“We are playing a long game, We get satisfaction from playing it”
When we bought our first company, I was 31 and my partner was 28. The company was doing around $350,000 in EBT. We took on debt for the acquisition but were confident in our ability to pay it back.
We could have begun taking a decent salary each from day one and once the debt was paid split the remaining earnings 50/50.
Pulling in $150k+ each, at 30 years old, while living in Panama would have been nice.
But we didn't do that. We plowed it all back into the business and bought a second company. At that point, we decided to draw a salary, but it was still less than 10% of our HoldCo earnings.
We have continued like that for 13 years now. Our combined Holding Company does over $100,000,000 in revenue yet we take less than 1% of that in combined salaries.
We are playing a long game. We get satisfaction from playing it. The act of building the company brings us joy, not just the spoils it produces.