Why we choose profit

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm your host, Kimberly Rhodes, joined as always by the cofounders of thirty seven Signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanssen. Well, you know, Jason and David have many books that they've published over the years, but they also have some writings on the thirty seven signals website as well as the base camp website. And one of them I thought we would chat about today is called why we choose profit. We've said forever we're a profitable company, but it's actually a choice. So let's dive into that right now. I think that word choose is an interesting place to start. Jason, do you wanna get us started with that? Yeah. I mean, you don't get to choose, like, and get it automatically. But you you do get to choose and think about, like, how do we wanna run this place? Do we wanna, like, be behind the eight ball all the time? Do you wanna just focus on growth? You know, this is one of the reasons why, you know, some people take money. They take money, and they lose a bunch of money for a long time spending other people's money to try to get mind share or market share, and then they try to work their way into profit later on eventually when they have to. We decided to go a different route, which is to keep our costs very, very low upfront and to not get ahead of ourselves and to try to make more money than we spend as early as we possibly could, which turned out to be the first year. And then we've just sort of stayed there. Our profit margins have fluctuated, but we've decided that we don't ever wanna get to a place where we're spending more money than we're making to chase something that we don't have. So if we wanted to grow or get bigger or whatever it would be, we could probably do that profitably too, but there's also an unprofitable way to do that where you suspend your profits for a while, spend a bunch of money, and then hope you can turn that profit spigot back on. We've decided never to do that. So the choice for us is stay within our means, keep our costs below our revenues, and grow comfortably in that sense, grow in control, and make sure that we're always taking money home, basically. So that that's sort of the kind of business we built. And it means that in some cases, people might say you've you've left money on the table. There's opportunities that you've missed because you're you're doing it this way. You could have been this company or that company or worth 5,000,000,000 or whatever. Like, could have been, would have been, maybe, could have, whatever. Who knows? What we know is is that we're still in business twenty …