That’s the question my hairdresser asked me years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it.
I was running my second company, working 80+ hour weeks, and I’d just spent my Saturday cleaning our office bathroom to save a few bucks. I grew up really poor — paying someone to clean wasn’t a thing I even knew was an option, so scrubbing that bathroom on the weekend just seemed normal to me. It wasn’t a sacrifice in my mind. It was just what you did.
I sat down in my hairdresser’s chair that day, exhausted, and I just started crying. She looked at me and asked, “Do you make more than $25 an hour?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then why are you cleaning the bathroom on the weekend?”
That question cracked something open. It wasn’t really about the bathroom — it was about a scarcity mindset I’d never questioned, and what it was quietly costing me as a founder: my time, my energy, and my ability to actually lead. I was so used to doing everything myself that I’d never stopped to ask what my hours were actually worth, or what I was giving up by refusing to let go of tasks that had nothing to do with growing the company.
I told that story — and a lot of others I’m not especially proud of — on my friend and former business partner Jamin Brazil’s podcast. We spent the episode digging into the real tips, tricks, and mistakes of scaling a company: what to do, what to skip, and what nearly broke me along the way.
A few of the things we got into:
Know your hourly value, and act like it. The $25-an-hour question applies to almost every founder I know. If you’re capable of $500-an-hour work — sales, strategy, partnerships, hiring — every hour you spend on $25-an-hour tasks is an hour you’re actively losing money, even if no cash changes hands.
Delegation isn’t a luxury, it’s a growth requirement. I held onto tasks for way too long because I thought handing them off meant admitting I couldn’t do it all, or because I didn’t trust anyone else to do it “right.” In reality, holding on was the thing capping our growth.
Scarcity mindsets don’t disappear with revenue. I’d built a company with real traction and I was still cleaning a bathroom on the weekend. Money in the business doesn’t automatically rewire how you think about your own worth — that’s a separate piece of work.
The mistakes are worth talking about too. Jamin and I didn’t just cover what worked. We got into what I got wrong scaling that company — the hiring calls, the things I should have outsourced years earlier, and what I’d tell that version of myself if I could.
If you’ve ever confused being busy with being productive, or you’re still doing $25-an-hour work when you should be doing $500-an-hour work, this conversation is for you.
Give it a listen. And reach out to me if you need more war stories like these to inspire you to change!