20/20/60 — The Model That Outlasted COVID

The year was 2001. Stan Bullis was building what would become Unbridled Solutions, a corporate travel management company. He was also reading Genesis 41.

You know the story. Pharaoh has a dream. Joseph interprets it. Seven years of abundance followed by seven years of famine. The solution wasn't complicated: in the good years, store one-fifth. Keep it until you need it.

Stan built a business plan around that.

The model

Twenty percent to charity. Twenty percent to the storehouse. Sixty percent to shareholders and the business.

The twenty percent to charity is the easy part to talk about. It's visible, it's inspiring, it makes good conversation. The sixty percent to shareholders is obvious — that's why you build a business.

The twenty percent nobody talks about is the storehouse. The reserves. The cash value that doesn't show up in the highlight reel but is very much present when the headline becomes a crisis.

March 2020

Unbridled Solutions is in corporate travel. When the world stopped moving, so did the revenue. In the span of about a week, approximately $50 million in annual revenue essentially disappeared. Accounts canceled. Bookings evaporated. The phone went quiet.

Dana, Stan's wife, gave birth to their child on March 12th. Colorado shut down on March 13th.

Competitors in the travel management industry cut 90% of their staff. Some didn't survive at all.

Unbridled didn't cut anyone.

That's not a brag. It's a direct result of the 20/20/60 model. For nineteen years before COVID, the company had been storing one-fifth in years of plenty. When the famine arrived — and it arrived fast — the storehouse was there. Policies could be borrowed against. Reserves could be deployed. Employees stayed on payroll.

And when March gave way to April and the competitive landscape started to clear, Unbridled went on offense. While other firms were in triage, Unbridled was acquiring clients and positioning for the recovery.

You cannot go on offense from a position of scarcity. You can only do that from a storehouse.

Why policies, not a bank account

A reasonable question: why permanent life insurance rather than a business savings account or a money market?

The answer is that a savings account requires discipline to not spend. Cash sitting accessible in a bank account is always available, which means it's always tempting. In a good year, when you're ahead of targets and someone's asking for an equipment upgrade or a marketing push, the reserve account loses.

A policy creates a different relationship with that money. It's yours. You can access it. But it has a structure around it that makes the psychological default to leave it alone rather than spend it. The process of requesting a loan is lightweight enough to be useful but just structured enough to feel like a considered decision.

Stan understood this in 2001 and built the reserves into a form that would actually hold.

This is why we do what we do

When I tell clients about these policies, I'm not reading from a product brochure. I'm describing the structure that our own company used to survive and grow through the hardest economic event most of us have ever seen.

We don't recommend these policies as advice. We use them ourselves. The 20/20/60 model runs through everything we do — it's how we pay our giving, fund our reserves, and protect our team.

Genesis 41 is a long time ago. But the principle hasn't changed. Store in the good years. It will be there in the lean ones.