How Much Should You Pay Yourself? The Founder Salary Math Nobody Shares
Your salary as a founder isn't one number — it's three, and each belongs to a different stage of the business. From a deliberate survival budget, to a fixed share of recurring revenue, to market-rate pay plus owner distributions: here's the math, in order.
READ IT ▸Stop Creating Content From Scratch — Extract It From Work You've Already Done
The blank page is the most expensive place in your business. Founders who treat every post as a fresh production burn hours that the multiplier approach makes unnecessary — because the talks and engagements you've already delivered hold weeks of publishable material.
READ ▸What You Celebrate Is What You Get: The Cheapest Lever in Your Partner Network
Every public shout-out teaches your partner network what excellence means here. Pick the behaviors you spotlight deliberately — delivery, client satisfaction, cross-referrals — and the whole ecosystem recalibrates without a single new bonus.
READ ▸The Certification Ladder: Levels That Keep Your Best Practitioners Climbing
Flat certifications quietly drive your strongest practitioners out the door. A published ladder of levels — measurable criteria, peer endorsement, coached progression — turns your ecosystem into a meritocracy clients can read at a glance.
READ ▸Seven Signals, Three Colors: How to Spot a Quietly Failing Partner Before It Costs You a Year
In a certified-partner network, the partners in trouble are rarely the loud ones — they're the quiet ones. A monthly traffic-light review across seven signals catches decline while you can still do something about it.
READ ▸Stop Discussing, Start Solving: How to Run IDS So Issues Actually Die
Articulate teams can talk about a problem so well that everyone believes work happened. Gino Wickman's IDS protocol exists to break that illusion — no issue leaves the room without an owner, an action, and a date.
READ ▸The 90-Minute Weekly Cadence That Replaces Every Other Meeting in Your Firm
Your leadership team doesn't have a meeting problem — it has a decision problem. Gino Wickman's Level 10 Meeting compresses reporting into 25 minutes and spends the other 60 actually solving things. Here's how to run it in an expertise business.
READ ▸Read Your Business in Five Minutes: The Only 21 Numbers Worth Tracking
Three review cadences, seven numbers in each. A dashboard built so the founder of a service business can judge its health in five minutes flat — and know which single number matters most this quarter.
READ ▸Profitable but Cash-Poor: Flipping the Cash Conversion Cycle in a Service Business
Your P&L says you had a great quarter. Your bank balance disagrees. The gap is the Cash Conversion Cycle — and unlike your margins, it can be redesigned until clients pay you before you deliver.
READ ▸Your Firm Doesn't Have a Communication Problem. It Has a Cadence Problem.
Five meetings, five time horizons: a 15-minute daily check, a 90-minute weekly anchor, a monthly partner hour, a quarterly half-day, and an annual summit. Drawn from Harnish, Wickman, Gerber, and Priestley — with the agendas, time blocks, and failure signals included.
READ ▸The Salesperson That Never Sleeps: Publishing Is Your Real Growth Engine
Before a buyer ever calls, they consume roughly 7 hours of your thinking across 11 touchpoints on 4 platforms. Build the publishing engine that does that selling for you — or keep carrying every sales conversation on your own back.
READ ▸Why Service Businesses Run Out of Cash Before They Run Out of Clients
Expertise businesses rarely die from weak demand — they die because cash leaves earlier than it returns. A walkthrough of the money architecture behind a service platform: pricing leverage, the three cash cliffs, conversion cycles, the revenue stack, break-even math, and the five numbers to check every Monday.
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