Family or Business? Time Management for Busy Entrepreneurs

If you don't have a plan and you're just kind of going through and you're not very intentional about how you're investing your time, and I use that term intentionally, it's investing the time, not spending it, you should expect a return on the investment of your time. Hey, everybody.

Ryan Dyson, Roland Frazier here with another.

Episode of Business Lunch.

Today we are going to talk about time. Brian, what do you think about time?

We're talking about time and family and starting businesses and balancing it all. It seems like an appropriate discussion now. And yeah, I was actually, you know, I'm almost never on Reddit because I'm old. I think that's the. I think that's the main reason. But I was. I happened to be on it and I went to the entrepreneurship channel or thread or whatever you call them on. Again, I'm showing my age here. Whatever they call them on a subreddit. There we go. It's an entrepreneur subreddit. And I saw this post and it kind of irked me a little bit because it's somebody just having an embedded excuse, like looking for a reason not to do something. And so I thought it was worth just kind of going through what the Reddit post. I'd love to get your take on it, and then I'm happy to kind of share what. Know my response and hopefully give people a little bit more hope that, like, yeah, you know what, I can do all the things I need to get done without having to sacrifice a family life. But I would just love to get your take. So you mind if I'll just read the Reddit post and then we'll jump in? You dig in.

Let's do it.

All right, so it was. The title of the Reddit post is Family or Entrepreneurship. So that's right off the bat.

So. So we're starting out with a. You gotta choose one or the other.

Yeah, we're starting right off at.

With.

With the dichotomy. Recently I met a guy who opened his business. Now, recently I met a guy. The person who wrote this, they're talking about themselves.

Just.

I don't know that to be true. I just know that to be true. But let's give him the benefit of the doubt.

We also opened a business for a friend recently.

Right. So hypothetically speaking, I met this dude who opened his business while he, you know, before he had a family. So single guy, then in six years sold the business. Not for a lot of money, but he got some money, not enough that he didn't have to work anymore. Now whore of whores. He has a family, he has a job, a full time job, because again, the previous business did okay, but not well enough to support him. So now six years later, he's got a family, he's got a full time job, but he's got that entrepreneurial itch again. He wants to get out there and do it, but he just feels like he doesn't have the energy and the time for this project. He feels like. And the final question is, if I ask you family or entrepreneurship, which would you choose? So you're an entrepreneur, you've done it, you've done it. You had a business in the past, you sold it, made some money. Now fast forward six years, you got this pesky family, you got this pesky job, you got this pesky entrepreneurial itch. You know for a fact that you can't do all of them. So do you do the business and murder your family or does your family live and the business dies? Which do you choose, Roland?

I mean, it's a coin toss for me, I think, you know, really, really tough decision. That's, to me that's such a, such a constrained view of it. It's not an either or thing. It's. I do think that there are people who are, I mean, I will say I think that there are types of things that you're going to do that are going to change the world. Like if you're going to invent the personal computer or you're going to, you know, handle space travel and electric vehicles and get them widely adopted, you're probably not going to have time to do that and make that happen and have much time to give to your family, although you still would have some. But I think that's like the most extreme case. And so I think that also there's a big difference between being an entrepreneur and being self employed. If you're self employed, you are not really creating anything new. You, you're another of the hundred thousand electricians or you know, 100,000 auto repair specialists or 50,000 or however many there are cardiac cardiology, you know, cardio surgeons. I just think that like you have to be responsible for the allocation of your time. And it is very possible to be self employed or to start a business from scratch and still have a family life. You will work differently than a 9 to 5 typical job. I do believe that to be the case. It does take more than that. And so if you cannot have a family other than in the span of the hours that are outside of nine to Five to work. Then I guess you choose family and misery and unfulfillment and being a drone because that's kind of what that person seemed to be saying. But if you're, if you block time for your family and you are any kind of time manager at all, then it is absolutely possible to do both. And maybe they're somebody that was a solopreneur that never figured out how to hire or build systems or teams or management structures or anything like that. In which case take some of your time and learn how to do that and get yourself, you know, get yourself out of that. I think also that if you're starting something like acquiring something, you go straight into it and you have an idea of what time is going to look like. And you usually have professional management or you have a plan to get them and you're like, I'm going to work for this period of time to get this thing set up and then it'll be much less effort by me. Or you're going to start up a business and you say, I've got this Runway for this amount of time that I'm really going to focus on this. And it's going to take more time than normal. So let's carve out some family time that will hold sacrosanct and then the rest of the time I'm really got.

