Lunch Money — by Dan Lynn

By Dan Lynn

When I started at ADP in 1997, I met a great, ambitious salesperson named Scott Delea. We hit it off instantly, and we discovered we shared the same dream: someday, each of us wanted to build a business of his own.

So we made a pact, the way you do when a dream is still young: we'd stop buying lunch and start bringing it. Save money for the future. Looking back, it's hilarious — we were saving maybe a few dollars a day. At that rate, we'd have funded a startup sometime around 2040.

But here's what actually happened. Every day, we'd sit down together with our brown bags — and talk about our dreams. What the businesses would look like. How we'd run them. What we'd do differently than the companies around us. Day after day, lunch after lunch, the dream stayed on the table, out loud, in front of a witness.

In early 2000, I left ADP to pursue my first business, DigitalGrit , full time. I never forgot those lunches — and shortly after we launched, I hired Scott as one of our first employees. Scott was a major driver of the success of DigitalGrit. Years later, after we sold the company, Scott went off and did exactly what he'd said he'd do at that lunch table: he started his own business.

I can tell you that the few dollars we saved definitely didn't make any difference. But the conversations? The conversations made all the difference. Because here's what we'd actually built without knowing it: a daily appointment with the dream. Most dreams die quietly, not from failure but from neglect — nobody talks about them, so they fade. Ours couldn't fade. It had a standing lunch reservation and a witness holding it accountable.

If you have a dream, don't just save for it. Find someone to say it out loud to — regularly, ritually, for years if that's what it takes. The money we brown-bagged was never the investment. The lunches were.