We have talked before about how LMG makes money. The vast majority of our
revenue comes directly from our audience through sales of our products or from
watching our content either on YouTube or over on Floatplane where our
incredible float goats subscribe for extra content, early access, and perks.
The rest of it comes indirectly from our audience in the form of sponsorships and
affiliate links. And that's why when we make a decision, you are our guide. We
are laser focused on serving our audience with the products we develop
and the content we create. Which is why it's time finally to have the talk. What
happens to the money? How does Lionus Media Group spend money? How much of it
does Lionus keep? I'm going to tell you all of it. But first, I'm going to need
to get some money from our sponsor, Meter. They're here to help you build
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I really didn't want to kill our accounting department preparing this. So
before we begin, I want to acknowledge that the data that they prepared does
contain some rounding and some quick math. So take it for what it is. It's a
big picture look at expenses for the last couple of years with Windows of
insight into the smaller details. With that out of the way, let's begin. Across
2024 and 2025, our largest expenses
combining for 50% of our total were inventory purchases and [music] people.
Now, when I say inventory, that doesn't include cameras and editing workstations
and that sort of thing. I'm talking about the 4% we spend on apparel, the 8%
we spend on backpacks and other gear items, and the 14% that we spend [music]
on screwdrivers and other items to stock in our warehouses and ship around the
world. It's kind of wild to think about, right? A quarter of our expenses are
buying inventory for ltstore.com. Now, in theory, these are sound
investments that should generate profit for us. So, uh, no big deal, right? But
nothing is a guarantee. We've had our share of duds over the years and even
for successful products, managing cash flow for a growing business can be
extremely challenging. If you buy too little, your store looks abandoned. You
buy too much and you might be short on money for payroll. The big loadin that
we had for Black Friday this year required pretty careful coordination
between Creator Warehouse and our accounting department. By the way, thank
you for being part of it and don't forget to leave a review for your purchase. We do read them and we care a
lot about your feedback. The next biggest expense for LMG is people, but
we'll come back to them later because I want to dive a little bit deeper into that. So, first let's talk about product
fulfillment. Why don't you guys have a European distribution center, you might
ask? Well, because the distribution channels that we have now are already
10% of our total company expenses. Guys,
storage ain't free. And the people who pick your orders, they're not free
either. Trust me, I hate giving couriers this 8% exactly as much as you do. And
when the time is right for us to have distribution in regions like Europe and
Australia, we will do it, but for now, we're just going to have to keep
exploring other ways to reduce our shipping costs and improve our delivery
processes for our global customers. Another thing that I'd love to reduce,
but can't, is selling costs at 3%. This
includes the fees that we pay for our Shopify store as well as the pound of
flesh that we sacrifice to payment processors like PayPal and Stripe. Let's
see what's next. Ah, yes, overhead.
That's an expense. Yeah, okay. It's a pretty broad term, but there are a lot
of things that need to fit under this umbrella. Our overhead category includes
bank fees, insurance, as well as company
events like sports nights, quarterly department activities, summer of fun,
which is where employees get credits for group activities like meals, golf, arts
and crafts, etc. And of course, our epic
annual Christmas party. It also includes postage, mileage reimbursements, office
supplies, janitorial services, security, building maintenance, marketing, and
charitable donations. Utilities are also in here at about 3%. And then there's
R&D, which I assume includes some of the wacky equipment that the CW team buys to
develop new products. Travel comes in at about half a percent and production
purchases weigh in at around 1%. So that's your cameras, lenses, lights, SD
cards, and that sort of thing. I actually remember making a comment years
ago about how cameras are not expensive, people are expensive, and people lost
their freaking minds about how out of touch I was. But this is the context,
folks. Yeah, cameras sting a little, but like software is substantially higher at
1.5% of our yearly outlet. The biggest ones are Solid Works for CAD, Gorgeous
for managing customer care tickets, and Adobe for well, you know, this Adobe,
Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, and Ship Station make up kind of the next
tier. And then there's a bunch of smaller ones. The last two big ticket
overhead items, totaling 1 and a half and 2% of our annual expenses,
respectively, are foreign exchange and other, which I assume is just
embezzlement, as well as rent. Wait,
rent? Don't you guys own your buildings?
