How I Balance My Family & Business

Welcome to the Freedom Business Podcast. Your host, Siddharth Rajshekhar here. Great to have you here. This is where we are going to be talking about how we can redefine our education system by building vibrant learning communities. Take your knowledge out to the world and be awesome. Let's get in.

I'm sure you want to know how do I manage my family and my business? Business. And I'm a father of two boys and really want to spend time at home and I'm literally like a house dad and I'm building this business. So I just want to share with all of you on how I approach this whole thing. Why did I make the decisions that I've made in the last few years? Why am I choosing to work from home other than building a big company and office and employees and multiple other things? I just want to share with you my overall paradigm view of the world. And if you resonate with this, you will probably align with this. And if you don't, that's also fine. You're going to just get my perspective on how I look at balancing family and business. And I don't want to use the word balance. How do I harmonize both of them? So let me backtrack in time. When I grew up in my childhood days, my dad was always working from home. He had an office at home and he would be in office, meet all his customers and then he would come and meet me and spend time with me. So I think right from my childhood days, that kind of an influence from my childhood days has really inspired me to live the same kind of lifestyle based on what my dad was, which was he was a work from home dad. And of course mom was also there at home to always support me. I would go to school, come back from school and mom and dad would always be there. So that comfort factor is something that I want to give to my children as well. Because ever since I, you know, had my second son, I made a conscious decision that that's what I really want to do. I want to spend time with the kids as my main priority. So my first son was born in the year 2012. And at that point in time I was in Bangalore and I was running a full fledged digital marketing agency with 35 plus employees. And it was a, it was a grind because I used to drive for 90 minutes in traffic each way. I used to live in this area called Marathalli, which is like crazy with traffic. And I, and my office used to be on Brigade Road in Bangalore. So that, you know, the Drive time each way was anywhere between 60 to 90 minutes. And I would spend three hours on the road. I would leave early when my son was still sleeping. I would come back late when my son had already gone to bed. And for a long time that was happening and I didn't feel good about it because those initial years of, you know, the life of a kid is so important and to see the father and stuff. So that happened for one or two years. Then after that I decided when we moved to Chennai IN 2016, from Bangalore to Chennai, where I made a conscious decision to support my wife in her music career. When that happened, I made a conscious decision to be a house dad, meaning that I want to really support the family first and I want to build a business from home. And the nature of the business that you know, that I actually took up. When I was transitioning from the agency to my digital coaching business, I started to do a lot more calls online. I stopped going to office. I started to set up tools and systems to virtually manage my teams and all of that. So when I moved to Chennai it was much more easier because like morning I would wake up at like 6:37, get my son ready to school, drop him at 9 and I would be the only father dropping the son to school where all mothers would be there and I would be the only dad who goes and picks up my son. So I did that for a good three, four years ever since we came here. And because my wife was very focused on her music career, she was going through an intense advanced Carnatic music course in music academy Chennai. And out of some thousand plus people, there were only six that were chosen and she was one of them. So for me I had to step in to support her in her career. And so she would leave much earlier than us, meaning her classes would start at 8am and she would come back around lunchtime, maybe 1 2pm So I would have to, after she leaves, I would have to get my son ready and then she would start. But the beautiful thing is through this entire process I got to understand how to make my life more efficient to balance family and business. You know, I think we did more than 2.13 crores in the first year of business where I was completely doing it from home, where I would drop my kid to school, wife is in music class, I would start recording videos for YouTube and my content and my courses would all happen in the morning while I'm still fresh. And then the second part, I would do a lot of one to one calls because when Anyone would buy my level two product, my gold membership at that point. It was called the Freedom Setup Challenge. I would set up a one to one call with them and I would do three, four, five, one to ones. You know, some one to ones would go on for one hour, two hours, three hours. So I would start one to ones at 2pm, it would finish by around 6pm, I have a quick break. Then 7pm, 8pm, I would just freshen up. And 9pm, I would do webinars, actual sales webinars, and I would do maybe two or three webinars in a week. And in between I would have an inner circle call as well. So it would actually be training for four or five days in a week live. And I've done possibly over a thousand webinars from 2018 till today. I'm talking about just sales webinars, not the inner circle calls or the leadership council calls or any other calls. So it was a lot of grind. But the beautiful thing is I would be able to balance the time in between. So get my son ready for school, come back, I would pick him up at around 1 and then I would start my 1 to 1 calls at 2pm So I would have a 15 minute, 20 minute window to have my lunch and then start the 1 to 1 calls and then finish those calls. And then during that gap between 6pm to 8pm I would, you know, go for a drive with my wife and we would just catch up. I would have dinner and that's the time I'd spend with family, then go back. I'm really glad that, you know, that rhythm really worked in favor because I was not doing anything else, you know, not going out, not partying. I'm not that kind of a guy. Not really going out, meeting friends and all of that stuff. Yeah, I had friends, but then I was very focused on the vision and the mission and I would attend a lot of training programs and in between when I would go for drives, I would just listen to a lot of podcasts and continuous learning. After I put my kid to sleep in the evening at night, like at 10:00pm, 11:00pm, then I would start my learning. You know, I would listen to tune into my podcast. I was tuning into other masterminds at that point of time, going through multiple other learnings. So it was pretty intense. You know, I would sleep at 1:32am in the morning, then I can get up at 7. So it would be six hours, seven hours of sleep and do that again again. So based on the journey so far, and as it evolved as I started to automate, delegate, systemize things, added team members and by the way, in the first phase of the journey I would answer all the emails. I would answer around 200 emails per day. Okay, so it was a lot of work. And in fact my son would come and laugh at me. He would say, dad, you're selling freedom business model, but you don't, you don't have any freedom. Your and it was quite hilarious. And I would tell Rishabh that, you know, just wait for a few more years and then you can experience that, the true freedom. So freedom is not free from what I understand. And everybody thinks that freedom means, you know, going to the beaches of the world.

