Now these are the questions I enjoy getting :D
So I started it with 2b which covered me for a good few weeks when we first started growing. We would typically do buybacks 10-100m, after we grew to 10-15 people we started doing gas huffing fleets, which populated our buybacks more than ore itself, think of guiding a group of new players to a gas cloud and they get hooked on huffing from there :P
It got to a point I would have to haul to Jita frequently in a Porpoise where I could compress the gas for a slight loss but made my transportation much quicker. This was at the time I was learning how a corp works, how to make sure to keep things flowing and experimented. I had no hauling ships, I had no freighter, I had an orca, porpoise and barges I handed out to a few new people and a load of ventures for the newcomers.
This vote was a decision that we scrap any handout ships but keep the tax at the same (90%)  The other option was we would increase the tax on it temporarily, to 80% should everyone agree. We would keep providing handout ships and actually used the tax to fund our hauling costs to PushX initially, which we were happy for. Everyone agreed to this option and we were starting to grow upwards with the additional tax. I bought our own Obelisk to support hauling, saving isk where I could, even hauling it halfway to Jita to reduce our costs in hauling expenses.
During these times I had also acquired a few members who specialised at a few things, one would love to do hauling, who we still use to this day, as he has now started his own hauling group which we like to support, we also had our first case of a corp thief where he would steal assets, which we caught onto as he would steal assets, liquidate and "donate" to us in hopes we would give him more roles and permission.
Being wise to this, I calculated he had stole about a 2b in assets and did return 1b or so as a "donation", I requested as we were struggling at the time if he could assist more, to which he donated another 2b. He was promptly removed and alliance was informed of the actions taken. We had recovered our assets lost and made 1b lol.
We had access to a private alliance refinery in HS that allowed us to reprocess for minimal tax.
We had moon mining 4-5 days a week, we still have this at 5-6 days a week with multiple moons some days.
We did at times run a corp "MFF" (mining for funds) fleet, where we would sit for an our mining belts, ice or moons to support our funds. We've not needed one of these for a while, should we ever need to we do run a monthly private moon for our funds purely if we decide we need to, otherwise it gets opened for the alliance to mine.
We made isk also through the production of FW ships, where we would build typhoon fleet issues, a couple of naglfar fleet issues and also the smaller min-faction ships too.
We mandate every member who does join and wish to stay after their 14 day trial period to register onto the alliance auth site and create an alpha alt dedicated to a doctrine for defending our HS structures, These fleets/defences are mandatory and we do punish members should they be online and doing other activities instead. Anyone with RL stuff obviously gets a pass, as we demand those that are playing eve at that time, can at least defend the structures they utilise on a daily basis.

We never had a hisec island, but we do live near one and I feel living in a hisec island, whilst definitely safer, would've crippled us at the start with gatecamps and the danger. Now I have a JF system in place and adequate hauling support and we can defend ourselves to a decent extent, it would have its uses.
The burnout as a CEO is insane it feels, the constant work and being the person everyone tries to go to for everything, no matter how small, meeting demands or requests by the alliance, but also trying to do your own things in EVE too and have a bit of fun in between, it does feel like an actual job in most senses to the time, but it's definitely something I love and enjoy as it's a whole new experience to me, especially when I never played MMORPG's before until I tried eve back around 2019 with the covid lock down in 2020 cementing me into it.