‘Financial Feminist’ Who Started Company to Help Women Be More Independent Admits Her Business Practices Are Unconventional (Exclusive)

‘Financial Feminist’ Tori Dunlap is challenging traditional CEO culture at Her First $100K by putting employee well-being and freedom at the heart of how she runs her business.

NEED TO KNOW

Tori Dunlap, the CEO and founder of Her First $100K, is redefining what it means to be a successful leader through unconventional policies

From paid menstrual leave to quarterly company-wide breaks, she’s built a workplace designed around the needs of real people

The 32-year-old tells PEOPLE that success means proving you can build a healthy, profitable business without burning people out

Tori Dunlap built her company, Her First $100K, around a simple idea: financial freedom should create choices, not just wealth.

But she has extended that philosophy beyond personal finance and into the way she runs her company — offering paid menstrual leave, four months of paid parental leave, unlimited PTO and a full week off every quarter, when the entire company shuts down.

The Seattle-based financial expert, New York Times bestselling author and host of the No. 1 money podcast for women in the world, has also built a fully remote workplace around the belief that employees should not have to sacrifice their lives to build a successful business.

For Dunlap, all of those choices point back to the same definition of freedom: “The ability to leave,” she tells PEOPLE exclusively. “Leave the job that’s crushing you. Leave the relationship that isn’t safe. Leave the city, the situation, the version of your life that you outgrew. It’s a savings account that means ‘no’ is a complete sentence.”

Dunlap founded Her First $100K in December 2016 after successfully saving $100,000 at age 25 and leaving her corporate job. The company grew from her mission to help women build wealth, but her philosophy about money has always reached beyond budgets and bank accounts.

She sees financial independence as a practical form of power, particularly for women who may need the resources to change a situation they no longer want or can no longer safely remain in.

That conviction is reflected in the women she says her work has reached and the changes money has helped make possible. As she describes it, the impact is not theoretical; financial independence can become the difference between staying and leaving when someone has reached the point where they need a way out.

“I’ve helped 5 million women leave abusive marriages, get $50,000 raises, pay off all their debt, and break generational poverty — and it means being able to leave,” Dunlap says. “I mean that in the most literal way possible, I know women, real women, not a hypothetical, who left marriages that weren’t safe because they finally had money of their own to leave with.”

That same philosophy informs what Dunlap expects money to make possible once someone has it. To her, wealth is not primarily about luxury or appearances; it is about having enough control over one’s life to make decisions without asking someone else for permission.

“When a woman has money, she can leave the boss who underpays her, the partner who controls her, the life that was chosen for her instead of by her. She can fund the causes she believes in. She can rest,” Dunlap explains. “Every one of those is a political act when you’ve been told your whole life to be grateful for less.”

Her approach to the workplace is essentially an extension of that argument. Dunlap says she wanted to build the company she wished had existed for her, rather than reproduce workplace expectations that treat rest, family responsibilities and physical needs as obstacles to productivity.

The policies were deliberately established from the beginning. While some may think paid menstrual leave or company-wide weeks off are unconventional, her reasoning is personal but also tied to a broader criticism of traditional workplace structures. She believes many of those systems were built around a worker whose family and household responsibilities were handled elsewhere, leaving little room for the realities of modern employees.

“I spend my whole career telling women they deserve more, that rest isn’t something you earn by burning out first, that their bodies and their families aren’t inconveniences to be scheduled around,” Dunlap emphasizes. “If my own company didn’t reflect that, I’d be a hypocrite with a podcast.”

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Courtesy of Tori Dunlap

For Dunlap, putting those policies in place was also a statement about what a workplace can be when it acknowledges that employees have lives beyond their jobs. She wanted the company to operate according to the same principles of agency and dignity that she advocates for financially.

“Building these policies in from day one was me saying, out loud, that the people who work here are whole humans with bodies and lives, and I’d rather design for that reality than pretend it doesn’t exist,” Dunlap tells PEOPLE.

Posts about the company’s menstrual leave and quarterly shutdowns have collectively received more than 20 million views, and Dunlap says many online reactions revealed just how unusual basic workplace flexibility still feels to people.

“Twenty million views is a lot of people looking at basic decency and realizing how little they’ve ever been handed by comparison,” Dunlap admits. “When ‘I can rest when my body needs to’ and ‘my company closes for a week so I actually recover’ feel radical, that tells you everything about what normal has been doing to us.”

Related Stories

Still, Dunlap makes sure to highlight that her model is not cost-free.

She acknowledges that the company’s generous policies require planning and investment, but she views those costs as part of building the company intentionally rather than treating employee freedom as an afterthought.

“We offer better family leave policies than many multi-billion dollar companies — and for comparison, our profit last year was just over $5M,” she reveals. “But it felt important and right.”

Dunlap’s unconventional approach to leadership comes back to the same lesson she teaches about personal finances: freedom has to be constructed before it is needed. The company is her proof that financial success and humane working conditions do not have to be opposing goals.

“Running things this way and running a profitable business can absolutely live together,” Dunlap tells PEOPLE. “The idea that you have to grind your people into dust to make money is the myth I most want to kill. I’ve got a whole team and a healthy business that says otherwise.”

Celebrity

Influencers