Completely automating your business, sipping on orange juice and just chilling and not doing anything and letting the money flow into the bank account. That's honestly, that's never going to happen. And even if it happens, it's going to be only for a short span of time. For me, freedom is to be able to wake up every single morning and to do what I love doing without anybody telling me what I should do. That is freedom according to me. And when I'm serving my community and I'm able to express myself to them, I'm able to build a deep connection and bond with them. That's what matters the most to me. So how I balance my family and business are based on a few a model that I've actually created. Now there are five priorities and the priorities are in this order. Number one is the environment. Number two is my soul. Number three is the body. Number four is my personal talents and hobbies. Number five is my family. And number six is my business. So business is my last priority now, even though it may seem like now it is my number one priority. But actually I like to priorit keep that right at the end and I'll tell you how I plan my calendar and my time according to this. So number one is environment. So the nature of how I operate as a person is I don't have meetings just like that. I don't say yes to every single meeting. I don't travel. In fact last year I did quite a lot of travel. But I don't travel for business. It's only travel for leisure with family or go to temples or something like that. I don't take any calls. I keep with a community of 30,000 people there's a high chance that I could get stormed with calls. But the way that I've set the context in the code of honor is that I don't get disturbed by anybody except for my quantum members who also message me and just send me voice notes, 30 second voice notes and I respond back to them really, really quick. And I don't make any unnecessary decisions just to, you know, get some award or go on TedX or speak on Joe Stalks. Get some, you know, some visibility to some more like an identity boosting decisions. I don't even make those decisions. I don't need that stuff because I'm very focused on what I'm doing. So the first thing is I cleared my environment in my physical environment, my digital environment. People who are not aligned with my goals and visions, I don't even meet them. I just very cordial with people. I don't burn the bridges. But if there's somebody who's not aligned with my goals and vision, I don't have conversations with them. So that's the first thing to set the environment in place. The second area is my soul. So I have my own daily meditation and morning meditation pujas that I do. We do our monthly temple visits. I do my scriptural reading. You know, all of that stuff happens just to keep inspired. And I follow my spiritual master's teachings to keep myself connected. So that is the next priority. So when the environment is clean, you can give your time to the most important thing, which is the soul. Then comes the body. So as some of you may know, I only eat Satvik food. I do an annual Panchakarma detox just to make sure that my body is on track. Because I know the body is the most important. You need to have the energy to be able to do great work for that. You got to take care of your body. Like how you take care of your car. You know, you need to give it for service and take care of it. And then I also make sure I get good sleep. So even if I'm sleeping late in the night, I want my eight hours of sleep. I also wake up a little late in case I sleep late. So I'm not very hard on myself that I have to get up at Brahmamurta and do my, you know, meditation and stuff. Sometimes it happens, you know, at different times. And I'm not very hard on myself and I'm okay with that. And then comes to my personal talents and hobbies. So I like making music, I like to launch elevation sets. I listen to a lot of tracks. And of course gaming is my other personal area. So I sit with my kids and I play a lot of games and we do at least an hour of Gaming every single day. And that's our bonding activity. So that's all my personal talents and hobbies. And then comes the actual family time. So my priority, I would say my number one priority is spending time with my wife. We both are aligned in our goals and vision and spiritual life. We've had very rough moments in the past in our relationship. And I realized that the one person who's going to be with you for the rest of your life till the day you leave this world is your wife. Your kids will come, they will grow, they'll leave. Your parents have brought you into this world. You respect them and you take care of them. They will leave. But the one person who's going to be with you all right to the end is going to be your own spouse. So for me my number one priority is, you know, my wife and I, we discuss different things and that's the one. Then comes kids. Even when I take my kids out, I have like one to one time with them. And we do something like a family time in the evening. So before we go to sleep we have a ritual. The ritual is more like the four of us come together and then we have a family time. What is the family time? So first I'll ask my youngest 15 year old Rudrua, what do you like about mom? What do you like about Rishabh? What do you like about me? So he shares one round, then we go one round. Everybody shares what we like about each other. Second round is what can we improve? So I asked the first one again, again the youngest one says, dad, you can do this better. So I take note of it. So we have like an open what do you like about the other person? What can we improve? And we've been doing this for over two years now and we miss some days but it's beautiful bonding time. We come together and we just connect as a group. Just five, 10 minutes. But.

