Fuck You Money
There are two financial concepts I keep going back to over and over and over again: “Passive Income” and “Fuck You Money”. Passive income is something I plan towards on a personal level towards a good retirement. Fuck You Money is a theme that comes up a lot on a professional level. Ironic given the term isn’t very “professional” some might say!
Fuck You Money is defined by the Urban Dictionary (everyone’s favorite dictionary. PS: I hadn’t gone to that site in ages so I was quite surprised with the new branding) as:
The exact amount of money required in order to tell an individual or organization to go fuck themselves without facing repercussions.
link: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fuck%20you%20money
Money.com has an extensive article on it as well, and of course there’s a Quora entry for it. The basic premise is that you need to have enough money to get yourself out of messy situations. That could be a bad relationship with a lover, or a bad relationship with an employer, or any person you might have a financial dependency on.
Now why am I talking about Fuck You Money on the B&G blog? No, I didn’t post this on the company blog by mistake. People typically talk about independence on the personal level, but very rarely talk about it on an organization level. Yet being in the service industry, and being a service agency beholden to the clients we serve and in some cases being at the mercy of those clients, Fuck You Money is very much a thing for a company like B&G just like it is for any individual.
When B&G was me + subcontractors, I could to some extent couple my own personal financial freedom with that of B&G. If I needed to stop working with a client for whatever reason I only needed to take my own financial situation into consideration. Now that B&G has 2 full time employees besides me (yup, I hired 2 full time employees in January of 2019, it’s been quite a month so far, more on that some other time), it’s no longer as simple. Now B&G is responsible for the salaries of more than just me, and B&G’s financial freedom is dependent on being able to pay those salaries without interruption.
Just like an individual, B&G needs Fuck You Money to ensure its financial freedom. Being able to fire an abusive client without repercussions requires a big enough war chest to afford to halt a relationship with a paying contract, and potentially the cost of any legal ramifications that might come with it. In fact, it doesn’t even have to come down to an extreme situation of firing the client, but even just having the ability to stand up to a client that is crossing a line, which could potentially lead to a severed relationship, is difficult without said financial freedom.
The hope is that we screen our potential clients well enough to not have to deal with these kinds of situations, but the reality is that we won’t alway be successful in uncovering abusive behavior or how people will behave under stress and pressure.
It gets even more complicated once you factor in that the more you add people to the mix the more fragile a situation can become. What I mean by that is that the more people are part of a conversation the higher the chances are that anything that is said can hurt someone. Which means the more the B&G team grows the higher the likelihood of an incident that needs to be dealt with. Which adds more pressure on me personally to make sure that I avoid bad situations at all costs, and to not put my team in a situation where they’d have to deal with abuse. Yet the moment we work with a client and are dependent on them paying us is the moment we’ve already put ourselves at risk. In other words, the moment I hired someone and the moment I assigned them a project with a client is the moment I put someone else at risk of being abused. That’s heavy. That’s a big responsibility.
The onus is on me to make sure that B&G is successful enough to build a reserve of Fuck You Money for situations when a relationship with a client goes sideways. While at the same time to build a reputation that can withstand a situation where a client would want to ruin the B&G name by retaliating and smearing us. What other myriad of repercussions am I even forgetting that we’d have to fortify ourselves against? I don’t know. What I do know is that we have a hill to climb, and if you’re a small business owner I hope you’re thinking about setting up some Fuck You Money of your own.
