Generous is not a framework.
In 1969 a French sailor was winning the first solo non stop race around the world.
Bernard Moitessier had the position and the boat. All he had to do was turn north for England, cross the line, and take the prize and the press that came with it.
He kept going east instead. Past the Cape a second time, and on to Tahiti.
He fired a message by slingshot onto the deck of a passing ship. It read “Because I am happy at sea, and perhaps to save my soul.”
It reads well on a poster. It also cost him the race, the money, the recognition, and a great deal at home. He counted all of that and went anyway.
That is the part people leave out. Choosing not to own the win is not free.
Here is the belief I am going to defend for the next seven Fridays.
You do not really own a business. You look after it for a while.
Now the honest part.
Nobody has to be argued into the opposite idea. It is the normal one. The one we all grew up with.
A business is a thing you own. You grow it. You take more out of it. You win, and somebody else loses.
Nobody chooses that story. It is the one we are all handed, and it arrives on its own wherever nothing else was said.
A default cannot be wrong, because nobody ever made it.
I found that out five times.
Five times I gave shares away at the start of a business. Foundation, or close to it.
The company was worth almost nothing. A few thousand euros, a dream, and a promise.
I never once said what the share was for.
I did not say that it paid for the risk taken on day one. I did not say that the work done afterwards was a separate thing, paid a separate way. I did not say what would happen on the day the share finally became worth something.
No framework. No rules. Not even a conversation.
They felt good that day. So did I.
I should say why I did it, because it was not carelessness.
I wanted the people building the thing with me to own a piece of it. I still want that. Handing over shares felt like the generous move, and generous felt like enough on its own.
Generous is not a framework.
Then the gap I had left got filled in by the only story available.
The first sign was small and I missed it. People stopped wanting the bonus at the end of the year and started asking for more shares instead. The share was growing faster.
The moment somebody would rather own than be paid, they have stopped thinking of themselves as crew.
Then came parity. Every one of them, in the end, wanted half.
They were not being greedy. They had worked hard for years, and nobody had ever told them that the hard work was not what the paper was for.
Some started behaving like bosses. They held shares, so they assumed they held the job as well. I had never separated the two. Why would they?
They wanted the reward. They did not want the risk.
They wanted the title. They did not want the training.
And I built the same shape every single time.
One minority partner per business. One person beside me, and everybody else outside the room.
So the only person that partner could measure themselves against was me.
The reason we split was different in every case. The fault line underneath was always the same.
Each of them runs their own company now. Some are doing well.
Not every partnership I have built went that way. Some of the best things I have been part of were built with other people and are still standing. But the ones that broke all broke on the same thing, and it was the thing I never wrote down.
What it cost me is the part they never saw, and I understand why.
For the first twelve or thirteen years I took a minimum salary and no dividend. Everything went back in.
When the crash came, and again in 2020, the guarantee was mine. One signature. A minority shareholder is never asked for one.
This is not a complaint. The risk was mine and so was the reward, and the reward came. That was the deal I made with myself and it worked.
But they looked forward and never backward. They saw a solid business and a plan that worked, and they were right about both. They could not see the years that had paid for it, because I had made those years invisible.
Now the part I like least.
Twice I called something stewardship when it was avoidance.
One business went wrong slowly for years while I told myself I could still turn it around. By waiting, the risk grew. Waiting is never neutral. The bill goes up while you decide.
And one person turned, once they understood the bigger stake was never coming. I knew. I did not act.
Every few months I found a reason. Not now, but soon, or someday.
In the end the team put me in front of a choice and told me straight what was happening. Then I moved. Four or five years too late.
That was not patience and it was not loyalty. It was me avoiding a hard conversation because I had no idea what was on the other side of it.
Last week I wrote about the difference between holding a position and drifting. This is the same question in work clothes.
So here is the obvious thing to say back to me.
Easy to talk about stewardship when you own the business.
That is fair, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I own it. I am not giving it away and I am not going to perform a version of myself that would.
But stewardship is not the opposite of owning. It is what owning is for.
A steward can hold the papers. What he cannot do is treat the thing as his to spend.
I want to be clear about one thing before I say what I would do differently.
The answer was never to keep it all. Sharing what you build is right, and it is also good business. People who own a piece of the outcome behave differently, and it shows.
The mistake was never the giving. It was giving without ever saying what was given and why I gave it.
If you are about to give somebody a share, write one page first.
What the share pays for. What the work is paid for, separately. And what happens on the day it becomes valuable.
Write it while the company is worth a few thousand euros, because that is the only day it is free. After that, every conversation about it is a negotiation, and you are negotiating with somebody who has already decided what they are owed.
We did write that page in the end. It is called a Virtual Equity Interest Plan, it has been running since the beginning of last year, and it gets a Friday of its own later in this arc.
It says what the stake is for, what it is not, and how somebody gets more of it. All the things I never said.
It answers every mistake above. Which tells you how long it took me.
So take the thing you are being patient about right now.
The partner. The country. The person everybody in your building already knows about.
Are you looking after it, or are you avoiding a conversation and calling it care?
For years I believed the handover was hard because of the people involved.
It was not. I made it impossible on day one and then spent a decade finding that out.
Like building a fast boat with a hole designed into the bow. She floats fine at the dock. You only find out at speed.
w. 🌊
Make My Mess My Message is a book written in public, one Friday at a time. Every issue lives here.
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