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Every Business Owner Should Have Freedom Days

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Do you?

The business owner’s game: “How do I make MORE money in LESS time?” Profit AND Freedom. The practitioner only gets Profit (at best). The business owner gets both Profit and Freedom Days. What are Freedom Days?

The Industrial Age gave us great toys, but stupid ideas about success. The Industrial Age assumption was that if you made money, you somehow would magically get time, too. “If I just had $10 million dollars, I would have a great lifestyle.” It never happens. Never.

You get what you intend, not what you hope for.

If you intend to make money and hope for time, you’ll only get money. I know a lot of very rich people who bought the Industrial Age assumption that money would buy them time, and they never have any.

What is a Business Owner?
I reserve the title “business owner” for those who intend to have both time and money, not just money. Money makes you rich, but only time and money together makes you wealthy. Freedom is the ability to choose, and it takes both time and money to create freedom (wealth). Without time, you don’t own the business, the business owns you.

If you have time, but no money, your choices are very limited. If you have money and no time, you’ll never have the life experiences you “hoped” money would buy you.

Most conventional wisdom would consider a business that continues to produce more revenue every year “a good business”. But unless it also produces more time, it’s just a fancy hostage situation.

You get what you intend, not what you hope for.

Any Business Owner Can Do This
We’re seeing business owners all over the world changing their intentions and throwing out the Industrial Age assumption that money would buy them time. They are now very intentional about their business producing both, and they’re getting both.

When I started this, my sixth business, I was tired of not having time. This time I intended for Crankset Group to make me both time and money (wealth, not riches). In order to get both, I decided I needed to be ambitiously lazy, which means I would have to be willing to work really hard on the front end to get more time on the back end.

A Day a Week, A Week a Month, A Month a Year
I worked 6-7 days a week the first year, 5-6 the second year with a handful of Fridays and two weeks off, five days a week the third year with a lot of Fridays and a number of weeks off, and in the fourth year almost every Friday off and six weeks.

In the fifth year of the business I get what I intended – every Friday is a Freedom Day – I can choose what to do with it. The fourth week of every month is a Freedom Week and once a year we take a Freedom Month as well – a day a week, a week a month, and a month a year.

Bonus – I didn’t intend it, but I also get a couple Mondays a month and the 13th week of each quarter. Add it all up and it’s about 60% of the work days in a year.

Freedom to Go On Vacation, or Whatever
What do I do with that time? Somebody might use it all for vacation, but that would never work for me. I use a lot of it to do productive things outside my regular business – running a second business in Africa, writing more books, traveling and doing keynotes and workshops to build 3to5 Clubs around the world. Over half of the work year I can choose (freedom) to either travel and help other business owners with their business, or take that time off.

Get What You Intend
In my first five businesses all I got was money. That’s all I intended to get. In this business I intended for the first time to get both time and money – I now get both.

Freedom Days rock. You get what you intend, not what you hope for.

What do you intend to get out of your business? You’ll get that.

Yesterday I Met a Rich, Self-made Hostage

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Riches vs. Wealth – the big lie.

I was stunned when I heard it – “Next summer is our 30th anniversary, and I’m planning a full two-weeks off work to celebrate with my wife.” This proud declaration from a man who owns a $30 million a year company demonstrates what a sad life he has. This is a man who lives in abject poverty with no clue how to run a business.

I see it all the time. Business owners whose personal lives are train wrecks, with no time to invest in their kids, spouse, or non-existent hobbies, and no time to even think about creating meaning in their own lives. They are hostages to their businesses with no end in sight for their incarceration.

People think this guy is a great business owner because he works all the time and has a lot of toys he doesn’t have time to use. I think he lives in abject poverty.

Riches vs. Wealth
Riches is just money. Wealth is freedom. Freedom is the ABILITY TO CHOOSE what to do with my time. Time is more valuable than money. It usually takes money to buy time, but unless the specific goal is to buy time, money can make us hostages.

Money does not bring freedom. Time brings freedom. This man has millions and has no freedom. He readily admits that if he is gone from his business for a few days things begin to go awry. He has built a $30 million business that depends on him personally being there every day! He is a hostage to his business. He is not a business owner; his business owns him. He lives in abject “time poverty”.

Intending to receive time, not just money
You get what you intend, not what you hope for. You can just hear this man starting his business. He intended to do two things:
1) “I’m going to work REALLY hard” and
2) “I’m going to make me some money.”

He got exactly what he intended – hard work and some money. And he is trapped by the hard work. He did not go into business intending to get both time and money from his business, just money. He HOPED that getting money would give him time and create freedom, but we don’t get what we hope (wish) for, but what we intend to get.

A Day a Week, a Week a Month, a Month a Year
I built five businesses like he did and was trapped as a hostage every time. This time around I intended to do something different – I decided this next business was going to give me both money AND time, and everything I did from the beginning was driven by forcing my business to produce both.

As a result, I now have every Friday off, the last week of every month off, two weeks every three months, and the month of February. I also now get the unintended bonus of every other Monday off, and only work a half day on the other one. A three-day, to three-and-half day week, with 16-20 weeks off each year is something I’m getting used to. I use only a few weeks for vacation, and CHOOSE (freedom) to invest the rest in Africa and helping others build businesses around the world.

A recent American Express OPEN survey found 66% of business owners haven’t taken time off in several years. And of those few who do take vacation, 68% of them check in daily to try to run things from their beach chair (we didn’t call once from New Zealand for 3 1/2 wks last February).

The famous Framingham Heart Study found those who took regular vacation are 32% less likely to die from heart disease and 20% less likely to die from anything else.

The objective of your business should be to build your Ideal Lifestyle. If you’re proud that you finally get two weeks off, you need to reassess how you are running your business and your life, and refocus on WEALTH (time/freedom), not just RICHES (money).

