Business and mastering the four freedoms

If you don’t learn to carefully manage your time, your daily commitments will rob you of your freedoms and ruin both your business and your quality of life.

I’ve seen many people start their own firms believing that having control would give them more freedom. But all too often the opposite occurs. It certainly happened to me.

Many years ago, I adopted a “freedom” grid through which I evaluate every business opportunity. There are four categories of freedoms that I weigh: money, time, people and purpose. (I was first introduced to these four freedoms by Dan Sullivan of The Strategic Coach, which I’ve participated in on and off for 20 years.)

Early in my career, I worked long hours building a financial planning business. While my professional goal was to provide high-quality advice and counseling to our clients, my personal goal was to make a good living to support my family. I was fortunate in that I was surrounded by smart people who helped me grow the business, so the goal of obtaining the freedom of money came relatively quickly.

But I was buried. I was working more hours than I wanted (or than was probably healthy). So after about 10 years, I made it a priority to carve out more free time for myself and my family. Professionally, I began to spend time on only those things I was good at and loved doing, and, hard as it was, I learned to delegate everything else.

Relatively speaking, I’d mastered the freedom of time. But the irony here is that bothmy business and my quality of life drastically improved.   

Now in my mid-50s, there is often a trade-off between the two other key freedoms -- people and purpose.

As for people, whether it’s clients, co-workers or business partners, I won’t work with or spend time with people with whom I don’t share similar values, who I don’t enjoy, or who I can’t learn from. Yes, it’s a luxury. But I’ve worked hard, and life is simply too short to spend time with people who bring you down.

The fourth freedom, purpose, is now the most important. Like you, of course, I have many different purposes, including raising children who are good people, having deep friendships, helping clients reach their financial goals, providing employees with an opportunity to grow, volunteering and faith, just to name a few. 

Each time a new business opportunity or endeavor presents itself to me, I think about this matrix and how saying “yes” will impact my freedoms. Will the new commitment support my purpose? Will the additional finances give me more free time? Will this individual help me to become a better version of myself?

To be clear, life is a learning process and I don’t always make perfect decisions. But I’ve found as I’ve gotten older that this framework works very well for me, and so I use it to both guide my own professional decisions and as a framework to mentor my young co-workers.

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Scott Hanson is co-founder of Allworth Financial, formerly Hanson McClain Advisors, a fee-based RIA with $8 billion in AUM.