It really keeps the bonding between the family really tight.

So my wife is my number one priority, my kids are next. And then comes my parents and in laws and we take care of both my wife's parents and my parents. And we don't speak to them that often but we are always there to help and support them. And then comes business. So the way I like to, the way I've structured the business is that I work a four day work week. You know, Monday and Tuesday I have my, all my calls structured. Wednesday, I keep it completely open. My calendar is fully free. I don't do any meetings, I don't do Any one to ones with my quantum members, members, none of that stuff. And everybody knows about that. And then so Wednesday is more like me time. I need to recuperate. I need to bring my energies together. I need to like, put my thoughts together to make. To plan the next steps. And so on Saturday is usually a family day. I take the kids out, we go for drives, long drives, Mahabalipuram, multiple places. And.

That'S more dedicated to family, unless I'm doing an event with success Gyan or we're having some weekend seminars and stuff like that. And Sunday is a spiritual day. So that was a time that I used to go quite regularly to the Sunday, you know, iskcon temple and visit that. But now, especially after Covid, it has not been so regular. But we go at least once in a month, pay our respects to the deities and, you know, just take the family over there and do it. And by the way, my wife does temples every day. Okay. So for her, it's like a daily activity in our local area where we are staying. We have like three, four temples that we go regularly. I go at least once in a week to these temples. She goes every single day. And just soak ourselves in gratitude and keep the vision high and knowing well, that who's the boss, okay? Pay respects to our local bosses and completely surrender ourselves to the bigger purpose and the mission of what we really want to do. So that's how I've kind of structured the balance in my family life and business. There's always things to tweak and improve. There are always moments where things go up and down.

Ad hoc things that can happen, sometimes travel happen, but overall, structuring things in this order, where fixing the environment, then prioritizing soul, then body, then personal, then family, then business. I mean, this kind of a structure has helped me get a lot done in less time without getting burnt out. And in case something happens, let's say I fall sick or I, you know, something happens. Like my, my. Usually my body shows that, like, recently we've traveled. I picked. I started to cough for like 15 days, and then I had to go for a panchakarma treatment. Every time I fall sick like that, I go for panchakarma. It's more like the body is asking for a reset. So I'm very conscious of my body signals and I give it that rest and time to come back while I'm automating everything else in the business. And I communicate that with my audience and that's what helps me grow in the business. So in essence, there's nothing like balance. There's only harmony. There'll be moments where you got to step on the gas pedal to build your business and grow it really fast. You got to do that. There are going to be some moments that you got to step off and just relax and spend more time with your family. Do that. And there are going to be moments where you have to, you know, really work on your skills and learn new things. And so there's going to be different bursts of moments in your business that you've got to be aware of. So I hope you found this podcast useful and catch you in the next episode. And this was my day. Six out of 90 day challenge. Let's see how far I can go. Catch you in the next one.

Sam.