I’m back with big news… We are DEBT-FREE!!!!
First, hi. How are you? I missed you so much.
Second, I’m back, I’m back, I’m back! Three weeks off… It was wonderful. And now, here we are in 2021.
I hope you enjoyed my blog posts while I was gone. Remember those books I told you I’d be reading? I read none of them. This break ended up being nothing like I expected it to be, and yet, it was exactly what I needed it to be. Turns out, I needed a break from everything. Have you ever felt like that? A break from talking. From reading. From doing my hair. From cooking. From working out. From having any kind of schedule whatsoever, even a loose one. It all felt like too much. Instead, I spent most of my time in my thoughts and in my heart—time spent really connecting with myself. I also spent time with my sister, my parents, Spiros, and Evie. We didn’t really do much of anything and it was everything. And then, of course, my break ended with the events of last week. It is a sad and scary time in our country. There is so much work to do. We must take care of ourselves, our families, our friends, our people. We must create loving, safe spaces around us. Personally, I am grateful for new leadership and for hope in 2021.
Speaking of 2021, I have so much to tell you. After three weeks off, there’s a lot on my heart. I will warn you that this will be a long one, but I hope you’ll make your way to the end. Today, I’ve got two big things to share: news to wrap up 2020, and a preview of what’s in store for the year ahead. Let’s start with the first.
Right before we went on break, we accomplished something huge as a team. It feels surreal to even type this right now, but I’m so excited to tell you that…
WE ARE DEBT-FREE! (For real!!! We did it!!!)
Back in February, I wrote about our ambitious goal to pay off the rest of our business loans by the end of 2020—five years ahead of the repayment schedule. We set this goal before we knew anything about the pandemic, and once it hit, we thought for certain there was no way we’d be able to stay the course. But the fact that we can say WE DID IT, despite closing Student Maid for two months, despite having to completely rethink our business, despite everything, is just… incredible. It feels like a giant weight has been lifted off our shoulders. It feels like taking a huge, deep breath. It feels like freedom. If you’ve ever been in debt and paid it off, I’m sure you know the feeling I’m talking about.
I want to share the steps we took to accomplish our goal in case it will give you inspiration and hope for the obstacles that may be ahead of you, financial or not. But before I do that, I want to thank you. Yes, you—the person reading this post. What helped us pay off our debt the most was taking the work we do within Student Maid and sharing it with other people and teams all over the world: people who want to emulate our culture, who want to reach their potential as leaders, and who want to turn their workplaces into empowering, supportive environments where people thrive. Thank you for reading this blog, for downloading our resources, for joining our LIVEs, and for sharing our work. Thank you for making it possible for us to do what we do every day. There is no way we would have made it through last year—let alone hit our biggest goal—without you. I could say it a million times and it still wouldn’t be enough. THANK YOU!
And now, the story of how we paid off our debt:
In no way did this happen overnight. The truth is that it has been a long, painful, and oftentimes discouraging journey. For many years, we couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel—not even a glimmer. The debt was daunting.
I remember sitting in a conference room with our team seven years ago. I had just written the amount of business debt we had at that time on a whiteboard. It was more than half a million dollars.
I will never forget the look on the team’s faces when they saw the number. I mean, they knew we had debt. I knew we had debt. But we had never added it all up to see exactly how much we had and exactly how long it would take for us to pay it off if we just made the minimum payments. The numbers showed that at that rate, we would have our debt paid off in full by 2025.
I probably don’t need to tell you how defeating it felt to realize that it would take TWELVE YEARS to pay off the debt—and that’s assuming nothing happened that caused us to accrue even more debt in that time. It wasn’t exactly motivating. Even worse, the debt was really holding us back. It was preventing us from giving the raises we wanted to give and taking the big, bold steps we dreamed of taking as a team and as a company.
So how did we get to that half-a-million-dollar number on the whiteboard seven years ago?
At that time, I was 25. I was four years out of college, and I was still very much learning how to lead a business (spoiler alert: still am). I took out these loans before I was 25 to fund various ventures: our software company, MaidSuite, and Student Maid’s second location in Pensacola.
If you’ve read Permission to Screw Up, you know that neither venture panned out like I had anticipated. Josh, my business partner in MaidSuite, passed away unexpectedly, and we ultimately decided to close the company. My heart wasn’t in the Pensacola location, so it wasn’t as successful as it could have been. We eventually found a buyer, but seven years ago, we were just starting our journey in Pensacola.
I was young and inexperienced and thought that loans were the answer to funding new businesses, and the bankers who approved them seemed to agree with me. I could have moved slower. I could have chosen to go after just one new venture at a time instead of going all-in on both at once. I could have used the money that we already had and worked at a smaller scale. But I don’t blame the bankers—I blame myself. What happened is on me, and I had to face the consequences of my choice to take out these loans. The worst part, though, was that my choices didn’t only affect me; they affected our team.
And so, there we were in the conference room, looking at this six-figure number on the whiteboard, trying to imagine what life would look like in twelve years. And we couldn’t really do it. It seemed like we had forever until we got there. Have you ever had that feeling? Where a goal you have feels so out of reach that it almost doesn’t even seem real?