Yes, we do. To give ourselves peace of mind and location security for the
future, we've spent a considerable amount of money over the years owning
and upgrading our workspaces. Some of these acquisitions have actually ended
up being pretty solid investments, which is nice, but others haven't, which is
all besides the point right now. The point is that Ivonne puts our offices
into their own companies that for tax purposes have to be paid to cover their
own expenses, like interest on the loans that we took out for those buildings. It
does mean more paperwork, but apparently there are also liability advantages to
doing it this way. I don't pretend to fully understand it. All right, that's
overhead. Now, for a fun one, capital expenditures.
Okay, that doesn't sound fun, but these are best described as large outlays of
money that don't comfortably fit into any other category, including the Labs
acoustic chamber, a fire truck, some upgrades to our sets and workshop, a
three-stage Cascade CPU cooler, a 2020 Toyota Corolla for the Comet AI
self-driving video, and the Yesest LED video wall that I bought on Craigslist.
What's interesting though is that while these high-profile purchases get talked
about a lot and have big dollar values in the thumbnails, they actually make up
less than 1% of our total expenses. The
same cannot be said about people. With a headcount of 120 now across our various
teams, it shouldn't be a big surprise that other than the inventory we stock,
payroll is our largest expense by a significant margin at about 25%.
Breaking this down from there was a little tricky. See, many members of our
team are crossfunctional. That's to say that one day they might be evaluating a
material sample for a t-shirt and then the next day they might be appearing on camera explaining t-shirt materials to
our flow plane subscribers. But the way that our payroll budget is generally
broken out is according to the areas where people make their primary
contributions. With that in mind, the largest department is called internal
shared services. with multiple companies. We could have separate HR,
accounting, events, infrastructure, logistics, and operations departments
for each company, but that would be horribly inefficient. So instead, we
share all of those departments. The biggest one is operations at a little
over 11% of our payroll for 2025. That's
so large because it happens to include multiple top executives and it also
serves as a bit of a catch-all for things like events, community
management, and HR. The other half is made up of accounting, IT
infrastructure, and logistics. These are the folks who get our expense reports
paid on time, keep our storage servers working, and who keep our shared office
spaces equipped with peripherals. All three of these departments are absolute
heroes, and we thank you for your service. Next up is developers.
Developers. Developers, developers, no one else. Okay, fine. The point is we
have a ton of developers now handling everything from Floatplane.com to
ltstore.com to lttabs.com
to internal tools and weird experiments.
Hey, remember the time our dev team built a VPN product in a weekend and
then we got cold feet around the legal and ethical concerns? These guys
absolute heroes, too. It is worth noting that this one is a little funky though
because Luke is in here and he is um not
a developer. He manages developers, but
then he also manages the lab's testing team and he appears on camera and is
just, you know, generally a Chad. So, as you'd expect, he inflates the numbers
here a little bit. The next several departments each land in the 10 to 15%
range, starting with writing. These are probably the folks that you know the
best. We call them writers, but it's kind of YouTube industry lingo for a bit
of writing, a bit of production planning, a bit of hosting, a bit of
Sorry, I'm doing what today? Okay. And then next up is production. Another
department of unsung heroes. [music] Though with that said, I actually kind
of love it when they sing a little. Whether that's our camera operators
jumping in to ask the question that everyone's thinking or our editors
adding their customary 15 pieces of flare to our videos for you guys to
pause and [music] appreciate. Product design, which includes graphic design,
fashion, and engineering, has become a major group for us over the last couple
of years. These are the folks that bring the many products you enjoy on
ltstore.com to life, obsessing over every detail from the sound of the
ratchet to the hand feel of a design printed on one of our high-quality
garments. In some cases, this team also gets tasked with taking our product
ideas behind the barn. That was a fun video, by the way, and is totally worth
a watch to get some insight into how these folks work. Finally, there's
operations staff and management specifically for ltstore.com. These are
more unsung heroes working on everything from customer care to compliance to
supply chain management and marketing. These are the folks who helped us
weather some major storms this year by
rolling out a US-based warehouse in a matter of months after a certain person
enacted a bunch of import taxes on Americans. And then they also had to
manage the fallout around moving fast and breaking stuff. Huh. Our two
smallest groups in 2025 at under 10% each are the Labs team who handles
product testing and is quietly working in the background to scale up our
