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- [00:00]
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The number one thing I hear from founders isn't AI, it's hiring. A players are rare and expensive. That's why Smart founders and CEOs are using near to hire top tier offshore talent in Latin America. Over 700 companies like Function, Health, Expensify and Deal use NEAR to build their teams and save hundreds of thousands in overhead. From senior engineers to heads of accounting to growth marketers. If it can be done remotely, near can find you the right person. You'll save up to 70% compared to US hires, but the real win is the quality. These aren't freelancers. They're loyal long term team members who actually care about your business. Near moves fast. You'll get resumes in three days and fill most roles in under three weeks. And you don't pay a dime until you make a hire. One of Near's founders is a Hampton member and plenty of others already use them. So if you're ready to hire the best talent in Latin America, you go to hirewithnear.com moneywise. That's hirewith n e a r.com moneywise to get 5% off your first hire.
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I'm about to share with you real salary numbers reported directly from real founders of over 150 businesses. And that includes their own salaries, how much they're paying out, on top of that, how much they're paying their C suite employees, and which industry niches are paying out the most. Which also implies we'll do the opposite. This is data, by the way, that is sourced directly from founders over at the community of high net worth founders@joinhampton.com, which means that this isn't secondhand data. This isn't mixing data, this isn't interpreting other people's data. This is information that is completely exclusive and you can't get anywhere else. And it's fascinating. We'll start with the base salary overviews, then we'll talk about the additional bonuses and distributions. Then we'll go to the C suite pay and also equity. If there is some or not. Then we'll compare by industry, then we'll compare by funding stage and finally the ways that some founders are finding ways to make it more worth their while. Especially those who aren't paying themselves, which you'll find out in a minute. There are some who aren't. And just before we get to that, if you want to ask these founders some questions more directly, maybe online, maybe in person, maybe you go to their house and become friends with them and have dinner with their family. It sounds creepy. But it's a community, so it's not. You can check it out@join hampton.com It's a community of high net worth founders. If you're doing at least 3 million in revenue, check it out. I'm Jackie Lamport and this is Moneywise, a show for founders unlike anything else you'll find out there. We are hyper transparent about finances, both business and personal, and we have vulnerable conversations about what it really takes to be a founder. Part one base salaries. Okay, so all of this data comes from the most recent full year of data that we can get, which is 2024. And also important context is what role those founders are playing in their business currently. So let's start with that to understand. Yeah, their salaries. Okay, so for this Data, we had 67% of respondents who were both the founder and the current CEO of the business. 16% were just CEOs and 13% were just founders. Getting right to the interesting stuff, 8% of the respondents actually said that they paid themselves nothing. And there are a couple reasons for that. Obviously, there's additional payouts and bonuses and whatnot. And, you know, we can talk about that more in a second. But there's also the other story, which is that a lot of the founders that we've spoken to on this show have told us that they paid themselves nothing, particularly early on, in favor of putting everything right back into the business so that they can scale it as fast as possible with the hope that there's, you know, a big payout in the form of an exit of tens of millions of dollars or something like that down the road. And that has happened for the majority of the people that we've spoken to. However, this is survivorship bias, so it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to happen. And before we move on from that point, a lot of the founders who actually did go about it that way, even if it did pay off, they have told us on the show that they kind of wish that they didn't, that they had paid themselves just at least a little bit, a little bit to make their lives good along the way. Not that they weren't good, but it could have been better, and it probably would have worked out the same way. The vast majority of those founders do pay themselves, however, about 80% of them keep it under 300k. It's only when you get into the final 4% that you reach the numbers above 500. Let's get to part two, which is additional payouts and bonuses. So it was actually only about 29% of founders who said that they are paying themselves their salary and nothing more. 9% of respondents actually said that they're paying themselves at least a million extra a year. The highest percentage of respondents was 30% of people who are taking home an extra between 100 and 300k. But there's also something else here that wasn't in the report that I want to comment on, and it's a trend that I've seen from interviewing founders for the past few years on the show. It's that there are two stories, really, of why founders are choosing to do what they do. And those averages that we're seeing, they don't really tell those stories. The first thing is what we have already talked about, which is the fact that there are founders who are putting everything that they can back into the business so that they can scale it and grow it with the intention of future windfalls.
