Everyone was growing faster than me

Growth in this business has a look. The office upgrade. The team photo with matching hoodies. The watch, the car, the conference stage. It's not even always conscious — we're social animals, and signaling success is how the world has always worked. Clients see it and think: these people know what they're doing. Talent sees it and thinks: that's where I want to be. I followed that narrative for years. A former Soviet kid from an ordinary family — engineer father, journalist mother — who somehow ended up running an agency. In those early days, it didn't take much for my life to look impressive from the outside.

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But I had to learn, slowly and often painfully, that the outside is the easy part.

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Yesterday I was on the phone with my mom. She told me that six months after my father's death, the apartment paperwork is finally moving forward — courts, lawyers, notaries, all of it. But while she talked, I wasn't thinking about the apartment. Or rather, I was, but I was remembering. Sitting at the kitchen with her, doing the numbers on little scraps of paper.

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In the nineties, when I was at university, my father worked in Moscow sending money home. We lived on my grandmother's pension and whatever he could send. My mom kept handwritten notes on small pieces of paper — who she borrowed from this month, who she paid back, how much I needed for the week at uni. She counted every kopeck. She was incredibly organized — a journalist by trade, not an accountant, but you wouldn't know it from those notes. Every debt tracked, every payment planned, every week accounted for.

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Here's the paradox. I studied programming at university. Went to work as a designer — first at a newspaper, then at a few ad agencies. I had zero financial education. Couldn't tell you the difference between margin and markup if you'd asked me back then. But that habit — count the money, always keep a reserve, never spend what you might need tomorrow — it came from watching those notes, not from any textbook. And it ended up defining almost everything about how I ran my business for twenty years. A programmer-turned-designer with no finance background, making financial decisions more conservatively than most MBAs. All because of handwritten debt notes on scraps of paper.

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The ceiling and the floor

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For years, I watched founders around me grow at speeds that made my head spin. Shiny offices, premium cars, lavish team events. Some of my own employees were buying apartments and luxury cars on credit because the party felt like it would last forever. We ran anonymous surveys and I remember one response that stung — someone wrote that other companies have scooters, gym memberships, amazing parties. And here I was, holding the line on expenses like some paranoid accountant.

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There was always this battle inside me. Like the cartoon angel and devil on your shoulders. One whispers: you earned this, enjoy it, show what you've built. The other: and if something breaks tomorrow? If a client disappears? If someone gets sick? You spent the reserves on a beautiful life and now there's nothing underneath.

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To this day, I honestly couldn't tell you which one was the angel and which was the devil.

But here's what I can tell you. Many of those founders who grew faster, spent bigger, and looked more successful? They're not in business anymore. Some went bankrupt because they never separated their personal wallet from the company's money. Others signed long-term leases and committed to expenses that looked great during a good quarter — and crushed them the moment a bad one arrived.

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I don't have anything against beautiful offices or generous perks for people who deserve them. I just always believed in building the floor before decorating the ceiling. Building a ceiling is fun. It's exciting, it looks great, people notice. Building a floor — the thing you actually stand on when everything shakes — is boring. Nobody applauds you for it. Your team doesn't thank you for it. Sometimes your own family pushes back because they want the nicer life now. But the floor is what saves you.

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When the floor holds the only thing that matters.

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In 2012, when my business partner told me there were no new clients and we needed to let most of the team go, I paid salaries from my personal savings for months while I scrambled to rebuild sales. Those savings existed because of my mom's notes. Because I'd built a floor before I ever thought about a ceiling. That floor let me keep the people who later became the company's leadership.

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A few years later, around 2015, we had a client — a promising music recommendation startup. Things were going well until their own business hit trouble. First came arguments over every invoice line. Then complaints about quality we knew was solid. Then payments started arriving late. Their last invoice took a full year to collect, and only after lawyers got involved.

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One delayed invoice. If we hadn't had a solid floor by then, that single event would've sent us spiraling — grabbing any project to fill the gap, overloading the team, quality dropping, good clients leaving because we were too stretched and too exhausted to serve them well. One invoice, and a chain reaction that could bury years of work. I've seen it happen to others. It almost happened to me in 2012. By 2015, the floor held.

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Something to try this weekend:

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That lesson from 2012 — and those handwritten notes — eventually turned into something concrete. A Payment policy. Nothing complicated. Three rules and one email sequence.

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Prepayment before work starts. Milestone-based billing so no single unpaid invoice gets dangerously large. A work-stop clause if payment goes overdue. And automated reminders so nobody has to feel awkward asking for money already earned.

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But underneath all of that sits one question: who in your business is actually responsible for collecting payments? In a lot of cases I've seen, the answer is either nobody — or the founder, who's often too uncomfortable to ask for what they're owed. Usually because there's no floor solid enough to say from day one: "These are our terms. We work this way, or we don't work at all."

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So here's what I'd ask you: however good things look from the outside — the team, the growth, the revenue — is it standing on a solid floor? If your biggest client delayed payment for three months starting tomorrow, what happens?

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Nobody will ever applaud you for building a floor. But one day, standing on it in the dark, you'll be grateful you had the nerve to build it when it was boring and nobody noticed.

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P.S. My mom turns 73 this year. She still counts everything. I used to think it was just a leftover habit from harder times. Now I think she understood something about money that most business books take 300 pages to say: it's not about how much comes in. It's about what's still there when things go wrong.