processes while also making growing contributions directly to the content as
well as our partnerships team which includes Disneyland who handles brand
partnerships and brought you mega bangers this year ranging from AMD
ultimate tech upgrade to that incredible tour that we did of Kyokia's Fab in
Japan along with our amazing procurement team who I think can buy anything. I
mean, they barely even raised an eyebrow when I asked for a fire truck. So, um,
that's it. That's who gets paid. But how are they paid? Well, while we don't
always get things perfect, what I can confidently say is that LMG delivers on
our goal of median salaries that are well above what's typical for our
region. in 2024, including only employees who were active for the full
ltstore.com. In 2024, including only
employees who were actually active for the full year, we landed at around
$73,500 Canadian, [music] and that was higher
than even the average income in our area at that time. Then in 2025, we increased
our median salary to just over $80,000 Canadian. This 9% change was made in
spite of actually flat revenues across those years to hire and retain key
talent as well as to better support our valued team members through the current
[music] cost of living crisis. It was also partly driven by the internal
minimum wage guidelines that we have for entry-level positions. It is separate
from the legal limit and instead is tethered to the published Greater
Vancouver living wage which is designed as the hourly rate that a full-time
worker must earn in order to cover essential expenses, avoid chronic
financial stress, and to participate in their community. Furthermore, it is
worth noting that unlike many gig- based productions, we hire the vast majority
of our local team members as full-time employees, which here in BC affords them
protections and benefits that are not the norm for contractors, [music] and
for that matter, not the norm for anyone in many other parts of the world. We
also offer a benefits package that includes retirement savings, matching,
continued education, health and dental, and budgets for extras like counseling
and physiootherapy. Also, now that more members of our team are having kids, we
recently added partial coverage for orthodontics.
I know that there will be many LMG team members, both current and former,
watching this video. And I'm sure this talk of company compensation is going to
raise some questions for some of you. But what I hope is that this degree of
transparency will answer at least some of them. And if you still have concerns
or you're looking for ways to improve your pay, it might be time for a
conversation about either performance or a role change. We post all open
positions on linusmediargroup.com and you can always speak with your manager
or with HR about how to boost your total compensation. We're working on a system,
by the way, for quantifying some of the previously intangible qualities that
have led to people with similar job titles making different amounts and we're hoping to roll that out shortly.
Moving on to average salaries. Naturally, these end up higher than
median salaries since you're going to have outliers like top executives that
skew the data. But they don't skew things as much as you might think. In
the last year, we have focused on improving compensation for our
individual contributors and have made only small adjustments to leadership.
This is reflective of a recent period of flat revenue growth and hopefully is a
trend that we can work to improve for 2026. Average salaries across our
companies then were 114,000 Canadian and
115,000 Canadian for 2024 and 2025
respectively. Another key metric that people look at to determine fairness is
the relative compensation of executives and individual contributors. [music] And
I'm going to do my best to give you guys some insight here, but calculating this
ratio is a little bit complicated for [music] us. See, Ivonne and I have each
paid ourselves $121,000 a year for
years. Why that number? I have no idea. But as [music] the also shareholders of
the company, it's obviously not our entire take-home. So then we could
remove ourselves as weird outliers, but
then we'd be sharing an average of like four people, which is basically just
outing their salaries. So what I've opted to do instead is to just semi-out
one person, Taran. Our CEO to median pay
ratio is somewhere in the range of 5:1 and 10:1. Okay, it's a pretty big range,
but for the purposes of this fireside chat, I don't think that really matters.
The point is that it's reasonable. [music] Even by 1970s standards, before
executive compensation went cray cray at the expense of the worker, that kind of
a ratio was common place. Now, it is worth noting that Taran's been on the
job for a few years now, and there are plans to tune his comp package in the
near future if we execute well on our plans for 2026, but I can only tell you
guys what [music] is, not what maybe will be. Which brings us to the 5'1 in
elephant in the room. This guy. At this
point, I'm addressing our team as much as the audience. So, I'll be direct. In
2025, our tax installments were just shy of 8% of our total expenses. And the
last 15 or so percent is [music] our net profit. Is it a lot of money? Yes. But
from an objective standpoint, it's not outside of the reasonable range if you
consider the whole picture. And if anything, my intention is to find new
revenue opportunities or efficiencies that will push that into the 20% range.
