doing business in the first place. Because we mentioned. Yeah, I mean, you need to enjoy the freedom and the money sometimes as well. And it's not always about just delaying, delaying until maybe you sell one day for a big figure. It's like, enjoy the journey as well. And a business should pay itself and be able to pay you a good lifestyle in order for it to be worthy, otherwise you shouldn't really be in business. So it's interesting because you get the mindset of. Because when you bootstrap you, you. Every penny counts and you, you, you watch every, every bit of money that comes in and out. But also you need to enjoy that because we never know how long we've got in life. And it's important to have a good time whilst. Whilst you're here as well.
