The Unpaid Intern
How much do you owe the thing you built?
Last in a series on the broken models that keep good people down.
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“I’m done being an unpaid intern in a business I’m starting to hate.”
She was crying when she said it, and she wasn’t describing a failing company. Five years in, profitable, staff who get paid on time, customers who come back. And in those five years she had taken exactly five thousand dollars out of it for herself.
Once, for a week at the beach with her kids.
And when she told me about the vacation, she apologized as though she’d done something frivolous.
Six weeks earlier, we’d had a very different conversation.
Her books were eight months behind. They’d always been done eventually, because taxes have deadlines, but nobody had been keeping them current enough to tell her what was happening while there was still time to do something about it.
She knew the business was profitable.
She just didn’t know by how much.
She wanted me to catch everything up and then, if the business could support it, stay on as her bookkeeper and CFO. She wasn’t sure she could afford me, so she proposed something entirely reasonable: clean up the books first, see what was actually there, and then tell her.
There was one other thing she wanted me to look at while I was in there.
She’d really love to start taking $2,500 a week.
If that was possible.
So we got to work.
Six weeks later, we sat down together with books that finally told the truth.
For the first time in five years, we could see the business as it actually was. What it earned. What it spent. What it could support.
And somewhere in that conversation, we got to her.
That’s when she told me about the five thousand dollars.
The only money she’d taken for herself in five years.
The beach.
The kids.
The apology.
Her line in the sand.
“I’m done being an unpaid intern in a business I’m starting to hate.”
I’ve spent thirty years telling people that numbers are information. They don’t carry a moral judgment. They tell us what happened, and if we’re willing to look at them without flinching, they can help us decide what happens next.
But every once in a while, a clean set of books does something else.
It gives someone evidence of their own absence.
Her employees were there.
Their wages and benefits were there.
The vendors were there. The software was there. The rent was there. Every person and every thing the business had agreed was necessary to keep operating had a place in those books.
She didn’t.
For five years, she’d built a business that knew how to pay everyone except the person who built it.
And until we put the books on the table, she hadn’t been able to see how completely she’d written herself out.
She could afford the $2,500 a week.
She’d been able to afford it for a while.
And there was more. Sitting in her operating account, doing nothing, was roughly three months of full operating expenses, including her salary.
Three months of runway.
Accumulated almost by accident, out of the habit of taking nothing, by a woman who had spent five years believing the answer to her question might be no.
That’s what I had to tell her.
The thing she’d been afraid to ask for had already been affordable for years, and the business had quietly been stockpiling the proof.
She wasn’t relieved. Not yet.
First she had to sit with the fact that the money had been there the whole time.
Something other than money had been keeping her from it.
I see this most often in extraordinarily capable people.
Give them a problem and they solve it. Give them a mess and they clean it up. Give them too much work and they find another hour. When something falls through the cracks, they’re already bending down to pick it up.
It’s one of the reasons they’re able to build businesses in the first place.
Starting a company requires an almost unreasonable willingness to figure things out. There is no accounting department down the hall when you need to understand sales tax. No IT department when the website breaks. No HR department when you make your first hire. In the beginning, the answer to almost every question really is you.
So you learn to figure things out, and over time you become remarkably capable. The problem you solved last month becomes evidence that you can solve this one too. You found the money when cash was tight. You stayed late and got client work done, on time and under budget. You handled the client who was furious, fixed the mistake nobody noticed until Friday afternoon, and somehow made payroll during the month when three invoices came in late.
Every gap you cover makes it easier to believe you’ll cover the next one.
And there is always a next one.
As the business grows, almost everything around the founder develops terms. The landlord expects rent on the first. Payroll has a date and employees have salaries. Contractors send invoices with due dates printed at the top. Software subscriptions renew with extraordinary confidence regardless of whether the month was spectacular or terrifying. The business learns to accommodate all of these obligations because they have been made nonnegotiable.
The founder remains flexible.
She is the expense willing to negotiate with herself.
When cash gets tight, her paycheck moves. When the work spills beyond the hours available to do it, her day off disappears. Retirement can wait another year. The vacation gets shorter, then postponed, then eventually becomes the five thousand dollars she feels compelled to explain to her CFO.
None of these decisions feels enormous when she makes it. That’s part of what makes the pattern so durable. One delayed paycheck doesn’t feel like self-abandonment. Working one Saturday doesn’t feel like a business model. Skipping one retirement contribution doesn’t feel like giving away your future. Each decision can be perfectly rational on its own, especially in the early years when building something often requires flexibility from the person building it.
Five years later, those individual decisions have become an operating system.
The business has payroll, policies, due dates, contracts, budgets, and commitments to nearly everyone who depends on it. The founder has taught herself to absorb whatever remains.
No one had to tell her to come last.
She’d become exquisitely good at doing it herself.