[music] Why? Well, because that bucket isn't just fund money for Lionus and his
family. For starters, it includes setting aside any capital that Ivonne
and I, with consultation from our executive team, [music] might put aside
to invest in new projects, such as the upcoming series, buying and renovating a
tech house, as well as another yet to be disclosed big content related
acquisition [music] for 2026. It also includes maintaining our operating cash
flow as well as our rainy day fund which
okay memes about my financial irresponsibility aside, Ivonne and I
have been extremely careful with our resources over the last decade plus.
We've weathered multiple major storms that have had serious business impacts
with zero layoffs and that includes both COVID as well as the 2023 controversy.
Now, it is worth noting here that layoff has a very specific definition. It means
a reduction in force due to like a restructuring or like a shortage of
available work which might happen someday but it hasn't yet and [music] if
anyone tells you that they were laid off here they either don't know or fully
understand what happened or they are not telling you the whole story. The [music]
last thing that our careful financial planning has enabled us to do is never
bring in outside investors which can be
okay but it can also carry the risk of initifying our jobs and our content.
Finally, yes, this pool does include paying
dividends to our shareholders. That's me and Ivonne. And this is where the lines
get really blurry. For one thing, if I
were to issue a dividend to myself, for example, I can't just give myself money
from that bucket. I'm going to have to pay personal income tax on top of the
corporate income tax that I already paid. So, that slice of the pie, it's
not actually as big as it looks if I wanted to use it personally. [music]
And then the other thing blurring the line is that any shareholder dividend
that I wanted to issue to myself, it wouldn't just be a payout for the
ongoing investment into the company. It would also include whatever the company
decides that I'm worth for being our primary on-screen talent, creative
director for our physical goods business, as well as a top level executive. How do you quantify what each
of these is worth? How do you quantify what they're all worth together? Am I
worth millions of dollars a year? Could anyone be worth that much? I don't know.
I could compare against other recognizable hosts where yeah, okay, it
doesn't look that ridiculous. But then realistically, I'm not as good as them.
But then on the other hand, Ivonne and I provided our own seed capital for this
company without even so much as a bank loan. They didn't have to go through that. So, it's a tough question to
answer. On the one hand, it sounds like a lot because it is. But on the other
hand, this is it. This is the pot at the end of the rainbow in a capitalist
system that we didn't choose but do have to operate in. Ivonne and I took a big
risk both providing capital to grow this thing and working our butts off
alongside the worldass team that we build. We beat the odds and we're also
making concrete efforts not to pull the ladder up behind us. If you did the same
thing, I'd want you to have the same reward. It's a hard truth to swallow,
but a wage will always have a ceiling. the ceiling of how much someone's
willing to pay, which is dictated or at least strongly influenced by a market
that is cutthroat by its very nature. By contrast, the ceiling for
entrepreneurship, that's however high you can build it. It is worth noting, by
the way, though, that while entrepreneurship is a great way to elevate your earnings, I am not saying
anything about what it'll do to the quality of your life or your peace of
mind. There are pros and cons to every path. And over a decade of being
self-employed, I've learned that there is nothing wrong with choosing
employment either. Whatever path our team members choose, we want to be part
of their road to success, though, and we're putting that desire into action.
Recently, we've taken steps to relax our policies around content creation side
hustles, even in competitive verticals. And we've even taken the unprecedented
step of directly sponsoring former team members who we feel are doing great work
and who have strong brand synergy. [music] I am so proud to be a part of
the teams that work here. But I don't know, recently I've begun to think that
maybe my greatest legacy could end up being the incredible [music] pipeline
that we've built for developing talent and then the future success of ex
LMGers. Whatever it ends up being, I'm excited
to build it together as long as it can be done while also respecting the
company's need to [music] grow and protect both its own people and its own
interests. Though it's important to note that with that in mind, we've reserved
the right to re-evaluate our policies as things evolve. Constant change is just
part of the game, you know. And you know what else is part of the game? The segue
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That's me t.comltt.
If you guys enjoyed this video, why not go check out how does LMG make money if
you missed it. It's changed a lot over the years, so it's kind of worth watching the whole free video