How to Balance Paying Yourself as a Founder While Still Investing in Your Growing Product Business

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So you've started a WordPress product business and it started to make some money.

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But what do you do with the money?

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Do you take it out of the business so that you can finally get paid after all your hard work?

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Or do you reinvest it to keep growing the business?

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This is WP Product Talk.

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A place where every week we bring you insights, product marketing,

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business management and growth, customer experience, product development, and more.

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It's your go-to podcast for WordPress product owners, by WordPress product owners.

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And now, enjoy the show.

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Hi, I'm Katie Keith.

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And I'm Zach Katz, head of Gravity Kit.

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And today we're talking about how to get the right balance between paying yourself from your business and reinvesting to grow the business.

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So we're getting towards the end of the sixth season of WP Product Talk,

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in which we've been going through each stage of the process of growing a WordPress product from the very initial idea to making it a success after it's launched.

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And the next step is to think about how to balance getting paid and reinvesting.

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And that's why we've invited Chris Hines today.

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Chris, thank you so much for joining us.

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Welcome to the show.

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Please introduce yourself and what you do.

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Thank you for having me.

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My name is Chris Hines.

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I'm the COO at Equalize Digital, and I run ops for the business, as you might imagine.

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And I act as an early stage consultant for a lot of agencies, WordPress product companies,

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and freelancers who are looking to do more with accessibility, grow their revenue and increase their impact.

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It sounds like you're the perfect guest to have on to talk about this.

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I think it's a really important topic because it's something that I struggle with and find the balance with.

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Chris, why do you think it's an important topic for WordPress product owners?

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I think understanding what to do with your money and how to control the cash flow in your business is one of the most important skills that you can learn as someone who's kind of making this initial foray into product and into entrepreneurship.

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Because what cash flow is for a business is essentially oxygen, right?

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So if money's leaving the business faster than it's coming in, that's like holding your breath.

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You can hold it for a little while, but not forever.

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Conversely, if you are keeping all the money in the business and not diverting any of that

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to yourself, you could be on the personal side holding your breath because maybe you're not

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making rent or sleeping in your car, or you don't know where your next meal is coming from.

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If any of those things are happening, you're kind of in lizard braid mode, you're panicking,

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and you're probably not making good decisions on the business side either.

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So it's this balancing act.

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And it's one of the most critical skills, in my opinion, that a business owner can learn.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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And I think you've explained it really well that if you go to either extreme, things just

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can't work and the business won't be viable and your life won't be viable probably as

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well.

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So we particularly wanted you on the show today because we think that the three of us have

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different ways of paying ourselves.

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So together, if we all share our experiences, it shows different ways to approach this topic.

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And then we can talk about what works, what doesn't and what factors influence that decision.

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So let's go straight into story time.

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And Chris, could you start by telling us a bit about how you pay yourselves at Equalize Digital?

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Why and what factors influence that decision?

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Sure. So I can speak to myself as a partner and part owner of the business, as well as our other two partners. Essentially what we do, and I don't think they'll mind me sharing this, but we all pay ourselves the same salary because we're all equal owners in terms of number of shares in the company.

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So that's our CEO, Amber, our CTO, Steve, and myself, the COO, Chris, each of us makes the same salary on paper.

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And our salaries are effectively a percentage calculated off of revenue after cost of goods sold.

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So that's and that's a model I can get into later.

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But that's what we found works really well for us is we understand and we can project what revenue is going to be.

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And then we understand what percentage of that revenue could potentially go towards owner's

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compensation.

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And then that's divided evenly for the owner's salaries.

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And then we have a separate category for operating expenses, because obviously we have multiple

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full-time team members on top of ourselves.

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But that's how we do it.

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And that's how we've done it for a couple of years.

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And it's worked really well for us.

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We have done dividends, but usually they're few and far between.

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and only when there's just a glut of excess cash in the business that has no other meaningful place

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that it can be allocated. And at that point, we would do a dividend.

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Yeah. In terms of dividends, I use them heavily. And I guess I'm doing my story time for a bit.

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That's fine.

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I started in 2005. I was young. I was just a solo shop. And at that time, my biggest concern

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when it came to having my own business was the banks didn't respect what I did.

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Like sole proprietorship at that time, even before I incorporated, it's essentially not

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having a job to a bank. So my primary goal was to establish my credit, was to establish

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my ability to buy a house eventually. And so my goal for the first six years of the business was

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to pay myself as much as I could possibly pay myself in order to establish my own personal

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credit. And then once I built that, I was able to work on paying myself what I should be paid,

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converting my concerns from establishing my own personal credit to balancing taxes,

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because tax burden is higher.

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Cat's Web Services is an S corporation,

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which is different from like an LLC.

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And I'm not a tax attorney,

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so I'm not an accountant.

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But the point is that your salary is taxed

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at a certain rate

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and your distributions are taxed at a lower rate.

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And you don't get taxed.

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You don't get this tax for Social Security

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and unemployment taxes on the distributions.

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And so after I was able to pay myself enough,

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I tried dialing it in so I would pay fewer taxes.

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And that meant keeping my salary kind of artificially low

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and paying myself more through distributions

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that weren't part of salary.

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Then when the business got to a certain level,

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my concern went from not paying myself enough

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to paying myself and having too many taxes

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to, oh gosh, I really don't want the business to get audited. So then I decided, okay, I'm going to

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be paying myself what I'm actually making instead of taking distributions as a way to avoid paying

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the tax on the extra money. So that's what we've been doing. The way that we've been paying

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ourselves a little bit extra without taxes, and it's actually the case, is that we rent the office

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space that we have in our home office. So we have a separate payment in addition to my salary. I get

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paid for the Cat's Web Services renting out my office space and the bathroom space. And, you know,

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that is a nice little additional amount per month that isn't taxed in the same way. And that's a

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nice way to enhance without taking distributions per se. So that's where we are right now.

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And over the past few years, I've kept my salary stable.

