As of this year, I will officially have been running my small media business, The Financial Diet, for a full decade. I am not alone: our company has four partners, and I only own a little over half of it personally. We have had W-2 employees for nearly all ten years, usually somewhere between five and ten, plus a steady stream of regular contractors who work on individual projects. But as co-founder and CEO, majority owner, and the face of our flagship content offerings, there are certain roads I have always needed to walk alone.

This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily: over the years, I’ve been able to create a job I really enjoy doing (making fun, educational content with a four-day workweek and a great team around me is a dream as far as day jobs go). And as one of the owners of the company, the value we create inherently benefits me, even if we currently have no plans to sell. I’ve always been open about my decision to pay myself less than other employees – and it is in many ways a selfish one, as I do not want the pressure of meeting bloated executive compensation packages – but it would be dishonest to downplay the tangible benefits of being a majority shareholder. We are not a co-op or a nonprofit, and that has impacts on the distribution of value.

But, as anyone who follows our work knows, we don’t really operate like a company that’s trying to generate shareholder value. We have no outside investors, we don’t optimize for profit, we don’t pay dividends, we don’t utilize interns or other cheap labor, and we don’t accept advertising dollars from huge swaths of the financial sector. (There was a time when crypto was flooding our industry with endless marketing budgets, for example, but we were determined to be on the right side of that particular chapter in history.) We end the year generally where we started, not lining our pockets, but supporting a solid team of women and building a community and body of work we can be proud of.

This calculus has always been worth it for myself and my partners. It’s not a personal enrichment venture – those of us who work actively at the company are W-2 like anyone else – but it makes for a great life. And for going on ten years now, this has always been worth it. Even in the times when being a business owner can be the most brutal, the good has always outweighed the bad handily. But as I look down the ski slope of a fourth consecutive year in a state of public health and economic flux, I am tired. I’m tired in a way I’ve rarely experienced, tired because it’s becoming clear just how much media – like essentially every industry in this country – is pushing us towards the lowest common denominator, and punishing those who opt away from that bottom.

The race to find the next relevant platform and totally overhaul your content strategy to fit it, year after year, is exhausting. The imperative to adapt events to the day-to-day fluctuations of safety protocols and digital accessibility is impossible to keep up with. The pandemic-and-recession combo that has decimated small businesses everywhere was once at least somewhat softened by government subsidies and reimbursements, and those are all but totally gone. We’re lucky to be a business in New York state, which helps us with things like supplementing maternity leave when one of our employees has a baby, but that’s basically all we’ve got. After a few years of help, we are back to fending for ourselves, as if everything were normal — even though nothing is.

And late last year, I had a bit of a breakdown. It’s never clear to me the appropriate mental health language to use because problems are relative, and mine are still privileged regardless of the scale, but I ended up seeing a doctor on an emergency visit and walking out with a prescription for an as-needed anxiety medication to take in case of another panic attack. I have only taken these pills twice, but I carry them with me absolutely everywhere: having them feels like a security blanket, and even though many more material things have changed in the past few months, I credit admitting I might occasionally need real help with providing a window of relief even during times of extreme stress.

Make no mistake: the stress, at times, was extreme. We dealt with things that nearly all businesses do at some point, like needing to pay people before you have been paid, or last year’s budgets no longer applying to this year’s receivables, or old solutions proving ill-adapted to new problems. Every partner and staffer has been affected by these problems, and has acted with grace in adapting to them. But as I said at the outset of the article, some roads I inherently find myself walking alone. As CEO, as majority owner, as the face of things, that sometimes meant I either figured the money out in the short term, or let things come crashing down due to problems of timing, losing everything we’d spent ten years building. In practice, that meant making budget cuts in every area of spending, that meant me foregoing a salary for months on end, that meant my husband and myself lending money to the business personally to avoid a toxic downward spiral of predatory working capital loans. The weight of it all – the fear of coming this far just to fail, of the responsibility of other women’s livelihoods and the value of this asset we’ve created – left me feeling like a dry twig crushed under a stampede. It was too much, all at once, and I didn’t even know the kind of help to ask for.

