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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.

Wealth vs. Riches – Which one defines business success?

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There is a significant difference between Wealth and Riches, and which one you choose will likely define whether your business is successful or not.

I was at a friend’s house in Maryland who lives on the water. We were sitting on his deck looking out over the water and I noticed that his neighbor had a nice 30’ sloop docked at his house. I mentioned it to my friend and without pausing he said, “Yeah, it’s a nice one, but I never see it go out.” I asked him to explain and he said, “Every spring he pulls it out of the water to knock the shellfish off and paint it, but I don’t remember the last time I actually saw him take it out. If it’s out, it’s certainly never out enough for anyone around here to notice.”

This guy was rich, but he definitely wasn’t wealthy. Riches equals money, but Wealth equals “the ability to choose what to do with my time.” Riches just accumulates money and stuff, but Wealth creates freedom. Too often business owners don’t make this distinction and buy off on the notion that piling up the money is the definition of success. This is leftover thinking from the 1980s and 90s that was expressed in the bumper sticker “He who dies with the most toys wins.” We got a chance to try it during the 1990s and 2000s, and it came up short.

Too often we intend that our business should throw off money, so at best, that’s all it does. But business should give us three things; two resources and a benefit.

Resource One: Money

You can do a lot of things with money, but getting money by itself is not a good goal. Ask anyone who has made a lot of it – Making money is not an empowering vision. Do you have an empowering vision that is bigger than making money? If not, you will likely never make a lot of it. The blue flame coming out your backside will come from having a vision for something that grips you, and money will just be a way to get there.

Resource Two: Time

Most business owners never ask their business for time, just money. So they get what they ask for – some money (usually not a lot). I expect my business to throw off both time and money, and relentlessly work to get the business to the point where it creates both assets for me. Without time, money is meaningless – it’s just a boat that never goes out.

The Benefit: Significance

The most important, least asked question in business is “Why?”. Most business owners have no idea why they are in business, so it’s no surprise they don’t know where their business is taking them. What is it that you could do with your business to create significance for you, your family, your employees, and in the world around you? The bigger that vision is, the more likely you are to succeed in your business. Significance, or creating meaning should be the reason you are in business. If you have a Big Why, you will be much more motivated to design your business in a way that it throws off both a lot of money and a lot of time. When you have both, you are Wealthy and can now choose how you will create significance in the world around you.

There are a lot of rich people in the world who don’t have freedom and haven’t done what they could have to create significance in the world around them. There are a lot more struggling business owners who just focused on making money and never made much of it because they never got a Big Why for being in business.

Go for “Wealth” – time, money and significance. We get what we intend, not what we hope for. Stop hoping your business will get there – random hope is a terrible business strategy. Instead, intend to build a business around your Big Why, and intend for it to throw off time and money so you can create significance. It’s not “He who dies with most toys wins”, but “He who lives with the best Lifetime Goals wins.”

Wouldn’t you rather leave a legacy than a pile of cash and a boat that never goes out?

Retirement is a Bankrupt Industrial Age Idea

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Retirement is a really bad, bankrupt, industrial age idea that was never a good idea in the first place. It was invented by big businesses to steal the best 40 years of our lives so they could discard us when our good years were all behind us.

What makes it so wrong? A few very important ideas:

1) A goal realized is no longer motivating.

Retirement is a goal that can be realized, and once it is realized, it’s not what we were promised. In the Industrial Age, the average life expectancy for men after retirement was 18 months. No longer motivated. Out to pasture. Stick a fork in them – they were done.

Men are beginning to live longer after retirement, but for reasons connected to Lifetime Goals – they’re finding meaningful things to do after they stop going to work every day (or choosing to continue going to work).

2) The very concept of retirement teaches us to put off doing anything really meaningful and substantial with our lives.

I heard it hundreds of times growing up from future pasture-geezers still in their 40’s – “When I retire, I’m going to….[fill in the blank.] What a horrible way to live – always hoping for a future time when you’re actually free to do something with your life.

3) The other really bad notion of retirement is that you’re supposed to work until your 65, then begin enjoying life.

The not so subtle message here is that work and play do not mix, and that you are really supposed to live two lives – your work life, and your meaningful life (shouldn’t work be meaningful, too?). And the ideal way to do it is to live your work life first, and hope you have time left to live your meaningful life afterwards, when you have no energy left to do so.

Wealth is the freedom and the ability to choose what to do with my time.

The retirement game teaches us you won’t be free until you retire. What a load of crap. Stop living for a future that never arrives. Don’t be that guy who, when you’re gone, others say “Too bad he didn’t get to enjoy his retirement.”

Lifetime Goals give us something to begin to enjoy today that we find meaning in, the rest of our lives. Do you have Lifetime Goals that you’re already living, without any need to be retired to get after them? Life should be meaningful, fulfilling, and satisfying today.

Tomorrow never comes. Carpe freaking diem already.

Don’t focus on making money. No business can survive that.

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The biggest problem in trying to grow a business is that we’re too busy making money. It’s not a play on words – it’s a serious problem. You’re too busy making money.

The overarching swing and a miss here: We think that our purpose in business is to make money when our purpose in business is to BUILD A BUSINESS that makes money. These two things are worlds apart, and almost every business I work with is absolutely buried in making money, which will keep them from ever making a lot of it. Why?

Because businesses are in a constant fight to balance two things:

The Tyranny of the Urgent

and

The Priority of the Important

The Urgent things in our business come flying at us all day every day, causing us to be REACTIVE and defensive in just holding the business together as best we can. One of the biggest things that comes flying at us daily is the need to make money to cover today’s bills.

We get so used to this pressure that even when it’s no longer there, and we’re making enough money to buy a hot tub on a whim and go on vacation a couple weeks a year to somewhere exotic, we never leave this mode of business. We actually think the goal is to make money. It’s a dead end and a big reason why most businesses, if they every grow up, don’t do so for decades.

In contrast, the Important things sit in the corner and whisper to us “I’m really Important, but you’re right, taking care of me today won’t make you more money today.”

Taking care of the Important things requires that we be PROACTIVE, because the Important things almost never seem Urgent. Taking care of the Urgent might even bring you Riches (money), but taking care of the Important will bring you Wealth (freedom and the ability to choose what to do with my time.)

Do you want Riches that you don’t have time to use, or Wealth that allows your business to make money while you’re on vacation?

One Example of the Important: If you stop making money long enough to write down the processes that you think you’re using in production, you don’t make more money today by doing that. But you now have something that will save you big bucks in re-training, inconsistent quality of products or services to your clients, employee stress, crisis management, and on and on. But since we can’t see a way that it will make us money today, we always find a way to put it off until “later” (psst… later never comes).

The key is to strike a proper balance between making money today (reacting to the Urgent), and BUILDING A BUSINESS that makes money down the road without me even being there (proactively taking care of the Important now, not “later”!). If you’re focused on the Urgent, you’re business will never grow up.

Next week we’ll talk about how to create the proper balance between these two so you can pay your bills today and ensure you are creating a business that makes money without you down the road. It’s not as hard as we make it (and it doesn’t take as long, either).