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I've given the team raises because obviously you need to keep your team happy.

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But I have enough, I feel, in my personal life where I don't need additional money every year.

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So I'm happy with where I am.

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So I've just been given the same amount of salary.

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How about you, Katie?

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So interesting.

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Yeah, we're kind of different. Again, it's interesting. A lot of what you two are saying

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is because you are US-based companies, whereas Barn 2 is registered in the UK, and I now live in

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Spain. So a lot of our decisions about this are a result of tax planning in the country that we are

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in. So we've always been very lucky. We've never needed more money than we had. We've always had

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enough cash flow to hire the team that we need when we needed it. I suppose we've been a bit

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slow in that. We haven't invested to grow. We have grown and then increased the team to provide that

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capacity when we needed it. So that meant that we always had more than we needed to take out of the

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company if we wanted it without affecting the level of growth that we desired. So if we wanted

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to grow super rapidly. Yeah, we couldn't have afforded another 10 developers, but we never

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wanted that. So that has never been an issue. And our decision has therefore come from what is tax

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efficient. So when we lived in the UK, they have certain tax rules, and it is far more beneficial

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to take as much dividend as possible and as little salary as possible, because you're saving on your

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corporation tax and also taking out less personal money that you pay tax for. So you kind of save

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twice by doing a dividend compared to or something like that. So I used to take something stupid like

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20,000 British pounds tax, which is a salary, which is very low, and then just taking dividends

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when I needed it. But since we moved to Spain, we found out that you can't do that. So I've

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increase my salary to something like 80,000 euros. And then if there's anything else I need,

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then I take a dividend. Because apparently, as the CEO, I have to pay myself a believable salary.

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And not just a made up salary like you can in the UK. So that's why we changed that.

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And it's interesting, Zach, what you said about the renting of the office, because we do that as

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well. We've been told that we can't make a profit on that. So this might be a UK thing. It basically

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needs to cover our costs. But the costs can be very high. So if I have a separate apartment that I work

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in, which I'm not in right now. So I can charge for basically a whole apartment that I rent from

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the company rents from me, and a proportion for my home office for when I'm working at home like now.

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So that actually adds up to quite a lot of money when I work out all the costs, even things like mortgage interest.

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A proportion of that really adds up, unfortunately.

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So that helps.

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And Amber has a question about this for you, Zach.

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So I think let's go to that.

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Amber says, did your accountant advise the renting your office thing?

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Because it sounds suspicious.

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Suspicious?

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Amber, it sounds like you're not taking advantage of a very good tax opportunity.

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So Chris, what are you doing in this regard?

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Yeah.

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Not what you're doing.

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Why not?

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On the office rental front.

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And I don't have any specific reason for that other than I just hadn't really considered it as a possibility.

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And our tax accountant had never brought this up as a possibility.

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I have two cost savings for you.

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pay yourself for your office space and fire your accountant.

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Potentially, right? Potentially. But I think then we get back into the cash flow question,

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right? Which is, can the business sustain the burden of renting three office spaces from its

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founders in overall cash flow or not, right? On fair market rent. But I think what strikes me as

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super interesting about this is that all three of us are doing something a little bit different,

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but also some similar things. But a lot of it seems to be down to business structure and tax

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basis for how your income shakes out as a founder. You mentioned that you're doing smaller salary,

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more distributions, or have for a while. That is also what we used to do when we were an S

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corporation. But when we shifted to a C corporation with, you know, shares and all of that formal

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tracking and governance for the purposes of taking on investors, that was when we had to shift more

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into salary, less into dividends, just because it made a lot more sense from a personal accounting

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tax basis for the founders and also for the business. And there's also laws when you're

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burning investor funds that you're not allowed to distribute dividends if you have negative

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negative cash flow. So there's just a lot more headache there when it comes to being a C-Corp.

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But it's super interesting. Can you talk more about the, because Katie and I both

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fully, we don't have investors. Can you talk more about your consideration for

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your salary as you took investment? So for us, our consideration for the salary really has more to do

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with the cash flow in the business than it does like investor dollars. So what we've always tried

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to do is to balance that cash flow need with what feels like justifiable and enough from a salary

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perspective for what we as the founders are contributing into the business. And we're all

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making, we're all still making below market rate, all three founders of Equalize for being a CEO,

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COO, CTO of a company of our size, but not like massively below market either. So it's just one of

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those things where I think you have to balance and just make responsible decisions. Like if you have

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this big pile of cash, you have to really ask yourself, like if you've taken on investors,

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does funneling more money just to me and into my pocket actually produce more business outcomes?

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Or should I be paying myself enough to feel comfortable so that I can focus on the business

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and then invest those investor dollars into things that are going to fuel growth and get the outcomes

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that the investor cares about, which tends to be a payout or a return at some point in the future.

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So it's I don't know if that's a super helpful answer, but it's just kind of a balancing act.

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It is. Yeah. Yeah. I always felt about one reason not to take an investor was lack of flexibility

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in being able to pay myself because I really like if say we want to buy a house or something,

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I'll just take a load of dividends and probably director's loan on top of that, which we haven't mentioned, actually, that we can also take director's loan so long as we pay it back at some point to the company.

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So that's another way of temporarily paying ourselves.

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So I've done that for large personal expenses as well and then paid back in a future year.

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So there is that as well.

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So we have some breaking news from Amber.

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Chris is our accountant who's fired.

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So there we go, live on WP Product Talk.

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And Amber's the CEO, so I think, yeah, she's got the ability to do that.

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So I'm sure she has extra voting rights, though.

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And Brad Williams says, wait, you all get paid?

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Yeah, if you're not paying yourself, that's a good place to start, product owners.

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You know, and that's a good point.

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Okay, so even if your products not make any money, you don't have any money, like make a ceremony out of it.

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Like do something for yourself.

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Even if you are just starting out, it's important that you are being paid something.

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Figure out what that means.

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If you're paid in cookies where like, okay, you get your website up and you still haven't made any sales, go get a cookie.