Is this just for special people? No. I built five businesses and never got off the treadmill. The sixth time I simply decided/intended to do it differently, and, what a surprise, it turned out different.

You get what you intend, not what you hope for.

What are you intending to do with your business and your life?

The Industrial Age is Dead – Time is the New Money

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The Industrial Age is Dead – Time is the New Money

As a business owner, you’re likely carrying a lot of baggage from the Industrial age (1800-ish to 1965-ish) that won’t fully go away for decades to come. He who makes the rules wins. You need to stop running your business on Industrial Age rules.

The Industrial Age brought us two incredibly bad ideas that led to many other bad ideas:

  1. Retirement
  2. Separation of work and play

A few weeks ago we said retirement is a bankrupt industrial age idea . Here we’re saying separation of work and play is a bad idea.

Time vs. Money
A young web designer friend of mine just one year out of college was given a huge pay raise by an ad agency, from $48,000 to $69,000. The company saw him as indispensable and didn’t want him going anywhere. A few months later, as winter approached, he quit. They wanted him there 8am-5pm and in the winter the only time to ride a bike was in the afternoon.

He would have worked in the evening, and that would have had no impact on the company, but they were stuck in the Industrial Age that valued money over time, and couldn’t see it. They were giving him the same tired “I’ll trade you money for your hours” deal that was dominant in the Industrial Age. He now runs his own very successful company and goes for a run or bike ride in the middle of the day any time he wants.

The Old (and Returning) Normal
For thousands of years people lived where they worked (over the storefront, on the farm) and played where they worked. Community was built around work and small markets. The kids ran and played, learned and worked there, the grandparents helped out – everyone was involved.

And there wasn’t much separation of work and play in the process. We look back and have a dreary and incorrect view of what life before “jobs” was like. What we miss is that above all else, we had community, something we’re only now beginning to recapture.

Humans as Extensions of Machines
It’s easy to see how this happened. During the Industrial Age, machines needed humans to become extensions of them in order to serve the machines properly. The machines needed people to be there all the time to run them, so we created humans in the image of machines. That “condition” was spread across all vocations, and “jobs” that separated work and play become the norm, even where there were no machines.

The Silent Generation – the worst label ever given
And it all worked in response to the needs of the machine, not the person. As the companies that owned the machines became huge, the pervasive need was to serve the corporation, and we were told to shut up, sit down, live invisibly, be loyal, don’t make waves and go out quietly. The generation which lived at the pinnacle of the Industrial Age, who are now in their late 70’s and early 80’s, have been labeled by marketers and sociologists as “The Silent Generation.” Can you think of a more condemning label? But it accurately reflects the damage the Industrial Age has done to us as a culture.

Time is The New Money
The Industrial Age taught us to value money above time. Giant Corporation, Inc. wanted you to focus on making money, not on having time to do anything with it. They needed all your time to run the machines. In the 21st Century we will understand that riches may equal money, but wealth equals freedom – the ability to choose what to do with my time. We will understand that money does not give us freedom, only time can do that.

Do you have time (wealth) or just money (riches)? Stop focusing on making money (see my book, Making Money Is Killing Your Business on the same subject), and intend to be wealthy instead. You’ll actually make more money and have a lot more fun in life, too.

Your Freedom Number is the Only Number That Matters.

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Your business has the same issues as those I visited in Kenya. In the final analysis, there’s only one number in business that really matters, you’re Freedom Number. While I was in Kenya, I had seminars and workshops with everyone from large international businesses to egg vendors in the slums. I wanted to impress on them the importance of net profit, the money that is “left over” after you pay all your expenses including your income.

I wanted them to know that it’s the only number that matters in the long run (others might be more important in the short run), so I asked an egg vendor:

“Would you like to get to a point where you could choose what to do with your time and your money?” She lit up.

I said, “Wealth is simply the ability to choose what to do with my time. We need to figure out how to become wealthy, not rich (riches=money).” She agreed and recognized instantly that having more money, if it didn’t create a better lifestyle for her, would not solve anything.

Sound familiar? We struggle with the same issue, the decimal point is just in a different place. The key is Net Profit. If you have Net Profit, now you have the freedom to choose what to do with it – the seed money for Wealth. To drive this home I asked the Kenya business owners to switch out the term “Net Profit” with “Your Freedom Number”, and to report it to each other every month, along with how the were going to reinvest it to create more wealth. They got very excited about the idea and there was a lot of buzz about their “Freedom Numbers”. I also challenged them to have a long term Freedom Number – the accumulated Net Profits over time that would truly create Wealth – the ability to choose what to do with their time.

One of the big “ahas” from being with business owners in Kenya was that the Cycle of Poverty is identical here with seemingly successful business owners – we haven’t really broken out of the mental Cycle of Poverty. The decimal point is in a different place, but we’re mortgaged and leveraged to the hilt and Net Profit is something we use to go to the movies, not reinvest in our business. After all, how could $50 left over at the end of the month have any impact anyway? I might as well just use it to enjoy the moment.

The egg vendor had the same question. She figured she might have 200 shillings ($2.64) of Freedom Money at the end of a month. We did the math. If she reinvested it and bought 20 extra eggs the next month, and kept reinvesting her increasing Net Profit for 18 months, her personal income would go from 4800 shillings a month to 30,000 shillings a month, with 10,000 more shillings to still reinvest in her business! $2.64 is a great Freedom Number if you see it that way.

What is your Freedom Number (Net Profit) this month? What are you doing to create more of it? Are you reinvesting it to build Wealth or using it for short term comfort?

Net Profit is the most important number in your business – it’s your only Freedom Number. Focus on it and you’ll make more money in less time.