“Forget Sweat Equity†was the name of this chapter. It revolves around how most business owners believe that their own salaries should take a back seat to making a business successful since you own it. For example, if you had an employee then you would cut your own salary first for reasons such as you don’t want to make the employee upset where they will leave you. It’s the mentality where you commit the sacrifices now to reap the big rewards later.
In general, he says that this is a bad decision as the whole point of starting a business was to make your life better. If you are constantly not focused in taking care of yourself financially then you are essentially making yourself a slave to your business and everyone else. He was pretty blunt with the employee example such as stating you could always get better people for cheaper and that if they leave you because of a pay cut then good riddance. He further emphasizes that with points such as those same people aren’t going to be writing you a cheque when you are in trouble.
Afterwards a lot of examples were used on how when business owners started to pay themselves more results started to turn around for the business as well. He says that should be paid the most for sheer psychology reasons too. If say your employee gets paid more than you then it makes it look like they have more control as well. He used an example where if you are the CEO you should pay yourself 3 to 4 percent on each dollar of revenue.
This chapter is really subjective I’d say. For the most part I would say this advice would be more relevant for a corporation that already generates a lot of sales. Compare that to say a sole proprietor type of business and the advice wouldn’t be as relevant. Cause like in a sole proprietorship you are literally the business as oppose to a corporation.