Jaclyn Johnson
speaker
489 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 27 Apr
Jaclyn Johnson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
no so i put in initially fifty thousand dollars my partner put in two hundred and fifty thousand dollars as like a loan to the company we paid ourselves back actually within a year based on the profits and things like that that's the only capital that was ever put into the business
So I'm actually the worst person to ask about this because I paid myself the same salary for truly like 10 years. had the notion and what's widely known is like the founder never pays themselves a lot. Like the high paid founder is usually a red flag, depending on what your revenue is, obviously.
But for me, I basically, I think I went in at like $100,000 and I stayed at $100,000 for truly like 10 years. And so I was really just putting everything back into the business. I will say until I brought a CFO COO on probably in 2018 and she was like, you're grossly underpaid. And she was like, we need to change this. You need to make more money. And so that's when things shifted.
So I had a nice windfall from the first exit. So I used that money to actually buy my first house. So I had equity in the housing market, which was really great. And then I also had a really big windfall from an angel investment I made. So those two things were actually what really propelled me through the next few years. And then we did take distributions occasionally from the company as well.
Yeah, no, it's such a good question. And now I say, I always tell people, I'm like, you really have to prioritize your own personal wealth when building a company. Do you do that year one? Probably not. But like year four, year five, you really need to start thinking through your own personal exit strategy. What is the financial success look like for you?
Because I think we often put ourselves on the backbone. burner. So I would say it's typically a ratio of revenue, right? So there's a lot of things online you can read about this, et cetera, but like the revenue you're making should be reflective of your salary.
So if you're doing a million dollars year one, you can figure out what your salary is at that 10% is probably hefty, but maybe realistic for your situation. as you grow your revenue, you should be increasing your salary over time.
And again, that doesn't have to necessarily be a guaranteed salary, you can bonus yourself, you can create goals for yourself, you can do distributions, there's ways you can get creative when you own the company. Obviously, if you have investors, it's a little different. But I think it's about getting creative in that way.
So great question. I would say I was 26 probably when I sold the company and the angel investment, I was probably 29.
No, it was new to me too. I didn't know anything about it. I didn't know about like what kind of checking or investing or anything like that as well. So it was like a whole new world for me. I will say I've been very lucky in the housing market and I've been really strategic with real estate, which has also paid off longer term.
We actually had two sell opportunities. So in 2018, we had a few strategic buyers come to the table, which was early for us, I thought. I think we were $8 million in revenue, a team of eight people. I had no executive team. It was pretty scrappy and small, but growing fast. And so we went through a process in 2018. We had, I think, like four LOIs that came through.
Yes, and they were big money.
It essentially means nothing. And that's important for this conversation. It literally means nothing. It's not binding. Because I was like, woo, buy me the yacht. We're buyers. Let's go. Yeah, it was exciting. It was a very exciting time. We went through...
painful diligence with a public company that was interested in buying us and it ended up falling apart in the nth hour which had nothing to do with us but was very brutal and I say that to say because I think a lot of people think selling a company is like very easy and it's like you find the person you do the thing it is So challenging. There are so many ups and downs.
Majority of deals, I would say, fall through. I don't know if you agree with that.
Truly. The stress.
and i wish i had known that most deals fall through because i think i was so emotionally connected to this deal it like crushed me when it fell apart like i just was because especially when we had done nothing wrong i was like no it's like the markets had shifted and so that was devastating for me and really challenging i'd like literally picked out my office space had told employees it was bad bad but again it was a very hard and expensive lesson
And then so cut to, I basically was like back to the drawing board, like we need to focus on building out the C-suite and really growing. Had a banner year 2019, top of 2020, absolutely crushed at Q1. And then we all know COVID hit. And luckily, like we actually had a good story coming out of COVID, despite being bootstrapped and being an events business.
No, it is mind blowing. I think I just like, I... thoroughly through my entire body and mind into that experience where I think most entrepreneurs were one or the other. They either completely shut down, which is understandable, or they were fight or flight mode and just went insane. I was definitely the person that went insane and was just like ideas move fast, go, go. So we moved very quickly.
We pivoted to digital. We luckily had a membership in place that we were able to monetize quickly. We retained 90% of our sponsors in minimal layoffs. Yeah, we were very lucky. And we were able to pivot very quickly and took a revenue hit, but actually maintained EBITDA, which was really exciting for us. So it was a good story for potential buyers.
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