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Personal Finance Guide for Founders
The 9-step guide (plus a salary calculator) that tells founders exactly what to pay themselves: your number by stage, the pay structure that stops the tax leak, and personal runway building from every paycheck. Drawn from my 70+ CFO engagements and 13 years with founders. Free.
Product details
You track company burn to the dollar. Ask what you pay yourself, and it's usually a shrug — whatever's left after payroll, never revisited.
A mismatched pay structure costs you thousands a year in taxes, leaves you no personal runway, and makes every hard call come from a thin bank account.
This guide gives you the 9 steps to set your salary right, get ahead of taxes, and build real runway. The calculator does the math: put in your stage, ARR, and burn — get your number out, plus what staying underpaid is actually costing you.
What's included:
9-step guide — set your salary by stage, structure your pay by entity type, get ahead of taxes, and build personal runway, ending in a 15-minute audit that scores you out of 10.
Founder Salary Calculator (Excel + Google Sheets) — enter your stage, ARR, and burn; get your number, what staying underpaid is costing you, and what fixing it costs the company.
Salary benchmark table — typical founder pay bands from bootstrapping to Series A+, the ranges investors consider normal at every stage.
p.s. by entering your email you'll also be signed up to Tiny Margins, where every Thursday I share how to catch your next expensive mistake before it costs you the company.