I only feel comfortable writing this now because I’m standing on the other side of a new year, and of these problems which in the moment felt impossible to handle. All the money we made last year seems to be coming in all at once, as is so often the case, and we’re operating with an extreme caution that means barring a force majeure – and let’s be clear, you can never rule those out – we will see the year through in a financially healthy way. (It’s a big year for us: our ten-year anniversary, our second book, new shows, and plenty more stuff we feel genuinely so excited to get to produce.)

But I have also made a decision through this experience that I share not just as a business owner, but as a human being: I’m not going to be playing the hyper-capitalist game anymore. I will continue to take on the responsibility of CEO, but I will not take it on as an identity. My self-worth and value are not tied to my ability to create profit in perpetuity, or show year-over-year growth on a spreadsheet. I will not race to the bottom on every new social platform, or create increasingly frivolous and nuance-less content optimized to trick people into watching. I will not hold events that aren’t safe to attend, even if it means taking a loss on them, as we have had to do many times in the past few years. We have been able to run a business with real financial ethics and produce high-quality work we are proud of for ten years, and as long as we can keep doing that, I’ll be here and so will our team. But I will not force a square peg into a circle just to say that I have succeeded for another year.

This is in large part why we decided, late last year, to totally change our video strategy. We were done catering to the endless demands of the weekly algorithmic cycle, and wanted to invest in longform, less frequent videos that could meaningfully deep dive on issues we care about. We’ve been lucky thus far in that this new format has been very successful for us, but even if it hadn’t been, that wouldn’t have been a reason to keep ourselves chained to a production schedule we’d long outgrown.

Similarly, we are moving a huge part of what we do – our monthly workshops, podcasts, newsletters, book clubs, videos, etc – to be members-only. The rat race of fighting for attention on every new thing, of devaluing our work, of trying to cater to an audience of “literally everybody” is just no longer working for us, creatively or financially. We are building a community of women (and a few men!) who are interested in building a thoughtful and financially sound life, and want to do it together. If that’s you, wonderful; if that’s not, no problem. We’ll always keep the majority of our financial education free, and our flagship shows accessible. But we’re interested in building a community that sustains itself, not one that is having to re-prove itself with every new whim of the algorithm.

Last year was the first as a business owner where I truly confronted the existential stakes of maintaining what we’ve built. I realized that it wasn’t just a question of financial solvency, but of personal identity – one that our deeply broken culture of worship around entrepreneurs only encourages. If we did not have the resources we did, we could easily have gone out of business. And that would have been seen as a personal failing, rather than an outcome of an economy where running a business year over year with any semblance of labor values is brutally difficult. That narrative has always been one I internalized, even without realizing it, and the extraordinary personal stress I experienced was in part a reflection of that. If I couldn’t make everything work somehow, who was I? What value did I have?

I’m back in therapy now, and the work is centered around just those questions. Finding a balance between “giving your best to your work” and “understanding that some things are forever out of your control, and that you also get to have limits” is an everyday thing, but it’s a task worth taking on. For me, for this year, I’m starting small: we are making the changes we need to make in our business for our purposes, not out of fear but out of agency. If it’s not pleasing to the platform gods, if it doesn’t go viral, if it doesn’t generate a million dollars in custom advertising, that’s just going to have to be okay. If another pandemic comes, and we don’t survive this one, that’s just going to have to be okay. If saying no to the hamster wheels of perpetual growth and maximizing profits puts us at a critical disadvantage, that’s just going to have to be okay.

I hope you’ll join us for everything we’re doing this year, but as a business owner, I’m okay if you don’t. And to any other business owner reading this, if you have struggled with the ever-moving goalposts of your industry and your own expectations for yourself, I get you. I know how painful and how frustrating this dance can be, and how every year feels like you’ve earned no credit from the last. Please know that you are valuable no matter what the P&L shows, and that if you’re building something with even a shred of ethics, you’re playing a rigged game and each day you survive is worth celebrating. Ten years may not be the milestone, but at least for me, it’s enough of a milestone to decide that much for myself.

— Chelsea Fagan, TFD cofounder and CEO

---

To directly support TFD, please consider joining our wonderful membership program on Patreon or YouTube. They're exactly the same on both platforms — so join on whichever platform you prefer!