I Got Paid NOTHING For 4 Years!

From 2018 to 2022 I ran Legiit and didn't take a salary. The freelancers got paid. The team got paid. I got nothing. Here's why I'd never do it again.

Think Big Minute #22

Sara Blakely paid herself $0 her first year of Spanx by choice. Adam Neumann took a $5.9M trademark fee from his own company before WeWork imploded. Guess which one is still in business 25 years later.

Same role. Different relationship to the money.

Pay yourself first.

Most business owners pay everyone else first and call it discipline. It isn't. It's avoidance dressed up as virtue.

Look at the people who built businesses that lasted decades.

Sam Walton paid himself a modest salary while reinvesting most of it back into Walmart, but he took owner distributions consistently for decades. He didn't run his household on fumes to make the P&L look good.

Sara Blakely bootstrapped Spanx with $5,000 of her own savings and was deliberate about pulling income out as the business could support it. She owned 100% when she sold a 75% stake to Blackstone for $1.2B in 2021.

Yvon Chouinard paid himself a salary and dividends from Patagonia for decades before the family transferred ownership to a climate trust in 2022.

Jeff Bezos took a roughly $80,000 Amazon salary and built personal wealth through equity. He never starved himself for the optics of a clean P&L.

Howard Schultz paid himself well at Starbucks from the early days. He came back to lead it twice, both times because he had the financial cushion to make the call.

Now look at the other side.

Adam Neumann took a $5.9M trademark fee from WeWork. Pulled $700M+ out before the IPO collapsed. Owner pay wasn't the problem at WeWork. Owner extraction without business discipline was.

Elizabeth Holmes paid herself executive comp while burning $700M+ of investor money and falsifying results. Doing 11 years.

Both expensive.

Most business owners aren't Adam Neumann. The opposite. They starve themselves to feed everyone else and call it sacrifice.

Here's the part nobody talks about.

A lot of business owners chasing investors deliberately don't pay themselves. Or barely pay themselves. They want the income statement to look stronger than it actually is.

Investor sees high net margin. Investor doesn't see that the only reason it's high is the business owner is working for $40K in a city where that doesn't cover rent.

That's not profitability. That's a hidden subsidy from the business owner's bank account into the P&L.

It's also a lie.

The day the investor walks in and the business has to actually pay a market rate executive, the margin collapses. The "8 figure business" turns out to be a 6 figure business with an underpaid CEO holding it up.

Cooking the books with your own paycheck is still cooking the books.

I did this myself.

From 2018 through 2022 I didn't pay myself a salary at Legiit. The freelancers got paid. The team got paid. The vendors got paid. I'd take whatever was left, which some months was nothing.

I told myself it was discipline. It was avoidance. I was scared the business couldn't actually support me, so I structured it so the question never had to be asked.

For four years.

The number was the number. I was just hiding it from myself.

When I finally started paying myself a real salary in 2022, I had to confront whether the business was working at the level I'd been telling myself it was. Most of the discipline I have today around pricing, hiring, and margin came after that. Not before.

Here's the deeper point most business owners miss.

If your business can't pay you a market rate salary plus profit, you don't have a business. You have a job that pays you below market and dresses up the difference as "equity in the company."

That math gets clearer the day someone offers to buy or invest in the business. The first thing they do is normalize your salary to market rate. If the margin disappears when they do, the business they're buying isn't the business you've been running.

Here's how to actually fix this.

1. Pay yourself a market rate salary based on the role you actually fill. CEO of a 7 figure business has a market rate. Look it up. Pay yourself that, not what's "left over."

2. Take owner distributions on a quarterly schedule, not when you "feel like the business can afford it." The schedule forces the business to perform. Vague timing lets the business hide.

3. Keep 3-6 months of personal living expenses outside the business. Never let your household run paycheck to paycheck off the company. The day you can't say no to a bad client because you need rent money is the day the business owns you.

4. Run the P&L with your salary normalized to market rate every month. If margin is negative once you do that, the business has a pricing or productivity problem you've been hiding from yourself.

5. If you're courting investors or buyers, don't artificially suppress your salary to inflate margins. Sophisticated buyers will normalize it anyway and trust you less for the games. Build the real number into the books.

6. Pay yourself first in the literal order of operations. Owner salary clears before payroll, before vendors, before reinvestment. If that breaks the business, the business was already broken and you were the one absorbing the breakage.

7. Audit your last 12 months. How many months did you take less than your market rate to keep the business afloat? That's the subsidy. That's also the real conversation about whether the business is working.

The business is supposed to support the business owner.

Not the other way around.

If you're the cheapest line item on your own P&L, you're not running a business. You're running a charity that benefits everyone except you.

Pay yourself first.

...Think Big.

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