I quit my first and only job out of college as an investment banker seven months after starting.
After a year, I was making half the income from my business as I had been making at my analyst job. Even worse, in less than a year all my previous coworkers who started with me would become Associates with six-figure salaries.
However, to grow my business, I couldn’t keep doing all the work myself. I had to hire someone. That meant an even lower paycheck.
It was worth it.
If you want to grow your business and your wealth, you must get other people to do work for you. Most will require a paycheck.
That’s the catch-22, or difficult situation for which there is no easy solution (according to Webster), of hiring. To make more money, you need more people; but, to get more people, you need to make more money.
The only solution is to sacrifice your own short-term gain for your long-term freedom. There is no other way as a bootstrapped entrepreneur.
Once you get through the negative profit period of a new hire (the cost is greater than the increase in sales), you gain a little more freedom. Soon, if things go well, you can use the extra free time you now have to drive more sales for your company and produce greater profits.
Every business, from my own companies to the biggest companies in the world, is built with this simple process. The sooner you start hiring, the sooner you start building real wealth.