My Dad Made Me Pay for My Own Haircuts

My dad told me I had to start paying for my own haircuts. I called him from college, outraged. Was I six? No. I was nineteen.

The deal was already lean by the standards of my friends: I paid 25% of my own tuition, plus most of my expenses. Now haircuts too? I hung up convinced this was an injustice worth telling people about. (I'm telling people about it right now, so apparently I never fully let it go.)

But here's what happened next. I started noticing what things cost. I typed papers for other students, detailed cars, flipped VW bugs. I wrote down every expense each week, by hand. Not because anyone made me. Because the money leaving was mine.

There's an old line: nobody washes a rental car. My dad had quietly moved me out of the rental.

I've watched the same principle sort people ever since. When we kicked off Mass Relevance in 2009, the founders wrote personal checks into the company on day one. Not because the company needed our money. Because we needed the feeling of it being our money. Same thing inside companies: hand a leader a budget and they'll spend it. Hand them a P&L and they'll defend it. Same person, different exposure.

I've come to believe ownership isn't a title. It's exposure. People take care of what costs them something.

That phone call was maybe a ten-dollar-a-month decision for my dad. It might have been the cheapest business education I ever got.

(These days the haircut budget takes care of itself. God's way of issuing a refund, I assume.)

Where in your business are you still paying for haircuts that someone else should feel?