Family or Business? Time Management for Busy Entrepreneurs

0:00If 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.

0:16Hey, everybody. Ryan Dice and Roland Frazier here with another episode of Business Lunch. Today, we are going to talk about time. Ryan, 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 um yeah i was actually you know i'm almost never on reddit uh because i'm old i think that's the i think that's the main reason um but um i was i happened to be on it and i went to the entrepreneurship uh channel or thread or whatever you call them on again i'm showing my age here whatever they call them um on a subreddit there we go i went to the entrepreneur subreddit and i saw this post and it it kind of irked me a little bit um because it's somebody just having an embedded excuse, like looking for a reason not to do something.

1:08And 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, you 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, I'll just read the Reddit post and then we'll jump 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 we're starting out with a, you got to choose one or the other.

1:46Yeah. We're starting to write off 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. I don't know that to be true. I just know that to be true. But let's give them a bit of a doubt. I opened a business for a friend recently. Right. So hypothetically speaking, I met this dude who opened his business 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, Well, horror of horrors, he has a family.

2:23He 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.

2:59You 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 it. To me, that's such a, such a constrained view of, of it. It's not, 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.

4:02Um, 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 a hundred thousand electricians or, uh, you know, a hundred thousand auto repair specialists or 50 ,000 or however many there are cardio, cardio, you know, uh, 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.

4:41You will work differently than a nine to five 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 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.

5:34In 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.

6:08And 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, I just we know too many people who have done this.

6:47And I get it. Like, let me be clear. If you're a single parent. Right. If you're a single mom, 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 it is absolutely doable. And I'd love to just kind of run, because I was like, I'm going to run the math. I'm going to run the numbers on this. So let's say that you've got a nine to five 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.

7:24How 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, some drive time on either side. So you're going to have dinner family time for like six to 9 p.m. Right now, I get it. Some people like I'm going to have to work a little later. OK, maybe it's seven to nine. I get it. But like loosely speaking, you got it if you got a typical nine to five. 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.

7:55No 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 nine to five. 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 nine to five, dinner family time, 6 to 9 p.m. 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 eight.

8:26Now it'll probably take until 10, nine or 10 for them to actually go to bed. But six to nine, 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 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. So you're going to wake up at 6 a.m. 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 on it, 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 5, that's only six hours sleep.

9:00Yep. It's only six hours of sleep, right? 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 nine to 11 and then you're going to work from six to eight. So that is eight hours of work. Like we got our eight hour job. We got two hours of on either side of the work day 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 because kids got to sleep.

9:45Seven 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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