By the time we met, she had started to hate it.
Not the work. She was good at the work. She chose it, and on a good day she still loved it.
What curdled was the thing itself. The business. The entity. The obligation.
It became the reason she missed the recital.
The reason there were four years without a vacation.
The reason she was tired in a way that sleep couldn’t fix.
A business that never pays its founder collects the difference somewhere. It collects it in resentment, and resentment compounds faster than interest. It also doesn’t appear on a financial statement. There’s no line for it on a profit and loss. I’ve never seen it listed as a liability on a balance sheet. Yet I’ve watched it close good business after good business.
Profitable businesses, with loyal customers and employees who depend on them.
Businesses that worked and made a real difference to their communities.
Quietly resented by the only people who could keep them alive, until being free of them began to feel more valuable than fixing them.
My client was crying in my office because she loved something that had started to feel like a debt she owed.
She was also six weeks and one honest set of books away from finding out the debt had already been paid.
I looked up the word intern.
Merriam-Webster defines an intern as someone who works, often without pay, in order to gain practical experience.
Experience toward what, exactly?
My client had five years of experience. She had employees. Repeat customers. A profitable company. She had survived the fragile early years when most businesses are still trying to prove they deserve to exist. She had learned her market, built a reputation, made mistakes expensive enough to remember, and become good enough at what she did that other people depended on the company for their own paychecks.
There was no senior position waiting for her.
She already owned the place.
That’s what makes “unpaid intern” such a perfect description of the arrangement. An internship contains an implied future. You accept less today because the experience is supposed to lead somewhere: a credential, a career, a paid position, a seat at a table you haven’t earned access to yet. The imbalance has an expiration date built into the bargain.
Founders make a similar bargain with themselves in the beginning. They bootstrap. They reinvest. They take less because the business needs cash to grow. They work jobs they fully intend to hire someone else to do later. They trade some present comfort for the possibility of building something that will eventually give more back than it requires.
There is wisdom in that bargain, but there also needs to be an expiration date.
Nobody says, “I have decided to exploit myself indefinitely.”
We have much better words for that.
Bootstrapping.
Reinvesting.
Building for the future.
Keeping cash in the business.
Being responsible.
Each can describe a perfectly sound business decision. I’ve recommended every one of them. A founder who empties the bank account every month in the name of paying herself isn’t building financial sovereignty either. Businesses need working capital. They need reserves. Growth sometimes requires investment before it produces a return.
The trouble comes when these decisions stop having numbers and dates attached to them.
“I’m reinvesting for the next twelve months while we build the team” is a strategy.
“I’ll pay myself when the business can afford it” can survive forever.
There will always be somewhere else for the money to go. Another employee who would make things easier. Better software. A larger marketing budget. New equipment. More inventory. A bigger cushion against whatever might happen next.
And every one of those things can sound more responsible than paying yourself.
That’s how another month becomes another quarter, another quarter becomes another year, and a temporary sacrifice becomes the way the business operates.
You keep building for the future while quietly removing yourself from the future you’re building.
We’ve been asking the wrong question.
We spend so much time asking what our businesses need from us.
More hours. More clients. More visibility. More investment. More patience. More courage. More of our attention, our creativity, our money, our lives.
I want to ask what is your business here to give you?
Because you were here first.
Before the LLC, the website, the lease, the employees, the clients, the inventory, the payroll, the followers, the revenue goals and the tax returns, there was a human being who wanted something enough to build a business around it.
Maybe you wanted freedom. Maybe you wanted to make beautiful things and spend your days making more of them. Maybe you wanted to heal people in a way the existing system doesn’t allow. Maybe you wanted to build something your family could carry forward. Maybe you wanted money, agency, time, impact, choice, or the ability to decide what happened to your own Tuesday afternoon.
Somewhere in the building, it’s remarkably easy to forget that original desire.
The business becomes another mouth to feed.
And because you’re capable, you feed it.
Your time. Your ideas. Your evenings. Your weekends. Your money. Your attention. Your nervous system. Year after year, you keep asking what the business needs next and finding a way to provide it.
Eventually, I want the question to travel in the other direction.
What is this business providing for you?
Your business is here to serve you. Not the other way around.
I mean that with every financially feral bone in my body.
It is here to create something in your life that would be harder to create without it. Wealth. Freedom. Expression. Purpose. Generosity. Choice. A home. A retirement. Tuesdays with your children. Art that gets to exist because the artist can afford to keep making it. Healing that remains available because the healer can afford to keep offering it. A family legacy in which every person whose labor built the asset gets to participate in the prosperity it creates.
And yes, your business can serve other people too. I hope it does. I hope it serves them magnificently. I hope your employees build beautiful lives with the wages you pay them. I hope your clients are changed by what you create. I hope your vendors prosper, your community benefits, and eventually you have so much surplus that you can fund things you may never personally benefit from.
