How we run a successful little business with big business problems

Looking back & looking ahead on our one year Bonfire birthday 🥳

Shannon Deep

and

Kevan Lee

Sep 20, 2024

"You are an ordinary, plain vanilla, very successful little business…with big business problems.”

This is what our accountant told us this summer as we grinned sheepishly at him through our Zoom windows. We’d just reviewed our revenue to date (more on this below) and manifested to him a vision for what we wanted to do with said money (more on this below, too).

We call our accountant Business Dad—not to his face, yet, unless he’s reading this newsletter—for two main reasons:

He is the first person we run to for advice when we have a question about Bonfire’s finances, which happens quite often.
We’ve frequently found ourselves excitedly asking him, “Ok so what would it mean for our finances if we did [insert big blue-sky idea here]?” only for him to sigh, pinch the bridge of his nose, and look at us with affectionate incredulity like he can’t believe he raised two people as goofy as we are.

This was one of those scenario #2 conversations. “...a very successful little business with big business problems,” he’d said, generously failing to add “...problems of your own making. Now go to your rooms.”

And he’s not wrong, per se. For the last year that we’ve been running Bonfire, we’ve quite studiously avoided doing normal business things, like doubling down on what’s making us the most money, spending time or energy on marketing our services, and paying ourselves more than the equivalent of $18.75 an hour, even though, according to our books, we can pay ourselves much more (see below).

Instead, we’ve run a business our way with ambitions so big that the two of us can barely hold them all.

It’s quite a wonderful way to live!

We talk each week in this newsletter about our general ethos of cultivating a strong relationship with creativity, but we’ve perhaps only hinted at the larger business we run, the good moves and the questionable ones, and the uncommon path we’re taking toward the business of our dreams.

So to celebrate our one-year Bonfire birthday, we thought we’d pull back the curtain and let you in on the inner workings of our business and our brains. You might expect to see even more of this “building in public” content in future newsletters, too. Let us know what you think! (Unless you are Business Dad; we already know what you think and appreciate the advice. We promise we’ll make you proud!)

Our first year in business, by the numbers

We’ll admit one number right away:

Business books read: Zero

Had we read business books, we likely would have been reminded just how hard it is to start a new business and how tough the first few years can be. But we didn’t read the books, and in fact, we had the opposite experience. 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♂️

So here are some of our most substantive business numbers from the first 12 months of Bonfire:

Revenue: ~$439,000

Advisory & coaching clients: 21

Newsletter subscribers: 681

Total audience (email & socials): ~27,000

When we started Bonfire, we had four different lines of business in mind: 1) brand marketing advisory, 2) 1:1 career coaching, 3) workshops and events, and 4) content subscriptions. Here is how those four lines of business ended up contributing to our overall revenue number:

(If all goes according to plan, this mix will look a lot healthier by our second birthday!)

But throughout the year, we talked often about money not being the only way we measure success. Far from it. Success for us means so much more than the dollars (though we do like dollars and also euros). So, if we were to tell the story of Bonfire’s first year by the numbers, it wouldn’t be a complete story without other numbers like these:

People we’ve met through website outreach: 76

On Zoom events with friends: 45

Different countries our clients hail from: 7

Days off (not counting national holidays): 36 total (big fail!)

In-person visits in the U.S. & France: 4

QBRs & OKRs: 0 (big win!)

How we did it: Key moments and turning points

In the interest of transparency, “building in public,” and not hiding the ways in which we've been lucky, privileged, or got in our own freaking way from time to time, we thought we’d share some of the turning points where we made decisions about how we run our business our way.

We’ve made decisions that prioritize an entrepreneurial path that centers creativity, life-work balance, and intentional lifestyle design. And maybe moreover, decisions that decenter certain conventional ideas about what it means to be an entrepreneur and grow your own business.

There might be some business-building “lessons” here, or there might not be. We can only tell you, with total candor, how we did things and why. So far, we’ve generally succeeded by doing things in our weird little way. But your mileage may vary!

1. We stopped saying yes to everything

When we first started out, a lot of our incoming new business inquiries came from people who already knew us: from Kevan’s network of tech industry connections, which he built (sorta incidentally) over his 15-year career as marketing leader, and from Shannon’s network, who knew her primarily as a brand writer and creative executor.

This was awesome! Inquiries were coming in just because we were posting on LinkedIn that you could hire us. A literal dream for baby business owners, really.

