Five years ago, I began a radical experiment that would change my life: I started a for-profit company built on generosity. I did it because, despite everything I’d been taught from my first days in business school onward, I really wanted to believe that you could be generous and successful in business at the same time.

Note that I didn’t say that I believed this. I wanted it to be true, but I had little proof. In my experience, the takers, liars, and assholes seemed to be the ones who shot ahead at work while the givers overworked themselves into middle management obscurity. “Charity’s for home,” one boss advised me, “At work you take care of yourself because no one else will.” I hated that advice even while acknowledging what seemed to be a hard truth. So that’s why this started out as an experiment: I had a hypothesis that things didn’t have to be that way, but I desperately needed proof.

As I shared here, the first year was both difficult and rewarding, but I was ready to call my experiment at least a partial success. I determined that, at a minimum, I could “give first” in my business relationships and make a living as a consultant. I had also managed to build a small but steady business without doing any “selling” in the traditional sense. I wasn’t hustling for prospects: clients were coming to me, sent by people who had already benefitted from my help. So the answer, at least for me, was, “Yes, you can make a living by giving.”

The answer, at least for me, was, “Yes, you can make a living by giving.”

That’s great, but in the words of every startup investor ever: does it scale? After five years, I think so. Today, Da Primus employs 15-20 people, depending upon our project load, including four fractional CTOs who are helping startups build their products, teams, and companies into (hopefully) successful and growing businesses. We’ve worked with more than 30 clients, usually for at least 6 months apiece, and we’ve advised over 100 more companies for free.

It seems like we’ve gone through every version of the startup story in the past five years: massive growth, steady expansion, acquisition, slow extinction, and fiery collisions with the end of the funding runway. Whether they were growing like weeds or shutting down, we’ve guided our clients to find the path that was best for them, their product, their employees, and their customers. We’ve lived a hundred startup lives, with many more to come.

So what’s the point? Is this a humblebrag “look how we’re growing!” marketing post? Definitely not.

So what’s the point? Is this a humblebrag “look how we’re growing!” marketing post? Definitely not. You see, most people are still surprised by a business plan with two words: Give first. They look at a consulting model that doesn’t squeeze dollars out of every interaction and ask, “How do you make money?” So in a world full of “How I made my first million” and “How I turned my side hustle into $10K/mo” articles, I thought I’d share my tips for how to build a sustainable, healthy business by giving before you get, then giving some more. 

And if you leave with nothing else, I hope you remember this:

1. It absolutely works

2. It’s a lot of fun

There are two psychological principles at work here. 

First, being generous implies that you have resources to spare. Or, as one author put it: “When I behave generously, I feel rich.” Even if your budget was feeling cramped before, when you genuinely give to help another person you open up a source of bounty that you didn’t know you had, so you feel better. From a business perspective, giving freely says, “We have time and money to spare,” which equates to success. Combined that with generosity in your business practices and you have a powerful attractant. Given the choice between two partners, wouldn’t you choose to work with the one that’s successful and is going to treat you well?

The second principle is our innate sense of fairness. Most people naturally want to balance the scales in their relationships and expect others to do the same. When they see someone give genuinely and unstintingly, they feel a sort of karmic debt and want to do something kind in return. This leads them to either “pay it back” or “pay it forward” to settle the debt, which often means trying to help a business that operates with generosity. How many times have you felt compelled to share a moment of exceptional customer service or given your loyalty to a company that treated you well? In a transactional world, generosity stands out.

So how do we do it?

We start with the same ground rules that I established in Da Primus’ first year:

1. If you have the time, say yes. To requests for advice, for help, to “pick your brain” over coffee. This is our first avenue for helping others, but it’s also a powerful pathway for opportunities.

2. Our advice and experience are free, period. Taking an hour to point someone in the right direction costs us little, and no one should ever stop getting help because they’re afraid the meter will start running.

3. It’s all about the to-do list. If we meet with someone and they leave with all of the to-dos, then it’s free. If someone asks us to start owning things, then it’s time to talk about our consulting services.

4. No selling. All of our business is inbound, solution-driven, and relationship-based. We might hire a business development person someday, but if we do their motto will probably be “Never Be Closing.”

Beyond that, we’ve developed a few practices that guide our decision-making and make room for generosity in our regular course of business.

Start by helping

Like most technologists, we’re problem-solvers at heart, so framing the correct problem space is essential. Rather than focusing on making a sale or adding people to an engagement, we ask, “How can we help?” Because we like elegant solutions to problems, this leads us to ways that our presence can have an outsized impact on every person we talk to and company we work with. In other words, by focusing on the best way to help, we create leverage for our roles.

We follow this with another question: “If this were my company/budget/idea, what would I do?” By putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes, we create a sense of ownership that helps us make better decisions with them. This often means that we find more capital-efficient ways for them to reach their goals, which builds trust. It has also helped us to build a network of trusted, “startup-friendly” partners who understand that their job is to build companies, not billings. We may not maximize our profit from each project, but we build lasting relationships that lead to repeat business.

Ask “what’s the generous response?” Then do it.

When we aren’t sure what to do, we seek the generous response. Sometimes, this means reducing the amount we charge a client that’s having trouble getting funding or working extra hours to bring a client through an important company milestone. Sometimes it means helping someone see that there’s no new feature that will save their company, so it’s better to spend those last dollars on giving their employees a soft landing when they shut down. Whatever it is, we work toward the best interests of our clients, mentees, and even each other.

When we aren’t sure what to do, we seek the generous response.

Why not just try to be fair? For one thing, fair is subjective and we all consciously or unconsciously try to slant circumstances in our favor, as every contract negotiation illustrates. Also, fair is boring. We want clients to remember and recommend us, so we go further. In the words of Linus Pauling:

“Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error.”

Make a Generosity Budget

Being generous might make you feel rich, but if you’re already feeling pinched then it can feel impossible to even take that first step. There’s an easy solution, though: budget resources to give away. At Da Primus, we reserve 10% of our time for free coaching and mentoring (I also put 10% of our gross profits into a Blessing Fund, but that’s another story). This makes it easy to say yes to those requests for coffee and advice without feeling like we’re forgoing profit. Of course we have time to help: it’s right there in the budget!

Being this intentional with our time not only removes pressure when we see an opportunity to help; it also shows everyone in the company that we value their experience. Coaching isn’t just something that senior people do: everyone’s an expert in their chosen field and can use their hard-won expertise to smooth someone else’s path. We want everyone to feel that satisfaction and, hopefully, get hooked on it.

A couple of years ago, I was at a dinner with someone who’s famous for skipping the small talk at work events and asking penetrating questions instead. After warming everyone up, he asked, “What advice would you give your 25-year-old self that would have changed your life for the better?”

I only had to think about it for a moment. Swallowing the lump in my throat, I said, “You can afford to be so much more generous than you think you can.”

And trust me, it’s worth it.