Every single team member, every single employee in our company, every one of them took a substantial pay reduction.

Most of them 50%. There were a couple of people that on top of a 50% pay reduction deferred additional compensation.

So they say, well, you know, my wife is making enough at her job and I've got enough save.

I only need to take home about 10% of my salary. I'll be able to cover my costs, my mortgage or whatever.

They all came to the table and that I will never, ever forget that.

I think one of the most important things that I learned during that time frame was the concept of...

...multiple people are selling their own money.

It's a great question, really insightful question, Austin, because...

...they voted to remove me as CEO of my own company. I still own more than 50% of it. I still was the owner. But they fired me as the CEO of my own company.

It was the most devastating thing that ever happened to me as an entrepreneur.

My name is Jay Wilkinson. I am the founder and CEO of FireSpring. We are located in Lincoln, Nebraska. I am 54. I've been at this quite a while.

My company FireSpring, we refer to as the world's first inside out agency.

I've been in the world of creating great marketing materials and content as an ad agency for our clients for many years.

And a couple of years ago we made a pretty sharp pivot to really start focusing on working with companies that exist more for their why than their what.

We want to work with companies that are trying to elevate the world around them, create an impact in their communities, referring back to the triple bottom line, making sure that you're focused on the social impact you make, environmental impact, and of course the employees and the people that work for your company were really focusing all those things.

We are a B corporation. We were featured in Inc magazine as one of the 50 best companies to work for in America. We really care deeply about all that stuff. And I think that really turned our attention towards wanting to work with other like-minded companies, other companies that focus more on their why than their what.

It was just this frustration that I had that there were so many companies, businesses, products, and services out there and entrepreneurs and people within those companies who say they're one thing and you get to know them a little bit, you do business with them and it turns out that they're something entirely different.

In 2018 we all live in glass houses, everything is changing so fast. I don't believe that companies in the future will be able to be in business if they're not doing what they say they'll do and living by the standards that they say they live by actually living their values and not just hanging them on a poster on the wall in an office.

The reason we call ourselves an inside out agency is that we not only help them now, this was the big pivot. We always help them with their marketing, building communities of influence around the products and services and helping them just become great stewards in the product lines.

But we learned that so many of the leadership teams inside of these companies were not aligned in their why and their purpose and creating culture that people just wanted to be part of. So now we come in and we also in addition to doing the marketing on the other side of things, we come in and work on the inside with leadership teams to help them get aligned then around what it means to be a company of purpose.

So we worked at them from both the inside out and we work with them from the outside in and it's been just so much fun ever since we made that change and we are loving life.

How big is your company today? We have more than 200 employees, two locations, one in Lincoln, Nebraska, one in Omaha, Nebraska. We have somewhere in the neighborhood of around 10,000 clients in all 50 states and 12 countries.

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