I wish I could tell you that we made a ton of progress toward paying down our debt after that meeting, but that didn’t happen. It took years to gain momentum. Part of the reason was that Student Maid did not have the margins to allow us to make extra debt payments, and at the time, we weren’t sharing our work outside of Student Maid like we do today. Another part of it was that I didn’t know where or how to start, aside from making the minimum payments on the loans. I didn’t have a financial partner in the business—someone who could guide me and help me approach this challenge. But everything changed when I read a book called Profit First in 2018.
If you haven’t read Profit First and you have debt—and even if you don’t—read it. It’s an amazing book. It helped me see that if we focused on profit-generation, not just revenue, and that if we were clear on where we wanted to allocate that profit, we could reach our goal a lot faster. We didn’t follow the book exactly—we put our own spin on its methods—but Profit First did more for the financial health of our business than anything in the past because it helped me develop a different mindset around money. I even asked our newly hired CPA to read it too (shout out to Katie at James Moore in Gainesville) so that we could approach this debt challenge through a similar lens.
And then, there’s Monique. Oh, our Monique. Monique is our Chief of Growth, and she is better with her money than anyone I’ve ever met. I can’t believe it hadn’t dawned on me before that point that she could apply her personal finance knowledge to the finances of our business and be the strategic partner I was looking for. She read Profit First, and we started making more momentum toward debt-payoff than we ever had.
But there was still a disconnect. Even though we were making progress, the rest of the team still felt discouraged by the debt. When I would announce in meetings how much we had paid off and how much we had left to go, I thought I’d be met with excitement, but I never got the reaction I was hoping for.
And then, one day, it happened. It wasn’t a specific ah-ha moment or anything; it was just like all of the lessons I learned had added up, and I could finally see what I needed to do to help the team feel more connected to the goal: I had to show them what paying off the debt really meant. I needed to show the team exactly what would happen once the debt was gone, both for them personally and for the company. I needed to understand what numbers they wanted to see, and I had to show them those numbers in a way that made sense. And then I had to help them see what they could do to impact the goal.
Up until that point, we weren’t exactly numbers people. We were more focused on culture. But now, we were reporting on metrics in our meetings and identifying the levers that result in more profit. We had a spreadsheet that tracked our progress in real time, and the team knew exactly what hitting each milestone meant for them individually as well as for the company.
And now, here we are. The debt is gone. When you see it all laid out neatly in a blog post, it seems like it happened easily and quickly. Let me be clear: It didn’t.
This took SEVEN years.
2,555 days.
And we paid back half of that debt in the last two years.
What I want you to take from this story is this: Whatever challenge you may be facing this year, remain steady. Have patience. Get clear on the levers that will impact the result. Invite others in to help you. Own your mistakes but don’t beat yourself up over them… learn from them. Create a common goal. Let everyone know exactly what will happen when the goal is achieved. Give people a reason to care. Look forward, even when it’s hard. One step at a time. Close your eyes and don’t stop until you can imagine the light at the end of the tunnel—it’s there, no matter how small or faint.
This leads me to part two, which is about where we go from here. We have another huge goal ahead of us in 2021.
With the debt gone, we are starting to reimagine our future. It’s not just the debt that has pushed us toward a new vision: It’s also the work we’ve been doing to build a calm company. It’s the resilience we developed as a team in 2020 when we learned what we were capable of. It’s the weeks of thinking time and clarity. For the first time, I feel like we have arrived in a place where we have real choices. A blank canvas. I suppose we’ve always had choices, but something feels different now.
More than any other year, I’m starting 2021 with an overwhelming sense of freedom to go after what we want and what we are most passionate about as a team. Freedom to go boldly after our dreams of making the world a better place. Our vision is so much bigger than what we are doing now, and we dream to make a much larger impact. It has never felt like the right time to run toward what we really want. But now, it does. And in order to do that, it will require us to reinvent. This is going to be a big year for us—perhaps our biggest one yet. It’s going to be hard and uncomfortable at times, and it’s going to take courage. But if there’s anything 2020 showed us, it’s that we can do anything. And deep in my heart, I know that it’s all going to be worth it.
I know I’m being vague, but as much as I would love to tell you exactly what we have in store, I have to save it for next week. We need to meet this week to make sure we are aligned on our vision as a team, and we'll need a little extra time to do that. My blog post next week will come out on Wednesday (instead of Tuesday), and I promise it will be worth the wait. There’s so much ahead, and I’m going to take you along with us every step of the way.
See you next Wednesday. Until then, big hugs through the screen. Whatever it is that you’ve got ahead of you, you can do it. I believe in you. Here’s to doing 2021 together!
Hugs through the screen,
Kristen
PS: We are back! Join us for our LIVE show this Wednesday at 11 a.m. ET., where our leadership team and I will share the challenges we’re navigating as leaders, as well as talk about this blog post! You can register here: https://bit.ly/3kWe2kT. It’s the same link each week. Hope to see you there!