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Pay yourself.

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You are important.

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you are worth cookies and you're worth eventual salaries.

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So on that note, let's go to Adnan's question.

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He says, I've been working with WordPress more than five years.

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Many times I got some idea that really solved users' problem,

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but being not a developer and not having enough money,

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I couldn't convert my idea into proven products.

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Any idea how I can overcome this issue, Katie?

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Watching from Bangladesh, wishing good luck to Barn2 team.

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Thank you. So, yeah, that's a tricky one because a lot of people build a product, but they don't know how to make it actually generate that income.

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My first piece of advice is to watch all the episodes of WP Product Talk because we really have discussed everything in great detail.

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Even if you just focus on the last two series is where we go from step by step, the whole process of building a product.

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So it's really good that it solves a user's problem.

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So I suppose the key thing is how to market it

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because a lot of people create products

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and they don't know how to then market them.

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So, but then not being a developer,

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you couldn't convert your idea into proven products.

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So does that mean it's a good idea

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to partner with somebody potentially?

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If you do have a business partner,

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then you don't have to pay them for their time

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because they get 50-50.

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So that might be a way to get from idea to products in your case so that eventually you can start making money from those products.

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Anybody else got any advice on that?

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Yeah.

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Adnan, check out artificial intelligence.

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Oh, yeah.

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Vibe coding.

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Vibe code your way to success here.

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This is now possible where even if you're not a developer, you can do a proof of concept and start making sales.

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Even if you don't know what the code is doing.

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I'm not going to say it's good code. We aren't even there yet. There's probably security issues

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with what... It's not going to be perfect, but it might give you some revenue. So that's a good

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place to start is try vibe coding. If you're not sure what that means, Google it. Watch a lot of

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YouTube videos. Things are changing a lot every day. But I also want to point out that part of

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what you're doing when you start a business is even if the business fails, you're proving to

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potential future employers that you are employable, that you have these skills. So part of what you're

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doing is you're interviewing in advance for a job that you might want in the future. So if you're

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not making any money, that's okay. You're doing an unpaid internship for yourself for the future.

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And I don't know about Katie, Chris, I did a lot of moonlighting in addition to my normal job

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in order to make sure that I had enough time to get client work done.

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So I had a salary while starting my business,

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while working hard to get the revenue coming in independently.

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And I had an agency business that was funding our development of products and plugins.

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So that way I funded that next stage of my career.

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So even if your product doesn't succeed,

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you're showing that you're hireable and it is not worth nothing what you're doing,

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even if you're not paying yourself.

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That's true. And it's a good idea about it being a sideline initially,

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if you've got a job or you're doing client work,

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and then the product doesn't have to pay for itself immediately.

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And Brad says, Mark Cuban has said he's not the smartest guy,

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but he is the hardest working.

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He didn't know how to code back in the day, so he taught himself.

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And that was before AI, of course.

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And he says he can learn anything with enough time and drive.

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So I think that talks perfectly to what Zach is saying.

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I have a little something to share here for something some people may not know about me.

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For the first 10 years of my professional life, I was a professional chef.

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I worked in restaurant kitchens.

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I'm now the COO of a company with investors in the WordPress ecosystem with a product that has just launched online courses and does accessibility work.

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And I have two amazing partners that have helped make that happen.

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But the point is that you can start, even if you're coming from a completely different career, if you're starting from zero, if you just start, if you find what you're good at, you have a willingness to fail at things.

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You will find your sweet spot in this industry and what you're really good at.

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I learned mine was ops and sales and the business optimization piece of things.

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yours might be code Adnan and others if that are, you know, have a great idea, but aren't sure how

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to execute it. And yeah, you can totally vibe code your way to an initial product and then find some

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early success and fail and learn and fail and learn. Yeah. So what, how do you all communicate?

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Chris, you have equal pay for the, for the partners. But how do you, how do each of us

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communicate our pay levels with our teams or do we at all you communicate your pay with your team

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no i i don't but some places have transparent salaries and you know there is a and there is a

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reason to do that is that like historically women and people of color have been underpaid and um

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that's not cool and uh so transparent salaries are really important if you're in a larger

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organization for sure, it helps make sure that people are not being, I don't know, family-friendly

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show that like messed with in terms of their salary, which can have compounding problems as

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like people get raises percentage-wise. So like if you start at a lower salary, that continues to

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have problems moving into the future. So a transparent salary structure makes a lot of sense

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and it's also not realistic for my business. So we don't do that. I also,

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So in the past with the business, I've drawn down personal funds to fund our ability to grow.

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I haven't also communicated that with the team.

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They might think that I'm rolling in dough when I'm doing well, but we're running a lean organization.

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So my not communicating with the team that I'm not making all that much more than our head developers

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might actually be a detriment to their feeling

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like they're being compensated properly.

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Yeah.

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And similarly, Amber says that they used to have

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transparent salaries when they paid themselves

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less than the money.

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That's a good way to do it.

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Yeah.

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But whatever you do, you actually kind of can't win

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in terms of telling your team what you pay yourself.

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I think this is a separate question

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to whether you have transparent salaries

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between your employees.

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which we don't do but you could do that and not reveal what you pay yourself but if it's as you

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say if it's a lot or if it's what they perceive to be a lot then they'll see inequality they'll

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think they deserve a raise or work less hard or something whereas if they perceive it not to be a

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lot then they might think it's not a thriving company particularly since in my experience what

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I pay myself is not any reflection of what I maybe could pay myself because I might leave money in

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the company say in case we did an acquisition or to save on personal tax or something like that

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or to invest in other ways so it doesn't mean that I couldn't have paid myself more but that

24:54-25:01
might scare the team so in a way I feel like you can't win by being transparent yeah yeah and I know

25:01-25:06
that Vlad, my lead developer, he said he was going to be watching this after. We just had a nice

25:06-25:13
retreat coding. One of the things I like to do is to stay at a nice hotel when we do team gatherings

25:14-25:23
to pay for all the dinners. I like to treat our team well when we can. Personally, my wife and I

25:23-25:29
both have Teslas that we bought years ago before everything happened. You had to put that in.