To dedicate to this.

But in the end, within X, you know, one year, three years, I'm going to have done the thing I wanted to do and we'll have more time to do family stuff and we'll have this business that's a valuable asset. So I just, I think looking at it as a black white, either or is, is fairly immature.

Yeah. To me it reeks of scarcity, but it also just reeks of bad math. And that was the thing when I was really running the numbers because I mean, we know too many people who have done this. And I get it. Like let me be clear. If you're a single parent, right? If you're a single mom, if you're a single dad out there, you're a single parent, you have a full time job and you also want to start a business that's freaking hard. That is so incredibly hard. But it also is doable. I'm not saying it's easy, but, but it is absolutely doable. And I'd love to just kind of run. Cause when I was like, I'm gonna run the math, I'm gonna run the numbers on this. So let's say that you've got a 9 to 5 job. Now I get it, I get it. Most jobs are not perfectly like nine to five, you know, but let's say you have an eight hour, eight hour.

A day, work week, five days a week. How about that?

Yep, you got an eight hour a day, you know, work week, you know, five, you know, five days a week. Let's give you some drive time on either side. So you're going to have dinner, family time from like 6 to 9pm right.

Now I get it.

Some people, like I'm going to have.

To work a little later.

Okay, maybe it's seven to nine, I get it. But like loosely speaking, you got it if you got a typical 9 to 5. And if you don't, by the way, if you've got a job that is hyper demanding of your time and you also want to start a business, do yourself a favor and get a job that pays similarly and is less demanding of your time. No joke. Go work for the government or something like that. I mean, if you're not trying to rise through the ranks of this company because you want to go and do your own thing, then get a just boring 9 to 5. Just go be a drone somewhere and accept that that's what you're doing. No reason to be both entrepreneurial at a job and entrepreneurial in your entrepreneurial endeavor. That's like, that's kind of dumb. So we got our 9 to 5 dinner, family time, 6 to 9pm Now I can tell you if you've got young kids, you're not going till nine. Like, you know, you're going to kind of start to clock out at 8. Now it'll probably take until 10, 9 or 10 for them to actually go to bed. But 6 to 9, you got your family time. Okay, now business, when do you work on your thing? From 9 to 11. That's when you work on your thing. You also work on your thing from 6am to 8am so you're going to wake up at 6am you say, oh, but Ryan, I don't get to exercise. No, you don't. During this time, you're probably not going to be the healthiest. If you need to like work out, cool. Then you're waking up at 5, you know. Oh, but Ryan, if I'm going, if I'm working until 11, going to five, that's only six hours sleep. Yep, it's only six hours of sleep. Right. If you're not exercising, then maybe you get a full seven. Is that enough? Maybe for some, maybe not. For Others, it doesn't matter. Like this is the sacrifice we're making. So you're going to work from 9 to 11 and then you're going to work from 6 to 8. So that is eight hours of work. Like we got our eight hour job. We got two hours of on either side of the workday for commute and buffer time. We got three hours of family time, we got seven hours of sleep, and we got four hours to work on the business per day. That is your day. Eight hours of work, two hours of drive time, buffer time, three hours of family time, which that's all most people are getting anyway. Cause kids gotta sleep seven hours of sleep, four hours of working in the business. And I haven't even talked about the weekends, right? I'd be putting in eight to 10 hours a day on Saturday and Sunday, you know, doing stuff while the kids napped when they generally don't need me. Add it up, you got 20 to 40 hours a week to work on the business while still getting ample family work and even rest time.

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