One of the less discussed parts of building a business is that society and business often speak in entirely different languages when it comes to success, and because of that, a founder can spend years doing what is rational in one domain while appearing irrational, unimpressive, or even suspect in the other.
Society, understandably, relies on visible shorthand. It wants some immediate, legible proof that one is doing well. The car one drives, the clothes one wears, the watch on the wrist, the wallet in the pocket, the handbag one’s wife carries, the house one lives in — these things are not merely objects, but signals, and people read them with astonishing confidence. From these surfaces, they infer scale, competence, credibility, and truthfulness. If the outward presentation is modest, then many quietly conclude that the inner reality must be modest too. If one claims otherwise, it can sound like exaggeration.
But business, especially in its earlier growth years, often demands a very different posture. It asks not what can be displayed, but what can still be retained. It asks whether the next dollar is better spent on comfort or on capacity. It asks whether the founder is willing to delay the performance of success in order to increase the substance of it.
That, in very plain terms, is why I have come to see deferred salary or deferred salary increments not as some grand act of self-denial, but as a form of capital allocation. Sometimes the business is not paying the founder more not because the business is weak, but because it is strong enough, and the opportunities ahead are compelling enough, that spare cash has a higher return inside the machine than outside it.
This is easy enough to say once the logic has become obvious in hindsight. It is much harder when one is living through it.
—
Because in real life, this decision does not feel noble. It often feels confusing. There is a period, sometimes a long one, where you are not entirely sure whether you are being disciplined or simply making life harder for yourself than necessary. You watch peers around you move along more socially recognisable tracks of progress. They buy the continental car while sitting in a fifteen-year-old car on the way to check on a stanky civil defence basement outlet.
And meanwhile, if you are in that founder phase where the business keeps presenting openings for expansion, you find yourself doing the opposite. You keep your own pay below market rates. You defer increments. You keep driving the old car. You continue dressing simply. You keep cash inside the business, because you know — or at least you hope, with a conviction that is never fully free of anxiety — that the retained dollar will do more work there than it will in your personal lifestyle.
I knew the theory. I had read the book. I understood compounding. I understood that a dollar retained in a business earning high returns is worth more than a dollar spent. But knowing that and feeling okay about it while your peers are visibly enjoying the rewards of normal career trajectories — those are two completely different things.
And when you have young kids, the internal narrative gets harder still. It is no longer just your own consumption you are deferring. The question shifts from “can I handle this?” to “am I depriving my family?” That is a different kind of stress entirely. The founder chooses the pain. The family inherits it.
—
This is where the emotional burden begins. The challenge is not merely delayed gratification, though that phrase is directionally correct. It is delayed social proof. It is not just that you are postponing comfort. It is that you are postponing the external evidence by which other people are willing to believe you.
I saw this most clearly in the earlier years when we were building out gyms. My co-founders and I would meet property agents or landlords dressed very casually — T-shirt, bermudas, sandals or slippers — sometimes driving a van or a very old car. If they did not know us beforehand, there would often be that subtle but recognisable first impression, that initial categorisation that people do almost unconsciously. You can read a person’s face in the first ten seconds. And what their face said was: these guys are not serious.
And then the conversation would continue.
We would talk about how many outlets we had already opened, our next few outlets, what we knew about lease structures and fire safety compliance and equipment procurement. We would reference our fabrication arm, our trading businesses, our supply chain. We would explain our cluster model and expansion roadmap. At no point did we reveal any trade secrets — but we demonstrated enough depth that the posture in the room would shift.
One could almost feel the perception changing shape in real time. It would dawn on them that we were not hobbyists wandering in hopefully, nor dreamers intoxicated by our own pitch, but operators who had done this repeatedly and who understood locations, operations, cost structures, and execution at a level that could not be faked for very long. And then, sometimes only then, the old car and the simple presentation began to look different. They were no longer interpreted as evidence of weakness, but as evidence of restraint — that this deferred consumption was a lifestyle choice made so that the businesses could grow even faster.
Today it is different. We do not walk into every room as strangers anymore. Landlords request us. Agents refer us. Fellow operators recommend us. The credibility is attached before we arrive. But that took years of showing up underdressed and over-prepared, earning trust one conversation at a time.
Looking back, I think the slippers were accidentally a filter. The agents who could see past the appearance and recognise the substance — those became our long-term partners. The ones who could not filtered themselves out. We did not plan it that way, but it worked that way.
