In short: The five principles Robert Nikic builds companies by, and what each one looks like in practice.
Five rules.
I didn't get them from a book or a course. Everyone and their mother is selling one of those. I got these from watching what keeps a company standing when things go wrong, and what knocks it over.
They're short on purpose. A rule you have to explain every time isn't a rule.
1. Build without a safety net.
Earn your next month from customers.
Nothing keeps you honest like needing to. When the only money coming in is money customers chose to give you, you can't fool yourself for long. The product works or it doesn't. The price holds or it doesn't. You find out in weeks, not years.
I've watched companies raise money before they had a business, and spend two years building things nobody asked for. I've watched companies with no cushion at all find their customers in two months, because they had to.
This doesn't mean never raise. Some businesses can't exist without money up front. It means don't raise to avoid the hard part. More on this one.
2. The people who build it share in it.
If the team built it, the team should do well when it does well.
That can be equity, profit sharing, bonuses tied to real results, or simply paying people what they're worth before they have to ask. The form matters less than the principle.
Here's what happens when you skip it. Your best people do the math. They see the company growing and their share of it staying flat. They don't quit right away. They go quiet. They stop bringing you ideas. Then one day a competitor makes them an offer and they're gone, and they take what they know with them.
Sharing the upside isn't generosity. It's how you keep the people who make the upside possible.
3. Say the true thing about your own industry.
Every industry has a story it tells about itself. And every industry has the part nobody says out loud.
The fees that customers don't understand. The promise that's technically true and practically misleading. The shortcut everybody takes. The people who get hurt and never get a phone call back.
Say it. Start with your own business. If something your industry does is wrong, the most credible person to say so is someone inside it. You'll lose a few friends. You'll gain the customers who were waiting for someone to be honest with them.
4. Give second chances. Earn yours.
I got more than one. I'm here because of them.
Anyone who has had a second chance owes one forward: in who you hire, who you buy from, who you back and how you treat someone who got it wrong the first time and owned it.
The other half matters just as much. Earn yours. A second chance isn't a pass. When you get one, you show up, you fix what you broke and you don't make the same mistake twice.
The people other employers pass over are often the most loyal people you'll ever hire. They know what the chance cost. They protect it.
5. Open the doors you found closed.
If you made it through, hold the door.
The credit that took you years to get. The introduction nobody would make. The rule nobody explained. The market that seemed locked. Whatever was closed for you, find the person behind you who's standing in front of the same door, and open it.
That's the whole job. Everything else on this list is how you get to the point where you can do it.
Each principle gets its own page over the next few weeks, with what it looks like in a real company, where it breaks, and what I've seen happen when founders ignore it.
Related reading
Robert Nikic is an entrepreneur, TEDx speaker and Advisory Council Chair at Reseated Councils (United Nations SDG 8 & 9). He writes about what he has seen build and break companies, and about the rules that decide whether small businesses get a fair shot. Read his writing on Medium, the Open Doors newsletter on LinkedIn and daily posts on X.