25:29-25:31
Before, you got to put that in.

25:31-25:35
But they were also not the most expensive cars we could have bought.

25:35-25:37
A pickup truck would have been more expensive.

25:39-25:40
We fully own them.

25:41-25:45
It doesn't mean we're rich, but it seems like a rich person thing.

25:45-25:49
So these are the kind of considerations that as a business owner,

25:49-25:53
I worry that my team thinks I'm just rolling in dough and going to the bank

25:53-25:56
and cackling like an evil empire magnate.

25:57-26:06
like, I want to appear like I'm not being overcompensated. How do y'all deal with that?

26:07-26:14
Yeah, it's tricky. I think at least between team members, I can speak to that.

26:15-26:22
First of all, at least in US law, you're not allowed to restrict talking about salaries or

26:22-26:26
compensation between team members, and they're allowed to openly discuss it in whatever way they

26:26-26:34
see fit and you can't retaliate or punish them for that. But we've taken, so first of all,

26:34-26:40
we follow that law or that guidance, but also we have a transparent, like in our employee handbook,

26:40-26:48
we have a salary formula that we follow that basically combines five different tiers of

26:48-26:53
experience with both qualitative and quantitative descriptions of what those are, regardless of

26:53-27:02
position. They're very general. And then we have, we pull from three different salary ranges that

27:02-27:07
show salaries by region globally for different positions. And we average those out to come to a

27:08-27:13
median salary. And then taking that and taking the local cost of living plus the salary range,

27:13-27:19
plus the experience level, we apply different weighted percentages and basically come to what

27:19-27:26
seems like a fair offer on that scale based on experience, location in the world and median

27:26-27:34
salary in the US. And we don't ever go below, I think it's 70 or 65% US median salary for whatever

27:34-27:40
the position is. So even if they're in a extremely low cost of living area, like I know a lot of

27:40-27:44
people are hiring in the Philippines for that reason. If we had an employee in the Philippines,

27:44-27:50
they would still be making at least 65 or 70% of US median, which would probably be very,

27:50-27:55
very generous for their area of the world. Because we do have team members in multiple locations,

27:55-27:59
and we spend a lot of time thinking about what's the best way to approach this and balance the need

27:59-28:06
for a global team with the need to have transparent communication about the salary that you have and

28:06-28:10
the compensation you have is not us throwing a dart at a wall and seeing what sticks. It's a very

28:11-28:14
intentional process based on a lot of different factors.

28:15-28:20
See, and that's with a company that has a COO. That's a lot of work. That's like months of work.

28:21-28:26
And it used to be with AI, I could have AI generate this stuff. But like, I also wouldn't

28:26-28:30
have come up with it myself, which is the most important thing. Like, I just don't have the time

28:30-28:36
to establish these kind of internal guidelines and rules and the processes. I am not a process

28:36-28:46
person. I'm an intuitive leader and I like to be fair. I like each person to feel like they're

28:46-28:54
well compensated. But geez, Louise, having bonuses based on performance means you have to track

28:54-29:00
performance and that means you have to have track metrics for what it means to be a good developer

29:00-29:05
or a good support person, a good QA person. I don't have the time for that. We just have a job to do

29:05-29:11
and I want people to feel well paid and I hope that we have a good environment where people feel

29:12-29:16
like they can come to me and say I'd like a raise and I hope that I also have a professional enough

29:16-29:21
environment where people can come to me and say this is why I deserve a raise and justify it

29:21-29:25
themselves. I don't want to have to do that work I want them to have to do that work that's just me.

29:26-29:32
Yeah well we've got a few comments from people about the perception side of things.

29:33-29:42
So Nicholas says, when I was an employee, it was hard to watch the owner of the company buying new cars constantly when most of the team felt under cared for.

29:43-29:47
And he then goes on to say, care for the employees.

29:47-29:50
And we don't care if you go buy a new car every eight months.

29:50-29:55
So that's interesting. I wonder what care for the employees means.

29:56-30:01
What level of equality do they expect regarding their salary versus the owner?

30:01-30:05
because the employee won't be able to buy a new car every eight months, will they?

30:06-30:09
I'm hearing that this is actually a lease situation,

30:09-30:13
and Nicholas might not have understood what the owner...

30:13-30:14
Hopefully it was a lease.

30:15-30:18
I'm just saying, maybe he was just going out and buying new cars.

30:19-30:20
Maybe it was a lease.

30:20-30:22
I get a car every three years,

30:22-30:25
because that's the cheapest way in Spain to get a car.

30:27-30:28
So, and what else?

30:28-30:29
I think we've got a few like that.

30:30-30:38
Amber said that we built a new house this year and I felt really weird talking about it with the team or even publicly because I was worried about the perception.

30:39-30:41
Yeah, it's like, oh, look at this new sink fixture.

30:42-30:46
Somebody looks at that sink and says, that's a month's salary.

30:47-30:47
Yeah.

30:48-30:55
Yeah, it's really hard, right, to balance that.

30:55-31:08
And you don't want to have the perception, or at least I don't want to have the perception among my team that I'm just massively enriching myself off of their backs and not giving anything back to them.

31:10-31:17
And we've spent time trying to be really intentional about compensating people fairly based on that rubric.

31:17-31:18
And that's why we have the formulas.

31:18-31:36
So we can always point to that and say, you know, the math and the data and everything about this shows us that this is what this is a great, you know, compensation package for this position in this area of the world and the work you're doing.

31:36-31:41
And I mean, the other thing that we do that's kind of uncommon in the tech world, I think,

31:41-31:46
is our team members, I think it's between, I think it's like 25 days off a year between

31:47-31:49
holidays and vacation that they can accrue.

31:50-31:55
So it's a pretty generous package in terms of like the other benefits that they get that

31:56-31:59
again, like it's that it's, I mean, it's, it's money a little bit, right?

