A Radical Business Model (that works when your planet's on fire)

[THE EVRYTHNG MODEL: INTRO | HACKING CAPITALISM | A DEEPER DIVE | OUR IMPACT]

Businesses that make bold claims about giving back are fraught with issues - it's easy to ramp up costs and expenses so that in the end, very little is actually given away.

 

To drive trust amongst jaded consumers we’ve created a new set of rules for doing business on a planet in chaos, based on a radically transparent approach. 

We have three key pledges:

1) Each Evrythng business has one employee who is not paid a traditional salary. Their remuneration is performance-based: they earn a fee per product sold. This keeps overheads radically low and allows us to give away profit from day one and not some indeterminate date in the future.

2) There are no for-profit investors in the business and we will never be for sale via an acquisition or IPO or similar.

3) Anyone, customer or not, can log into our Xero account and track every single penny as it moves through the business. Just email hi@evrythng.cc and you can check we’re doing what we say, in real-time. 

Why is each of these pledges important?

1) You may have come across businesses that promise to give 10% of profits to a certain charitable cause and are then disappointed to find that after 'exceptional deductions' they gave very little away.  In reality, it's easy (either by design or by bad practice) to ramp up the operating costs of a business so there's no profit created once everyone has been paid, expense accounts have been reconciled and marketing budgets have been met. 

If we want to do a judo move on capitalism (so we can exploit the profit it makes) we need to change the structure of the businesses we are running. By forgoing a traditional salary it means that when you buy a product from us we can create profit from day one, not in the future when salaries and these other costs have been met.

It relies on founders who are willing to focus on the long game and swap future millions for a steady and equitable salary.

2) If Evrythng business behaved like all before them, they would raise venture capital so they could employ a big team and carve out a marketing budget to cut through the noise of competition. By doing so, they would immediately be at the behest of the system we are trying to defeat. The people investing would expect a significant return on their money and will lean on you to cut costs, drive up margins and access the cheaper, dirtier parts of a supply chain. 

By eschewing any form of for-profit investment we are unencumbered from this system and are free to write our own rules of how to do business on a planet in chaos. 

3) By giving this globally unique level of access to the day-to-day finances of our business we not only drive a deep trust with commercial buyers and end consumers, we also build in a feature that allows us to grow a worldwide collection of Evrythng businesses at lightning speed.

One key part of our future growth is the free assignment of our IP to any founder in any category and any territory so that they can quickly spin up an Evrythng business with minimal investment. If you are a coffee expert in Rio or a gin expert in Sydney and you are will to pledge to these three promises then you can join the mission. By having open accounts, we can rely on the crowd to hold each business to account. If you are not passing on the profit or buying Porsches on expenses, then you will be quickly found out and shut down. 

This beats the B Corp model as it takes 200 or so people months to do the administrative checking that companies need to achieve their status. We can quickly build a network of not-for-profit businesses so that you'll see many types of packaged consumer goods on the shelves of our local supermarket one day - we hope! 

[THE EVRYTHNG MODEL: INTRO | HACKING CAPITALISM | A DEEPER DIVE]