—
Let me make this concrete, because the numbers are what make the logic undeniable rather than merely persuasive.
My co-founders and I have drawn minimal personal salary across all our businesses for over a decade. Before we started fit bloc and Arkkies in 2021, we had Movement First (fitness equipment, founded 2013), Javy Sports & First Aid (school PE equipment, 2016), and KC Metal & Trading (metal fabrication, 2019). Each entity was funded by retained earnings from the ones before it. No investors. No external capital. Just profits reinvested instead of extracted.
Here is what that reinvestment enabled.
When HDB-managed civil defence shelters came up for bid, we could move aggressively. We could stomach rapid site buildouts and sometimes elevated bid prices because the capital was in the business, ready to deploy — not locked in a condo mortgage.
We had 15 of such outlets by the time HDB started excluding gyms in late 2025 as an approved trade entirely — too many other operators had caused disamenities like noise, vibrations, and heat from aircon compressors, on top of internal issues like illegal modifications and misuse of void spaces. Rent across these outlets is affordable, will never be increased drastically, and will stay for the long term as long as we do not move out or cause trouble. That base is now permanently protected. Nobody can replicate it. That window existed briefly, and we were in a position to capture it, because retained earnings meant we could move on each opportunity without hesitation.
Our fabrication business, KC Metal, gives us a customisation advantage over every competitor. We understand how to fabricate and modify metal structures for effectiveness. That business exists because profits from Movement First were deployed to start Javy Sports, which were then redeployed into building KC Metal — rather than paying ourselves more.
Each business funded the conditions for the next business. That is not diversification — it is compounding across entities. And the compounding only works because the founders are not extracting.
—
This captures one of the stranger ironies of entrepreneurship. The very behaviours that strengthen the business can weaken how the founder is perceived. One conserves cash because growth opportunities are real, because money left in the business can compound harder than money extracted too early for consumption. But from the outside, prudence can be mistaken for scarcity. Simplicity can be mistaken for underperformance. Deferred consumption can be mistaken for failure.
The paradox that took me years to articulate clearly: the better your businesses are doing, the more capital you need to retain for expansion — and the less successful you appear. Meanwhile, someone whose business has plateaued can afford to extract freely. They have nowhere to deploy the cash. So they buy the continental car and the condo, and they look more successful than the person who is compounding at twice their rate but putting every dollar back into the machine.
The market may eventually reward prudence. Society, much of the time, rewards display.
—
And that is why I think the question of founder salary is not merely a financial question, though it is certainly that. It is also a psychological question, and perhaps even a moral one. What exactly are you optimising for in this season of life? Are you trying to look successful, or are you trying to become structurally stronger? Are you extracting proof, or are you preserving optionality? Are you decorating the outer layer of life, or are you still feeding the engine?
I do not say this to romanticise needless suffering. There is no virtue in paying oneself absurdly little forever, nor is there wisdom in confusing prudence with permanent deprivation. A founder should, in time, be paid properly. But there are phases in business where the disciplined decision is to leave more inside the company than one’s ego might prefer, because the business is still in that fertile stage where retained capital meaningfully enlarges what can be built next.
The end result, in our case, is full control of all our businesses — without external funding, without giving up equity, without answering to short-term investors whose timelines do not match our own.
But there is one more dimension to this that I only recently found the words for, and it may be the one that matters most. A typical commercial gym membership in Singapore costs $100 to $110 a month, often with a long-term contract, an initiation fee, and a cancellation penalty. Our gyms charge roughly $55 a month. No contract. No lock-in. Low initiation fee. No penalty for leaving. If you want to try getting into fitness, you can walk in and start without risk.
For every dollar I do not pay myself, I can work towards opening another gym. And for every gym I open, roughly 400 members save about $40 a month compared to what they would pay elsewhere. That is $16,000 a month in savings returned to the community — per outlet. Multiply that across fifteen, twenty, twenty-five outlets, and the number becomes difficult to ignore.
This reframes the entire question of deferred salary. It is not only a capital allocation decision for the founder. It is, in a small but real way, a resource allocation decision for the community. Every dollar retained inside the business does not simply compound for me. It funds another outlet that makes fitness more accessible to people who could not or would not pay commercial gym prices. The sacrifice could be just on me, but the benefit is for the entire community.
And sometimes it is simply the discipline to accept that real compounding often becomes visible much later than the sacrifice that made it possible.
Early founder life, at least for many of us, is not just delayed gratification.
It is delayed social proof.
Leave a Reply