31:59-32:05
Because they're not putting in labor on those days that they're off, but they feel cared

32:05-32:09
for, they feel like they can take time to decompress from work and they're not always

32:10-32:10
having to grind.

32:11-32:18
And I think that that as well lends itself a lot to not being judged if you go get yourself

32:18-32:20
a nice thing or you build a new house like Amber talked about.

32:22-32:25
And yeah, I think that's incredibly important.

32:27-32:27
Yeah.

32:27-32:33
And I try to model, like, it's interesting that as product owners, we're talking about

32:33-32:39
our employees being happy when this is a show about how to balance paying yourself. And this

32:39-32:46
is the balance, right? And so part of what I try to do is to show my team that I'm working hard

32:47-32:54
because I'm not just a fat cat sitting around benefiting, but that I also take advantage of

32:54-33:00
the benefits that I try to have them take, which means we have unlimited time off policy with a

33:00-33:05
minimum time off policy so that people don't feel like they can't take time off because nobody else

33:05-33:10
is. So everybody has a minimum of, I don't know, something like 20 days or something like that,

33:10-33:18
20 work days. Yeah. And I do that too. I say I'm taking time off for my own personal health,

33:19-33:23
for my own, it's a beautiful day outside. I'm going to take the rest of the day off.

33:23-33:39
That is a form of paying yourself as well, where that demonstrates a healthy interface with your own business and shows your employees what it's like to a true wealth is health and happiness.

33:39-33:44
So hopefully we can help our employees have that.

33:45-33:49
Yeah, that's true. So a few more comments coming in.

33:49-33:54
Nicholas, regarding the buying of the new car every eight months, says it is perception.

33:54-33:57
Your employee won't think any deeper of it's that.

33:58-33:58
Yeah.

33:59-34:03
If you're a business owner, you've got to be like, this is a lease or this.

34:03-34:07
I'm just renting this camera for a week and then I'm giving it back.

34:07-34:10
Yeah, I suppose you could manage perception a bit.

34:11-34:14
But you also don't want to be ashamed of like we are business owners.

34:14-34:16
We are product owners. This is great.

34:17-34:19
We had an idea. We implemented it.

34:19-34:20
We deserve to profit from it.

34:20-34:23
And that is an attitude that is hard for me to own.

34:24-34:26
That is not something that comes natively to me.

34:27-34:28
But yeah, you're damn right.

34:28-34:29
I make more than every employee.

34:30-34:31
That's my thing, right?

34:32-34:32
Yeah.

34:32-34:33
And you took the risk as well.

34:33-34:35
They didn't take the risk.

34:35-34:37
They don't have to worry about anything.

34:38-34:39
They get a salary all the time.

34:40-34:45
Like that's, we stay up at night worrying about how to make sure that the books balance.

34:46-34:47
And that's not something they have to do.

34:48-34:50
We try to make it a good work environment.

34:50-34:56
That's not something like we have a lot of burden outside of only having a job.

34:57-35:00
And we deserve to be well compensated for that.

35:00-35:06
And we deserve the fruits of our idea and the fruits of we're paying them for their labor to enhance our products.

35:07-35:09
And that is modern capitalism.

35:09-35:15
And I need to remind myself not to apologize for the structure of humanity as it currently exists.

35:16-35:20
And, you know, OK, I do want to have this question posed to y'all.

35:22-35:29
One thing that I wanted to do is look into profit shares to assuage my own guilt when we do make money.

35:29-35:41
But then I don't want people to be over aligned with the profit share and be concerned when our margins are low and then starting to worry about like, well, why are our margin?

35:42-35:43
They're not business owners.

35:44-35:49
they're not taking a share in the company they're taking a share in the profit so that affects them

35:49-35:54
if we invest in something else versus having a fixed bonus at the end of the year or like a

35:54-36:00
one-time bonus that type of thing so how do y'all deal with that we don't do profit sharing

36:02-36:07
and we just try to pay what is a a good compensation and benefits package for

36:08-36:13
what position they're working in and where they are in the world and that's that's how we circumvent

36:13-36:17
that whole thing. We try to just put packages together that make people feel good about their

36:17-36:24
job and to have a good work environment. And then if it's somebody that has us, you know,

36:25-36:30
shares in the business, then the dynamic changes a lot, right? Then it's more about having,

36:30-36:35
you know, like at least for the equal partners, right? It's equal salaries. We have the same

36:35-36:43
benefit packages that our team members do in terms of like insurance or insurance reimbursement and

36:43-36:49
like that. We also try to take time off, although we don't accrue PTO the way they do. We have more

36:49-36:57
of that dreaded unlimited PTO. We probably take less off than we should. In fact, I know we take

36:57-37:04
less off than we should. But we're also in growth mode where the business is relatively young and

37:04-37:14
still and still growing um yeah yeah now i know how many hours amber works as well and it is more

37:14-37:19
than your team i am sure and that's the case with a lot of uh people in a growing who are running a

37:19-37:24
growing business and that is their choice in order to get greater rewards later isn't it

37:25-37:34
long-term thinking yeah so we are similar we don't do any kind of profit share and in fact i i have a

37:34-37:40
for being really open about the finances on social media and things like that. But you may or may not

37:40-37:46
have noticed that I don't really talk about profit. I talk about revenue, which doesn't mean anything.

37:46-37:52
So I'm actually not sharing that much. And similarly with my team, they don't know about

37:52-38:00
profits. And Wences has a question, what do you think about open book management? We do share our

38:00-38:06
high level P&L with our team and feel that it creates alignment. So that's kind of linked to

38:06-38:12
that. And I've been wondering about that recently. I don't actually look at profit that much myself.