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All right, money wise listeners, here's the deal. On this podcast, we talk about money. And that's great.
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So.
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But the one thing that's even more important than money is your health. And a few years ago, I made a change. So I made a change to get fit. I wanted to get fit for vanity reasons. I wanted to look good, but I also wanted to feel awesome and hopefully live a long time. And the way that I made this change after years of struggling was I hired a coach and it changed my life. I went from being like 25% body fat to 13, sometimes 12% body fat. It changed my life. And that's why today's sponsor is Daily Body Coach. It's a premium online coaching service for ambitious entrepreneurs and executives looking to achieve their dream body and perform their best. Daily Body Coach is run by an exited software entrepreneur and Hampton member. And in fact, a bunch of other Hampton members are using Daily Body Coach. And they hook you up with a super personalized exercise and nutritional roadmap to help you achieve your goals. Their expert coaches are available seven days a week so you can rest assured knowing that you have someone to hold you accountable every single day and to keep you on track. You can have it all. They offer a 100% money back guarantee within 30 days, no questions asked. Make a change. Check them out. Daily body coach.com moneywise. Again, that's daily body coach.com moneywise.
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The other group are the people who are optimizing for cash flow. So it's about the business right now and subsidizing their lifestyle as they're living it now. Something that's interesting is that the People who seem to be optimizing for cash flow are those who are selling second or third time founders or also seeing it as a lifestyle business. I'm not going to say which way is right or wrong because I mean there's a lot of factors that would play into that and that's not what this episode is for. I will say if you are interested, that there are a ton of episodes in our back catalog where we talk to founders who are doing one of those two things and you can see for yourself. But at this point let's get a further more specific breakdown on the total take home for founders, that salary and also any additional distributions but by net worth. So founders in the 1 to $10 million net worth range are taking home on average about 350ish k. Then we get to the 10 to 20 and we're looking at about 520 to 50. We get to the million, triple that for 50 to 100 and then 6.5 million yearly take home for the 100 plus founders. 100 million net worth plus not, not age obviously. Now I did say that we're going to talk about the kind of interesting ways that founders are paying themselves that aren't salary making it worth their while. And we're going to in a bit. But first let's talk about those C suite execs because they're obviously getting some money too. So what is it? How much? So Part 3 C Suite salaries and Equity now this data obviously needs to be filtered a little bit more because not every company is going to have the same C suite team or roles. And also in some cases there are founders who are acting as those roles roles. So we're actually not counting those ones at all. But the roles that we did ask about were heads of marketing, product, operations, tech and sales. And all of those salaries sat pretty much in between 120k and 200k. What did make the difference between the roles was bonuses. So let's talk about those. The majority of the roles had pretty modest bonuses we have for the heads of HR, marketing, product and operations all around 25 to 50k extra a year. Then we get to the heads of tech who are looking at roughly an extra 70k. And the biggest jump, not surprising, comes from the sales heads who nearly doubled their take home after adding the bonuses. So we have an average salary of around 157,000 and then an average bonus of around 125,000. Pretty good. But alas, it does not end there. Roughly 35% of founders said that they also offer equity packages to the C suite team. 20% said that they offer profit sharing and then 18% actually said that they give both. Now at this point we have been looking at averages across the board, but it's about to get really interesting because we're going to break it down by industry. Okay, so part four industry comparison. And just so you're not confused, we are going back to the founder base salaries and additional bonuses, which by the way, those additional bonuses and payouts that can really, really, really change things for a few industries. In particular, for instance the healthcare industry, they have salary averages at about 168k which is below the total average, which was 202. And however bonuses they saw an average of 870k which is far above the 332 total average. Now, we actually did cover a lot of industries here, so I'm not just going to throw a bunch of numbers and labels at you. What I will do instead is I will list off the top five industries by salary and then a separate list for the top five by bonuses. And if you were wondering what the lowest one is, I can just tell you right now that home garden and outdoors is the