Mary Poppins was my favorite movie as a kid. I loved her the way kids love a good babysitter ... fun, a little magic, doesn’t yell. I understand her better every year I get older. She never flattered the Banks children or told Mr. Banks what he wanted to hear. She gave whichever medicine each of them actually needed, said the hard thing when it needed saying, and left the moment she wasn’t needed anymore instead of staying around for the thanks. That was never nice. It was kind. It took me over 30 years to notice the difference.
The same split shows up with money, whether or not anyone in the room would call it that.
A nice advisor tells a business owner who’s ready to grow: “That’s exciting. Let’s make it happen.” It’s the answer that matches the energy in the room. Nobody feels talked down to. Nobody leaves the meeting deflated.
A kind advisor asks a different question: “How are you funding it?”
Not “can you afford it” ... most business owners can technically afford almost anything for a little while, on a card or a loan or good intentions. The real question is whether the growth is going to be funded by cash that’s already sitting there, ready, or by cash that hasn’t shown up yet and is being counted on anyway.
This isn’t just an advisor thing. My son is eight. When he brings me a drawing, I tell him it’s great, because at eight, effort is the whole point. If he’s still bringing me drawings at eighteen, hoping to make a living from it, telling him it’s great stops being kind. It’s just nice. At some point, he needs someone willing to tell him what’s not working yet, not just someone clapping.
A few years ago, Brandon and I had the chance to stop being two individual financial professionals working next to each other and become something bigger: co-CEOs of an actual financial services firm. Real growth, the kind you say yes to.
It also meant real new overhead. Being a firm costs more than being two people with desks near each other. And the revenue that was supposed to justify the new expenses didn’t show up on day one. It showed up later, the way it usually does. For a while, we were paying for a bigger version of ourselves before that bigger version was paying for itself.
This is exactly the moment where Profit First quietly breaks for a lot of business owners. The system works by paying your profit and your owner’s compensation first, then running the business on what’s left. It’s brilliant right up until a growth expense doesn’t fit inside what’s left, and the temptation is to raid the accounts you promised yourself you wouldn’t touch. Once you do that once, the discipline is gone. You’ve taught yourself the rule is optional.
We didn’t raid the accounts. We used the cash value we’d already built in our Bank On Yourself type policies to cover the gap while the new revenue caught up. The Profit First structure stayed intact the whole time. We didn’t have to choose between growing and keeping our word to ourselves.
Profit First and Bank On Yourself aren’t two separate ideas we happen to both use. One makes the other possible. Profit First is what creates the surplus in the first place ... it’s the cash flow structure that keeps a business from spending itself broke on its own way up. Bank On Yourself is where that surplus goes to become something usable. Without a place for the surplus to live and grow, “pay yourself first” is just a nice idea you’ll abandon the first time growth gets expensive. Without the structure that creates the surplus, there’s nothing to “bank” in the first place.
Most growth advice skips this part entirely. It treats growth like a decision you make with excitement and figure out the funding for later. That’s the nice version. It feels good in the meeting. It’s also how a lot of otherwise solid businesses end up stretched thin, servicing debt they took on to fund a “yes” that came before the money did.
The kind no is a sequencing question, not a rejection of ambition: liquidity first, then growth ... not growth first, with liquidity as a hope. Wait long enough to have already built the thing that pays for the next thing. It’s a harder answer to give and a harder one to hear, because “not yet” doesn’t feel as good as “let’s go.” But “let’s go” funded by nothing is how a good year turns into a stressful one.
Nice and kind can sound identical in a single meeting. The difference shows up in what gets asked next: “does this feel right to you?” versus “how does this actually get funded, and what happens to the rest of your plan while it’s being paid for?” Nice lets a good year carry an optimistic assumption forward unchallenged. Kind asks what the same decision looks like if next year isn’t as good.
If you want to know which one you’re getting, pay attention to what happens when you say yes fast. Nice matches your energy and moves on. Kind slows down long enough to ask where the money’s actually coming from ... even when the answer is still yes.
And to demand kind treatment instead of just nice, go ahead and ask your own what-if questions. If you want to be treated kindly, treat others kindly in return. If you want to keep it surface-level, smile and keep your not-so-nice thoughts to yourself. I hope you’ll choose kind when you talk with me.
Where in your business are you funding tomorrow’s growth with money that hasn’t arrived yet?