38:13-38:19
So I was a bit surprised last week when I did the end of year numbers. And I realized that our

38:19-38:26
revenue has been going up for the last five years at the same rate as our team costs. And that means

38:26-38:32
that if I took the maximum money I could out of the company, which I don't, but if I did,

38:33-38:39
then the profit would have been the same five years ago as it is now. And yet the company has grown

38:39-38:45
and the team has grown. And we've created employment, which is great and helping people

38:45-38:51
that way. But as a company owner, I'm thinking maybe I should be more open about the fact that

38:51-38:56
actually, I am not making any more money as a result of having done all these things.

38:57-39:02
So that links to the idea of sharing the P&L, because that would make the team aware that

39:02-39:08
as we grow, that doesn't actually, well, I actually, I do earn a lot, but I already was

39:08-39:15
five years ago when we didn't have a big team. So if they knew that, then would they think,

39:15-39:20
oh, she earns a lot good on her, buying a new car or whatever we were talking about,

39:20-39:24
Or would they be a bit more understanding because actually profit isn't growing?

39:25-39:26
Yeah.

39:26-39:32
And we are, what I do currently is I give an update at least once a year.

39:32-39:37
I try to do it like twice a year, just like state of gravity kit, how we're doing.

39:37-39:43
And this is like a relative prices situation where I say like our revenue is up, our team

39:43-39:46
costs are up, like, and here's the percentage amounts.

39:47-39:54
And trying to give them an understanding of how I feel about the company and the business direction we're heading.

39:56-40:03
And I've been considering sharing more because our costs are far exceeding our revenue growth.

40:03-40:05
And so that can't continue forever.

40:06-40:09
But, for example, we hired recently a QA person.

40:10-40:17
And hiring that person has been one of the biggest morale boosts for the rest of the team that we've had in years.

40:17-40:22
because that team member has taken off testing issue creation.

40:24-40:25
It's freed up the developers.

40:25-40:26
It's freed up customer support.

40:27-40:28
So yes, it costs us money,

40:29-40:30
but it also increases the quality of life

40:31-40:31
for the rest of the team members

40:31-40:36
in a way that I think is worth the decrease in profit.

40:37-40:39
But would they agree,

40:39-40:41
like if the QA person's salary

40:41-40:43
were distributed to the rest of the team instead,

40:43-40:44
would they feel the same way?

40:44-40:44
I don't know.

40:46-40:51
it also comes down to why we run a business and to your point katie like we are employing people

40:53-41:00
we are building a a community of of people that we spend a lot of time with and we get to share

41:00-41:07
our expertise with and interact with like we're choosing uh and i don't like when people say

41:07-41:11
family but we're choosing a group of friends like even if we're just business acquaintances

41:12-41:17
I spend more time with my team than I do with anybody else outside my wife.

41:18-41:20
And it's a beautiful thing to develop these long-term relationships

41:21-41:26
where Vlad, my lead developer, he passed his seven-year work anniversary

41:27-41:29
and we just hung out for a few days and it was really nice.

41:29-41:36
So us paying our people properly is us helping ourselves build

41:36-41:38
the people we want to be surrounded with.

41:38-41:39
So that's also a good thing.

41:45-41:52
so we have a follow-up comment from Adnan who was asking earlier about how to get started with

41:52-41:58
selling a product given that he wasn't a developer and he says thanks a lot to you all I agree with

41:59-42:05
Zach regarding AI as I'm already working with my current idea and developing a plugin let's see

42:05-42:10
how long I can go alone with the help of AI. As for product marketing, I know I will make it as

42:11-42:16
I've been working in the marketing department over the years. Well, that's really good. And that puts

42:17-42:23
him ahead of a lot of solo developers, particularly who launch products and don't have marketing

42:23-42:31
experience. So yeah, good luck. I will share something with you, Adnan, that helped us in our

42:31-42:36
very early stages with accessibility checker. And this was something that Amber primarily did,

42:36-42:42
but also I did a little bit as well, which is we found, I don't know, maybe 20 or 30 businesses or

42:42-42:48
people that we believed were our target market. And when we had a proof of concept, we reached out

42:48-42:52
to them kind of cold outreach style and said, Hey, I have this thing that I think will help you with

42:52-42:59
this outcome. And I want to show it to you and let you try it for free in exchange for your feedback

42:59-43:07
and just, you know, we got so much valuable feedback from those initial conversations.

43:08-43:10
And it was basically just free consulting.

43:12-43:13
Right.

43:14-43:19
One of the things that I am anticipating, you know, as speaking of Anon and AI and stuff,

43:20-43:23
I figured this is a good place to have this conversation.

43:24-43:35
I anticipate giving myself salary cuts for the next years in order to cover the impact of AI so that I don't have to let any of my team go.

43:36-43:49
That is just an X that that is the reality of our current state, where if we aren't making more money and if and revenue has been pretty it's been growing, but it's been growing slowly or more slowly than it has in the past.

43:50-43:54
And costs are going up and inflation is going to continue, it seems.

43:55-44:04
I anticipate that I'll take a cut and that is OK because I'm still building equity in my business by having them work on the products together.

44:04-44:18
So even if I pay myself less as a salary, the value of the business should remain and is being built upon. So how are you, how do you think about in lean times, what do you do?

44:21-44:39
In lean times for us, or when we see that on the horizon, one of the first touch points that we have is we spend a good deal of time revising all of our projections, both for revenue and for costs, for an outlook of six months.

44:39-44:47
So we've done this a couple of times previously where we overestimated revenue coming from XYZ revenue category, and we've had to revise that down.

44:48-45:01
And then we look at what that revenue is, and then we reapply our percentage allocations for owner's compensation, operating expenses, taxes, et cetera, to that revenue, including an allocation for profit.

45:01-45:07
And then we make decisions about what expenses have to be cut or how things have to be moved around.

45:07-45:29
And I think Amber mentioned this in the chat, but one really transformative book for us was the profit first model of accounting and kind of figuring out how your business aligns with profitability, with what you're paying yourself, with operating expenses and all of those things.

45:29-45:42
And if you can apply a financial model to the revenue you have coming in, basically, if you just flip your thinking, right, because a lot of people think about it's like, you know, revenue minus expenses equals profit.