But! But…

Kevan’s reputation as a marketing leader was much broader than our actual business offering, and Shannon’s was much more downstream. We sell brand storytelling, strategic brand foundations, brand expression, and brand messaging work, and we coach and advise professionals doing that work in-house. But could we do fractional head of marketing work? Product-led growth strategies? Website copywriting?

Well…sure! Why not, right? Money is money. Business is business.

Except it’s not. Not when it’s not the type of work you actually want to be doing.

Let us be clear: We’re good at all that other work. We did it, respectively, for many years. But what we’re best at, what we enjoy, and, frankly, what we simply just want to do is the brand stuff that sits in the strategic stratosphere.

So we stopped saying yes to money and started saying yes to projects and collaborators.

And you’ll never guess what happened: We started getting more of the kind of work we really wanted.

Now, we are well aware that this is a position of privilege. We could literally afford to say no. But we’re committed to showing you our privilege instead of pretending we just worked really hard or are so amazing, so there you have it!

But privilege aside, we were clear from the very beginning that we only really wanted to do a particular kind of work. We didn’t want to become a more general marketing services agency, even though the market was showing us that we could take on a bunch of those projects and hire specialists to work with us! Maybe that’s a future iteration of Bonfire, but we decided Year One was not the time for it.

The learning: It’s okay to say no. And it’s okay to work on the things you actually want to work on. That’s the whole reason people start businesses!

2. We didn’t pay ourselves what we could

For the first 9 months of Bonfire, we didn’t pay ourselves at all, even though we were making enough money to do so. After that, we started paying ourselves the full-time equivalent of $18.75 an hour, which is not nearly as much as we could afford and still have super healthy margins. And because Bonfire is classified as an LLC partnership, we have been thus horrified by the fact that we have paid exponentially more in taxes to the IRS than has hit our personal bank accounts.

Why the austerity measures? Why let Business Dad repeatedly yell at us about how we’re not paying ourselves enough?

We’ll talk more about that below in the “What’s next” section, but this decision has led us to a situation now where we’re on the cusp of new things, and we have a good amount of capital to work with to make those things happen! We can hire people. We have budgets to create and promote things. And we can do those things maybe a little bit faster than we could have afforded to otherwise.

Again: What a privilege it was for us both to be able to live off of savings for 9 months. Not that that’s an ideal situation, but we could do it because we decided the future business would benefit from it.

The learning: Know what is “enough” of a salary for you and don’t stress about replacing your tech salary one-for-one in year one.

3. We struck a life-work balance that works for our lives

We are a cofounding team halfway around the world from one another. We work with people in every continent except Antarctica (really!). We work with clients in one of the most notoriously plugged-in industries of them all: tech startups.

Because of all this, we have been uber-intentional about the way we work together. We have had to be!

What this means in practice is that we pay close attention to the equilibrium of life and work, making sure that all the life stuff takes priority, and that we don’t overly identify with the offerings, successes, or failures of Bonfire. If something doesn’t work out, if something takes longer than we thought, if we have to change business strategies, if something costs more than expected…can we still say we’re living good lives and taking care of ourselves and the people we love?

If the answer is yes to that, then there is no real work problem. Ever. There’s just some work stuff to figure out. And maybe that stuff is frustrating. Or complicated. Or takes a lot of time. But it never rises to the level of an actual problem in our lives.

We are friends first, business partners second. We show up for our loved ones before our clients. And we value ourselves over our work. We strive to keep our true stakes and priorities crystal clear.

Whenever a frantic or stressful moment would arise amongst the marketing team at one particular international startup, an ex-colleague of Shannon’s used to say, “There’s never been a marketing emergency.” Amen to that. And we’d actually like to think that real business emergencies in general are almost nonexistent, too, no matter what your boss or CEO or board says. Are people’s lives, health, or livelihoods literally at risk? Maybe sometimes. But definitely not as often as they want you to think.

The lesson: Be cognizant of the real stakes of your business’s day-to-day. And be aligned with your cofounder about what really matters.

4. We decentered work from our lives

There’s some weird idea that entrepreneurs and founders are supposed to be, like, in love with their businesses and careers. Western capitalist culture has set the standard of “your job/career/business should be purposeful, meaningful, and fulfilling,” or else you’re doing it incorrectly, poorly, or for the wrong reasons. And while sure, of course, your business can be those things, it doesn’t have intrinsic, inherent value as such. There are other modes of being in the world.

