A business owner who's been at it 17 years still works 13-14 hour days. If your business hasn't given you time back within five to ten years, your strategy is broken. Redesign to chase freedom, not just growth.
If your business needs you to survive, you didn't build freedom, you built a cage. And so, so many home service business owners fall into this trap of building a business with the expectation that they leave their 9 to 5 job in order to get more freedom, more time with their family, be able to afford the vacations they want to have, and they just build themselves an absolute cage of a job that Instead of working 9 to 5, they work 7am till 8pm Their, their family hardly sees them. They cannot even afford to take vacations, let alone the business afford for them to be out of the company, not working 13, 14 hour days. And so I was with someone last week that had 10 kids and I would talk to his wife and after 17 years of being in the business, still was working 13, 14 hours a day, leaving early before everyone woke up, and then getting home at nine, ten o' clock at night. And I'm sorry, but like if you've been doing business for 17 years and your whole objective and the reason that he gave for building the business was to be with his family and you have not yet achieved that in any way, shape or form in 17 years, we have a problem. And I would understand if someone was working that much time if they're trying to grow and grow and grow and build a billion dollar business and they're still not profitable and they're just pouring time into it. Well, the objective of the business is now for growth. But if it's to spend time with family, then freedom is the thing you're optimizing for. And if it's taking more than five or 10 years to build that for a typical small business, I think that we have something strategically incorrect and misaligned inside the business.