45:42-45:51
Well, what this model proposes to do is revenue after COGS minus profit equals what you have left for expenses.

45:52-45:59
So it's just a slight tweak on the traditional accounting methodology that sounds so stupidly

45:59-46:01
simple, but for us, it changed everything.

46:02-46:03
Yeah.

46:03-46:06
And I like to do what the business needs.

46:08-46:13
And sometimes that means that, I mean, every business owner I talk to in the WordPress

46:13-46:21
space has business better margins than we do which which uh you know might suggest that i'm

46:22-46:28
overspending and i shouldn't be doing that but i also you know gravity kit is a good business and

46:28-46:34
it's worth money so i do feel like i'm even if we break even that's not a bad deal for me as a

46:34-46:42
as a business owner uh if we're paying people well and have the right team for the the jobs that need

46:42-46:48
to be done. And Profit First, I did buy the Profit First book. I started it and I'm like,

46:48-46:52
yeah, this isn't how I work. I need a COO. If it bounces off, that's, you know,

46:52-46:57
that it bounces off, right? Chris, I need a fractional COO. Do you have any recommendations?

46:58-47:05
What's that? A fractional COO. I don't have any, although maybe that's my post-equalized

47:05-47:12
digital career after Amber fires you. Yes, after Amber fires me for missing that thing about

47:12-47:15
able to rent your own house from yourself through the business.

47:19-47:26
Right. Well, we've got one more comment and then let's move on to the best advice section.

47:26-47:34
So Nicholas suggested that a metric to track for bonuses could be a task that has trackable

47:34-47:40
throughput to revenue or profitability because that keeps teams aligned to the bottom line.

47:41-47:47
Yeah, that's a good way to do it that isn't about maybe the overall profits of the business,

47:47-47:52
but is about the outcome of a particular project. So let's say you have multiple products within

47:53-47:57
your company, then maybe you would give a team member a bonus based on the growth of that product

47:57-48:03
if they were directly relevant to that growth, for example. Do either of you do anything like that?

48:05-48:10
My wife is a professor and she studies perverse incentives. Well, as part of what she does in her

48:10-48:15
area, she studies perverse incentives, which is where you reward something that isn't the outcome

48:15-48:21
you desire. And every time that I look at whether or not, like, should we reward bonuses to team

48:21-48:27
members in support who receive positive feedback? Well, that very well could lead to them asking for

48:27-48:35
five-star reviews, you know? Should we reward developers for releasing a plugin on time?

48:36-48:40
Well, that could lead to shoddy work, or that could lead to them working too hard and burning out.

48:40-48:46
just to meet this bonus structure. So I've decided not to do that because I feel like

48:47-48:52
bonuses tied to an outcome are always, the outcome needs to shift in order to keep things correct.

48:53-48:57
And I just have decided not to do that. How about you, Katie?

48:59-49:08
I haven't done that. But I went to my first ever Shopify event on Monday, and there was a talk by

49:08-49:12
the founder of the biggest Shopify app in the world.

49:12-49:14
And one of his bits of advice,

49:14-49:17
they have something like 22,000 reviews

49:17-49:18
for their Shopify app.

49:18-49:19
It's ridiculous.

49:20-49:23
And he said that they do incentivize their support team

49:24-49:28
by giving a financial bonus for five-star reviews

49:29-49:32
from customers that that support engineer has helped.

49:32-49:35
And I'm sure they have rules around that.

49:35-49:38
For example, in Shopify, you cannot ask for a five-star review.

49:39-49:40
You can't ask for a positive review.

49:41-49:49
So I'm sure they have processes to avoid the perverse outcomes that Zach is describing.

49:49-49:54
But that is one reason that they are the biggest apps in the world on Shopify.

49:54-50:00
And I am considering that for our Shopify apps because of the importance of reviews.

50:00-50:03
That is the thing that affects your ranking more than anything else.

50:03-50:07
So if that can make our first app a success, then it's worth doing.

50:07-50:11
But yeah, we would need processes so that they ask appropriately.

50:12-50:13
What about you, Chris?

50:14-50:20
For us, we don't have current and equalized digital, any formal bonus structure or bonus

50:20-50:21
incentives around anything.

50:23-50:28
What we do have, though, is we have clear processes in place for doing annual salary

50:28-50:36
or compensation increases in alignment with CPI and then additional incentive-based increases

50:36-50:38
beyond that for performance.

50:38-50:44
And that's down to the manager or company officer's discretion for outstanding performance.

50:44-50:51
For instance, we have members of the team who have taken on more responsibility over

50:51-50:56
the last year and have really done an outstanding job owning more parts of their domain within

50:56-50:57
the business.

50:57-51:09
And we went beyond, we went like, I think almost two and a half times the inflation rate increase for that team member because of how much additional responsibility they took on.

51:09-51:20
And we made that very clear in their annual review that that was why they got such a big increase was that they had put in the work and they had shown the initiative to take more ownership and to do more.

51:21-51:22
And so we rewarded that.

51:22-51:24
And again, it comes down to revenue too, right?

51:25-51:30
So we have that percentage-based breakdown of where revenue after cost of goods sold can go.

51:31-51:36
And if there's room in the operating expense budget for more salaries, we wait, you know,

51:37-51:41
does it make sense to just after salary increases, hire another person?

51:41-51:45
Because we have this gap that would, like Zach said with his QA person, would improve,

51:45-51:50
measurably improve everyone's quality of life and make the entire business more enjoyable to work in.

51:51-51:52
And do we direct more of it there?

51:52-51:58
Or is it better to let people own a greater percentage of overall responsibilities within

51:58-52:02
the operation and just give them bigger increases and pay them more because they're doing more

52:02-52:03
and they're controlling more?

52:04-52:05
So it's very fluid.

52:06-52:09
It's not as rigid as my salary rubric is.