All this to say: We—as founders of a successful company, a company that’s growing, a company we actually deeply care about—would rather not be working.

We would rather be pursuing our own creative projects, supporting other people’s creative projects, hanging out with our families and friends, traveling, reading, petting dogs, touching grass, cooking—you name it. (That’s just what’s meaningful to us personally. Your answer might be different.) So if we already had all the money we’d ever need to live the lives we dream of having for ourselves and providing to our communities, we wouldn’t be doing ::gestures around:: all this. Let’s not kid ourselves.

That’s not to say that the desired alternative to working is “doing nothing”; the alternative to working is the freedom to have the impact you’d really love to make on your world, defined however broadly or narrowly you like.

The lesson: Work, and the company that we created to facilitate it, is just a means to other things, and we talk openly about that together. This work earns us money—a tool through which we can have healthy, enriching, enjoyable lifestyles. And by accumulating these tools, we can do bigger, better, cooler, more impactful things for our communities.

Things like …

What’s next for Bonfire?

After a year of success as a boutique brand strategy and storytelling agency, we’re beginning to turn the ship into uncharted waters. As we’ve been hinting, in the spirit of creating even more big business problems for ourselves, we’re eschewing the traditional path of most successful agencies and starting to branch out what it is we do at Bonfire.

We are thrilled to have created a successful agency and are eager to see it continue to grow.

But this alone is not why we got into business.

We got into business to do remarkable, impactful work for the creative people who we believe deserve their turn in the spotlight. We’re fortunate to be able to shine a little spotlight on creativity through our agency projects, but from Day One we couldn’t help but dream about the breadth of possibilities we’d be eager to bring to life. In particular …

We plan to launch a community for creative marketers, full of educational materials, networking opportunities, and creative encouragement.

The goal is to launch in 2024. (::looks at watch anxiously::)

We also plan to create in-person experiences that cultivate creativity for in-house marketers, creative freelancers, business builders, teams, and founders.

The goal is to lay the groundwork for this in 2025.

And by “lay the groundwork,” we do actually mean literal groundwork. We plan on purchasing a property in the French countryside with sprawling grounds—a chateau or manor or farmworks—to support people coming and staying and doing creative work with us. We’re talking workshops, retreats, and—the cherry on top of the gâteau—a free artist residency program.

Funny enough, it was the logistics of this grand vision that first caused our Business Dad to remark about our big business problems. Six months into our business and we were creating a French business entity and looking into reverse mortgages.

Why?

We are fully aware that many successful businesses remain in their successful form and don’t try to stretch, stretch, stretch into new and uncharted territories. But that would not be us. We are both highly ambitious people who share a desire to make life better for the people we love and for each other, a life that is more creatively fulfilling, more free, and more impactful. Some people go into business to make money; we went into business to do life and work on our own terms—and sustain that state financially.

Year One has been full of learnings. It’s been full of reminders about how lucky we are and how privileged we are, sure, but also how right we are that the stuff that really lights us up is the stuff that transcends the traditional money-making business wisdom and takes us to a place of doing meaningful things in uncommon ways with people we love for reasons we believe in.

We are setting our sights on a whole new line of business and a literal castle in France not because we think it’s going to be the fastest path to our faces on the cover of Forbes. We’re doing it because we see it as an authentic way to make the impact that will make us happiest while letting us design the life we most want.

Final learning from Year One, which also happens to be the piece we start with when consulting with our clients and the piece we’re so grateful we spend so much time discussing: Know your why, talk regularly about your why, and treat your why as your North Star just as much as you would revenue or users or clients or profit.

Thank you for being with us on this journey!

For the last 12 months, we’ve had just the most lovely, encouraging, supportive response from people already in our community and those we’ve met along the way. (And, sure, a small number of blank stares, too.) If you’re reading this, you’re part of that group, and we really appreciate that you’re here.

We hope you enjoyed this (looong) peek into how we’re doing things at Bonfire. We’re opening up the comments! Let us know any questions or things you’d like to know more about. And of course, more to come in Year Two!

For more…

Follow us on LinkedIn and on Instagram. And let us know if you’d like to go deeper with us to talk about you and creativity. We do:

1:1 coaching and mentorship
Team workshops and consulting for marketing and leadership
Speaking and appearances on podcasts and at events

Say hi anytime.

Kumbaya,
Shannon & Kevan