lowest for both of those. So sad day to love trees. AI search is quickly becoming one of the easiest ways for companies to get in front of customers right now. And the best way to take advantage of it is with mentions. So it was built by a Hampton member and it gives you one simple dashboard that shows you exactly how your company ranks inside LLMs like ChatGPT and more importantly, what you need to do to get ChatGPT to recommend your product or service to potential customers. Every 10 years or so, a new growth channel is born. And for a small window of time, companies are able to get attention for cheap and drive massive growth. Imagine being able to go back in time and buy Facebook ads in 2007 with all the knowledge that you have now. Or even being able to go back and create TikTok content in 2017. The companies who took advantage of these growth channels in their early stages experienced insane growth. And guess what? This is exactly the opportunity you have right now with AI search and the ability to show up right in front of your customers on LLMs like ChatGPT mentions. So makes it easy. AI search platforms like ChatGPT that are so highly trusted people are using it for everything from relationship advice to legal advice, or even as their own personal therapist. That's why many companies are reporting conversion rates of up to 17 times higher when their products are recommended on ChatGPT compared to traditional search on Google. So go to Mentions so right now and sign up with the discount code moneywise for 50% off your first month and a free AI search from the Mentions team who are behind the SEO campaigns of some of the biggest and fastest growing companies in tech like Beehive, Kajabi and American Express. That's Mentions. So code moneywise for 50% off your first month and a free search audit. Okay, so the top five industries by salary. Starting at number five, we have real estate. Number four, we have information and technology. Number three, we get beauty and wellness. Number two, pets and animal care. And in the number one position we have finance and insurance. Not really surprising there. And for bonuses we have in number five, beauty and wellness. Number four, apparel and accessories. Number three, finance and insurance. Number two, education. And as I already gave away, number one, healthcare. Notably, by the way, the only two industries that are on both of those lists were finance and insurance and duty and wellness, which, I mean, they're similar in a way they're not. Now there are more ways to compare and we will, which is why we're going into part five, which is looking at the differences in total packages by funding stages. So for this one we've just totaled everything together. So all the salary, the bonuses distributions, and unsurprisingly perhaps the top earners were the people who were bootstrapped or self funded. And they saw an average about 650k take home a year. And, and the lowest group was actually series B founders or founders who were in the series B stage. Their average was 260k take home. And for the rest of them, series A founders saw an average of 305k, series C saw 460 and private equity owned founders saw an average of 414k. And yeah, that's a quick section, that's all I got. And this is the part that you've been waiting for anyway, because it's not something that you can see in the numbers. This is the stuff that you have to get directly from founders and you have to know the right questions to ask. It is part six, which is the creative ways that founders are making it worth their while. What we asked founders here is how else they felt compensated and the responses were quite interesting. So if you take salary for what it is, which is a way to pay for your life, a lot of founders have found that that official salary isn't really the only way to do that. One founder in particular told us that they run 50% of their expenses through the business. So that includes 50% of rent, WiFi, gym and travel expenses. Another common response outside of personal expenses was credit card points. One person actually said that they are taking home an extra 3k a month in credit cards. Cash back and a couple more notable responses. One person said that they were doing 401k matching which made it worth their while. And lastly one person said that they took out a 250k loan against the company company. Now this is not advice to do or not do any of these things. The state of your business, relationships with employees, investors, co founders, tax strategies, all that stuff plays into this. So yeah, this isn't to say that any of this stuff is good or bad, but if you do want to know for real and get some personal tailored advice, then it's best to talk to founders like you, which you can do in the Hampton community where this data is sourced from. So if you are a founder who's doing at least 3 million in revenue, check that out@joinhampton.com and also if you want to see the full report, which has a lot more interesting stuff that we didn't get to cover in this video, I'll leave that in the show description. And if you're looking for a podcast like this one and you want to work with the company that I work for, then you can check out Lower Street Co because we make podcasts. And so I'm Jackie Lamport. This is money wise and I'll see you soon.