52:10-52:15
And it's much more open to interpretation, which I think makes sense from a compensation

52:15-52:20
standpoint for someone who's been in a business for one or two years versus five plus years.

52:20-52:26
the conversation shifts over time. Yeah, I really like that. And it's interesting you mentioned

52:27-52:34
salary, because I do have that regarding salary increases. So we typically do an annual cost of

52:34-52:39
living increase. And then when we do somebody's appraisal, then depending on the team member,

52:39-52:44
if they have the sort of role that you can increase their salary for measurable reasons,

52:44-52:48
then we do that, because that gives them something to work towards that hopefully

52:48-52:54
aligns with the needs of the company. So for example, my YouTuber has some metrics regarding

52:55-53:00
things like number of hours watched and number of subscribers on our YouTube channel and that kind

53:00-53:07
of thing. And sometimes you do end up getting it wrong. For example, for a while, my designer had,

53:08-53:15
I had created some milestones for him where he could increase his salary based on certain outcomes.

53:16-53:20
And it was encouraging him to work on things that actually didn't benefit the business.

53:21-53:24
And so I removed those and we rethought about it together.

53:24-53:31
For example, he was spending a long time writing really nice reports about things he'd done, which wasn't a good use of his time.

53:31-53:34
And it just wasn't aligning our needs.

53:34-53:36
So it's really important to get that alignment.

53:37-53:40
But that can be a good way to incentivize people.

53:43-53:45
So, well, I think we have covered a lot.

53:46-53:52
So let's bring it all together and talk about our piece of very best advice.

53:52-54:03
So if we were going to if we've just started making money on our product, what is the one most important thing that we can do regarding paying ourselves?

54:03-54:08
So my advice is to think about the goals of your company.

54:08-54:12
How much of that revenue do you need for the growth that you have in mind?

54:12-54:18
And couple that with the laws of the country that you are operating in, because that might

54:18-54:22
significantly affect the way in which you take money out of the company.

54:23-54:24
What about you, Chris?

54:24-54:25
What's your best advice?

54:26-54:28
I have a two-parter, if that's okay, if time permits.

54:28-54:29
We love a two-parter.

54:30-54:38
Part one is, and we did this a few years ago, set goalposts and deadlines around what you

54:38-54:44
want your compensation to be and be super clear, like how much, when, what the business has to look

54:44-54:48
like and all that needs to be realistic. Like you can't, unless you are highly confident that you

54:49-54:53
can make the next Apple, don't say I'm going to make the next Apple and be a billionaire. Right.

54:54-54:59
So that's, that's one goalposts, but number two, and this was something that in my early

55:00-55:06
entrepreneurial days, like shifting out of the corporate world where I was running ops for large

55:07-55:11
like district level organizations with dozens of employees and big budgets. But it was,

55:11-55:16
it was much more just about the P and L profit, profit, you know, revenue in expenses out what's

55:16-55:23
left over and less about like long-term planning and thinking. And so there was a time when Amber

55:24-55:30
and I intentionally underpaid ourselves to basically create what I think Amber called fake

55:30-55:35
profit, but you know, fake profit so that the cashflow looked good, but all we were really

55:35-55:41
achieving by doing that was one, stressing ourselves out more, but number two, hiding cash flow

55:42-55:47
failures from ourselves, from what our business should look like. And we did that in our previous

55:48-55:52
business and previous agency. And that was one of the things that we fixed shifting over to

55:52-55:57
equalize digital. But it doesn't serve you well. It doesn't serve your employees well if you have

55:58-56:03
them. And it's a really, really tempting habit to get into because I know that we all want to see

56:03-56:08
really awesome numbers on that bottom line of our P&L. But if you're personally sacrificing,

56:09-56:13
you know, your own compensation to make those numbers work, then you're just

56:13-56:16
hiding from a reality that you would be better off addressing.

56:17-56:22
And that reality is going to be exposed if you do seek investors or somebody to acquire your

56:22-56:26
business. They're going to be like, you're underpaying yourself. They're going to see

56:26-56:30
right through it. So it doesn't really help anybody in that regard either.

56:32-56:35
For me, my best advice is also not worry about it.

56:36-56:38
Pay yourself what you need if you can.

56:39-56:40
If you don't have enough to pay yourself,

56:41-56:43
then you've got to do what you've got to do.

56:46-56:50
I kind of put the preference to the needs of the business

56:50-56:53
instead of the needs of myself because I've met my own needs.

56:54-56:59
But if I'm not able to survive and thrive,

56:59-57:04
then the team should be willing to share that burden as well and the company as well.

57:04-57:12
So yeah, don't worry about it. If you can, do a good job like Chris and Katie do. Read Profit

57:12-57:16
First. Everybody in the business space says, "Have you read Profit First?" I'm like, "Yeah."

57:19-57:27
It's a great book for those for whom it clicks. It doesn't click for me. Just be your own leader

57:27-57:34
is my best advice. Okay. Well, that's a wrap. Chris, thank you so much for joining us.

57:34-57:44
Where can people find you online? I am Mr_ChrisHines on X. You can also find me on LinkedIn.

57:44-57:49
I tend to share lots of hopefully valuable information about accessibility in both of

57:50-57:54
those locations. Usually there's a lot of alignment between the two. So if you follow me in one or the

57:54-58:00
other you'll get everything um and of course anything else equalized digital.com for all your

58:00-58:10
wordpress accessibility needs yeah um and the uh next week on wp product talk amber ceo of equalized

58:10-58:15
digital and i will be chatting with kevin geary about another important step of the business journey

58:15-58:22
uh and launching a wordpress product it's how to decide whether to diversify your product line or

58:22-58:27
double down on your breadwinner and this is a topic that I think that we probably all have

58:28-58:36
faced on this call. Yeah definitely. Well special thanks to PostStatus for being our green room.

58:36-58:40
If you're enjoying these shows then do us a favour and click hit like, subscribe,

58:41-58:47
share it with your friends, put it in your email newsletters and don't forget to tune in again next week. Bye!