I Hated My Company So Much I Tried To Give It Away

This is the written version of this week's episode. As always, the podcast is the full, unedited, occasionally unhinged version — this is the good bits, organised. Listen on [Spotify / Apple / YouTube].

Hey,

So this is a crazy one:

Between roughly 2018 and 2022, at the exact moment AJ&Smart hit its peak revenue (around $6 million revenue, with a 47% profit margin), I wanted to give the company away.

Not sell it. Give it. To anyone who’d take it. Or shut it down. I was talking to people about both options. My co-founder wanted to be bought out, and honestly, part of me wanted to be bought out too. There is a very real alternate timeline where I am not running this company today.

If you’ve never owned a business, that sentence sounds insane. Peak revenue! Great margins! What’s the problem?

If you have owned a business, you might already know exactly what the problem was. So let me give you the short version first, and then the whole story.

The nuggets (if you only read one section, read this one)

* The “held hostage in your own company” feeling is real, common, and almost nobody talks about it publicly. I now speak to founders constantly who describe the same thing: you walk into your own office and feel like you’re not wanted there. Like it’s not your company anymore. Like you’d have to ask permission to change anything.

* It’s almost never a revenue problem. It’s a hiring problem. Not “hiring is bad.” Hiring badly, for years, in ways that compound.

* Perks don’t buy goodwill. They buy expectations. We had a chef on Fridays, yoga twice a week, retreats, a basically unlimited tech budget. The result was not gratitude. It was “why don’t we have a chef every day?”

* “Hire when you need someone” is a spending instruction. The second I removed myself from hiring and told the team to hire whenever they felt they needed to, people hired the moment they felt slightly busy. At our peak of dysfunction, we had four employees managing one small office. My friend Sam Ovens was running a $12M company with nine people and a cleaner who came once a week.