You belong inside that circle of prosperity.
Every time. From day one.
In fact, you are its epicenter - everything you desire for the world ripples out from you when you thrive.
The four broken models we’ve been examining share the same disappearing act.
The artist disappears behind the art.
The healer disappears behind the healing.
The child disappears behind the family.
The founder disappears behind the business.
And every one of them deserves to come back into the picture, and it requires more than deciding you deserve to be there.
Eventually, it has to show up in the numbers.
I want to see your life well represented inside the financial plan for your business.
I want to know what it costs to live well now, what you’re building for later, and what kind of support makes it possible for you to keep doing this work without consuming yourself to do it.
I want your salary sitting beside payroll and rent as something the business is expected to produce. I want retirement contributions planned before another year slips past. I want time off that has been funded instead of stolen from whatever week finally looks quiet enough to disappear.
Yes, I want a number.
A real one.
One of the most dangerous promises a founder can make herself is “when there’s enough”, because enough can move forever. Give it a dollar amount. Give it a date. Decide what the business needs to hold in reserve, what it needs to reinvest, what it needs to meet its obligations, and what it needs to send home to the person whose life and labor make all of this possible.
Then build for that.
This may mean the business needs to make more money.
Good.
That is useful information.
Maybe prices need to rise. Maybe an offer isn’t profitable enough to keep. Maybe labor is too high, margins are too thin, or growth has been eating every dollar it creates. Maybe the business model that works beautifully at $500,000 stops working at $800,000.
Those are problems we can solve.
A founder disappearing from her own financial model is much harder to fix.
Revenue grows.
Payroll clears.
Taxes get filed.
The business looks successful.
Meanwhile, the person who owns the thing is still waiting for her turn.
Your turn belongs in the budget.
Your life belongs in the forecast.
Your future belongs in the plan.
Put yourself in the math.
My client did.
The day after our meeting, she started taking the $2,500 a week she’d been afraid to ask for six weeks earlier.
She also hired herself a fantastic CFO, if I do say so myself.
And then something wonderfully ordinary happened.
The business kept going.
Customers still came back. Employees still had jobs. Bills got paid. There was money to reinvest and money to hold in reserve. The business did all the things she’d spent five years protecting its ability to do.
Only now, it supported her too.
And it flourished.
So did she.
These days, she takes a week off every quarter.
I think about that whenever I remember the woman who once apologized to me for taking her children to the beach.
One vacation in five years had felt frivolous enough to require an explanation. Now four weeks a year belong in the plan.
That’s what changes when the creator of a business finally becomes one of the people the business is designed to support.
The time and the money move differently. The future feels more exciting. And perhaps most importantly, she no longer has to hate the thing she built in order to imagine being free.
She gets to be free inside it.
Over the last four essays, we’ve met the Starving Artist, the Healer bound by an old bargain, the Dutiful Child, and now the Unpaid Intern.
Different work. Different histories. Different ways of disappearing.
And underneath all four is the same quiet assumption: the more meaningful the work, the easier it becomes to justify leaving the person doing it out of the prosperity it creates.
I want to challenge that assumption all the way down.
The world needs artists who can afford decades of making art. It needs healers whose own care is fully funded, family businesses that create wealth for every generation whose labor built them, and founders whose companies make their lives bigger instead of slowly consuming them.
Because when good people are well resourced, the benefits don’t stop with them.
They keep creating.
They keep healing.
They employ people well. They invest in their communities. They fund ideas that might otherwise never get funded. They have the time, money, energy, and capacity to take on problems bigger than their own survival.
Resources are power.
And I want more of that power in the hands of people who give a damn what happens to the rest of us.
That is the larger argument I’m making in Profit Is Protest, the book I’m writing now.
The book goes beyond these four models into the stories we’ve inherited about money, profit, generosity, worth, and what good people are allowed to have. We’ll follow those stories into the numbers, because beliefs eventually become business models, and business models eventually become bank balances. Then we’ll build something better: businesses capable of creating real wealth for the people who own them, the people who work inside them, and the communities they can reach.
If you’ve recognized yourself anywhere in this series, I hope you’ll join the waitlist.
I’m writing this book for the people who have spent years making sure everyone else was taken care of and are finally ready to include themselves in the prosperity they’re creating.
The world needs what you’re here to build.
Let’s make sure you can afford to keep building it.
ProfitIsProtest.com
What do you pay yourself? What would feel more expansive than that?
You don’t have to tell me in the comments, but ask yourself and write that number down.
And now, if you’re feeling feisty, add a zero.
P.S. Profit is Protest, and so is building a business that gives back to the person who built it. Your work can fund your most expansive-feeling life and change the world at the same time. Make both nonnegotiable.
Shaneh, the way you have with words is just magical. So many moments in this landed for me. Thank you for sharing your wisdom!