Hippie CEO Life #04 - The Value of Savings

May 6, 2022

When my friend, and co-founder, Hila Dahan and i founded 33 Sticks in April of 2013, we did so as an experiment to see if consulting could be done differently, to see if it was possible to build a different, in our mind's a better, type of agency that was built upon the intentions of:

👉🏼 business value, not hours
👉🏼 people, not profit
👉🏼 radical authenticity
👉🏼 an exceptional experience

The reason it was so important for us to be deliberate in our intentions for building a business was that we both had previous experience being part of companies in which there was a general lack of intentionality. As these businesses had no purpose, no why, no reason for existing, the default purpose became to generate revenue.

And when revenue becomes your purpose, you intention, then you find yourself in a position where you lack a strong foundation upon which to make important business decisions.

“Should we take on this new customer? They are really toxic, have a history of mistreating people, and are generally just bad people.”

The answer is almost always YES to this question because they are willing to give us money.

We didn’t want to build a business this way, we wanted to be in a position where we could make important decisions based on our ideals and principles, not simply because we needed revenue, and so we set out with an intention for why we were building a business and those intentions continue to inform how we operate today.

One of the most valuable decisions we made very early on was to put an insurance policy in place. This policy would protect us against making bad business decisions due to lack of money in the business.

The policy was something we created, an agreement to spend less money than we earned, an agreement to put money away for a “rainy day” rather than splurge on things we really didn’t need.

This policy has come in handy on more than one occasion when we were faced with the decision to fire a toxic client, say no to a prospect that wasn’t a good fit for us, to buy us time to properly evaluate a situation without the pressure of having to make a decision RIGHT NOW BECAUSE WE NEED THE REVENUE!!!

When you are short on money, it makes it much easier to put your ideals and principles at risk in exchange for short term revenue.

✌🏼💛