What Goes Around, Comes Around: Mentorship as a Business Model

Story by Natalie Beach

People love to say that what goes around comes around, usually right before something bad happens to someone who deserved it. I've come to know it the other way. You give what you can, honestly and without keeping score, and one day it comes back to you multiplied. I didn't plan it that way. I'm not sure you can plan it. But I've lived it, so let me tell you how it went.

I started this company with five thousand dollars and a dream I was too stubborn to give up on. What I did not have was a blueprint. What I had instead were a few young women who believed in me before there was much of anything to believe in. We call them the OGs now. They worked their tails off for a business that could barely promise them a future, and everything good that came after started with them.

If you're an owner reading this and hoping I'll hand you a shortcut, I don't have one. What I have is the long way around, which is the only way I know.

“These women believed in me and worked their asses off."

The choice: pay them first.

When money was tight, and in the early years money was always tight, I made sure everyone got their check. Some weeks that meant I didn't get mine. I want to be clear that I never thought of this as noble. It was just the math of my own conscience. These women showed up for me, so I was going to show up for them, even when showing up meant going without. I didn't say much about it at the time. I'm still not sure I need to. You either understand why you do that or you don't.

The choice: put it all back in.

If you ask me what I did with the profits in those first years, my honest answer is, what profits. Anything left over went straight back into the business. But I don't just mean equipment and inventory. The best money I ever spent, though it rarely looked like money, went into people. Into teaching, correcting, showing up early and staying late next to someone who was still learning. Relationships were the real investment. I couldn't have told you the return at the time. I can tell you now that it was the best deal I ever made.

The choice: hold the line.

I design spaces down to the sixteenth of an inch, because in this work a sixteenth of an inch is the difference between beautiful and broken. So I ran the studio the same way. I expected a lot, I gave a lot, and I never pretended the bar was lower than it was. I wasn't trying to build the future of my company when I did that. I was just trying to do the work right. But it turns out that when you show hungry young people what uncompromising looks like every single day, you're building something whether you mean to or not.

And that is what came back around

Here's the part I still can't quite believe. The people I poured into all those years ago grew into exactly what this company needed. Some left and came home. Christy went off and started her own cabinetry firm, then walked back through my door with all of that hard-won experience in her pocket. Some never left at all. Jacqui has been with me since the late 2010s, and her technical skill rivals the best designers in the business. And some grew up right in front of me. Rachael started as a simple administrative assistant and has come back around as one of the leaders running our day-to-day operations and building our new ventures.

I gave that mentorship away for free, expecting nothing, and it became exactly the leadership this company needed to grow into what it's becoming. I didn't earn that. I planted it early and got lucky enough to still be standing here when it grew.

So if you're building something and you're wondering whether it's worth pouring into people who might one day walk out the door, here's my advice, for whatever it's worth. Pour anyway. Do right by people because it's right, not because of what it gets you. And then don't be surprised when some of them find their way back home.