Your Business Should Serve Your Life (Not the Other Way Around) | Ep. 17

0:00 – Most high achievers, they run their business better than they run their lives.
0:03 – They have dashboards, scorecards, quarterly goals, but when it comes to their own life, they’re often just reacting.
0:11 – And the hard truth is, you can build a very successful business and still not be living the life that you actually want.
0:19 – Welcome back to the Sage Investor. I’m Brian Spear and my mission is to help you generate cash flow and build legacy wealth in a tax-efficient manner.
0:25 – Because that’s what I’m trying to do for my family and I’m sharing all the secrets that I learn along the way.
0:30 – And today, I want to talk about something that took me quite some time to actually get a good grasp of and to really fully understand.
0:37 – It’s about how to run your life with the same intentionality that you run your business.
0:43 – A few years ago, I had a couple of realizations that were a little bit uncomfortable for me at the time.
0:48 – So when we started this business, we wanted to put it in place in operating systems, something upon which there was a solid framework that we could build a business upon.
0:57 – There’s a lot of different versions out there, whether it’s scaling up or the EOS model entrepreneurial operating system.
1:04 – And there’s a handful of them out there. We’re not going to go deep there. But we ended up selecting EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system as kind of the foundation of our business.
1:13 – We started doing that probably 2016, 2017 and we kept growing and growing and it was unbelievable. It’s a great framework to help you scale the business.
1:20 – It really has helped in a tremendous manner, been doing it for about a decade now.
1:24 – But about four or five years into that growth, I ended up finding myself in a situation where the business was growing rapidly.
1:33 – The business was doing great to the point where that growth was kind of outpacing some of the other areas of our lives.
1:43 – And I ended up waking up one day inside of a single wide trailer after having been on site inside of that mobile home park for multiple months away from my wife away from friends and family.
1:57 – And I’m thinking to myself, what am I doing? How did I actually get here? Now granted, the business was doing exceptionally well.
2:06 – But to what end? We were doing well. We were growing. We were making money. All those things were all great and true.
2:12 – But the truth is the family situation that I was creating, right? I was working unbelievably ridiculous amounts of hours.
2:20 – And it wasn’t creating the lifestyle that I would have otherwise anticipated. And it made me pause and reflect and think, why am I actually doing this?
2:29 – What am I actually trying to achieve here as I look to build this business?
2:32 – And so what I want to do today is just share some insights, a little bit of wisdom that I’ve learned along the way and some of the tactical things that I do to ensure that we put family first and everything that we do.
2:43 – And we build the business for the betterment of the family. So when you’re growing the business, it actually is growing in such a way that you’re achieving the goals that you want for you and your family.
2:54 – And the position that I would take is the following. You know, there’s a lot of different folks that we serve over time. We’ve worked with a thousand different partners across the country and some internationally.
3:04 – A lot of these individuals are entrepreneurs in one way, shape or form, whether they’re actual business owners that start a company or they’ve co-founded things or they’re doctors and dentists and they run their own individual practices, etc.
3:16 – But even if that is not you, even if you don’t actually own your own individual business, what I would say is the moment that you choose to trade the path of the traditional investment advice and move towards alternative investment advice.
3:31 – And the phrase we use is move away from the nest egg strategy and over to the Golden Goose strategy. The minute you choose to do that, you’re taking control of your family’s financial future.
3:42 – You’re no longer just working 10, 20, 30, 40 years, putting all your money into a 401k, outsourcing your financial future to somebody else, some other financial advisor.
3:50 – But rather you start purchasing income-producing assets for your family, trying to generate cash flow, live off of the income, never sell the Golden Goose.
3:58 – That strategy, once you decide to do that, you are officially a business owner. You are running your own individual family office.
4:06 – And so if you’re going to run your own individual business, if you’re going to run your own individual family office, you had better ensure that you run it like a business.
4:13 – You better ensure that you put some things in place to grow the business well for the betterment of everybody involved, for the betterment of the owners.
4:21 – It was around this time that I was introduced to the idea and the concept of strategic coach. Strategic coach is run by a gentleman named Dan Sullivan.
4:31 – It is an entrepreneurial group that’s been around for about 50 years, and any sort of little mastermind group that’s been around for 50 years, you know, there’s got to be at least a little bit of merit to what they’re doing along the way.
4:42 – It intrigued me enough to take a second look and actually get involved in some way shape or form.
4:47 – I was introduced by another entrepreneur who shared that while growing the business, one of the things that helped him tremendously was to ensure that you had a solid personal objective when building the business.
4:59 – So let me take a step back and give a little bit of an idea of the difference between what I’d say is strategic coach and EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system.
5:08 – I think that these two items go together like peanut butter and jelly. This is personally my contention.
5:13 – So the EOS platform is really a framework for how to run a business. And if you’re going to look at it from that manner, EOS is a framework for how to run a business.
5:23 – I would state that strategic coach is a framework for how to run the entrepreneur. So if EOS runs the business, strategic coach runs the entrepreneur. It really teaches you how to think.
5:33 – There’s some very simple practical tools that we’ve been able to implement inside of our business, inside of my personal life, and then inside of our business for the betterment of the health of my family, the kids, friends and family, and then honestly the business at large as well.
5:46 – So there’s multiple ideas that I want to put on the table that hopefully can benefit you as you as you seek to build your own individual business, whether it is you as an entrepreneur or if it is you as an owner of your own family office, but regardless.
5:59 – I want to I’d like to bring a couple of points to the table here. The first is the idea that was brought from from strategic coach of this idea of free days, free day focused days and buffer days.
6:11 – Far too often when you’re running a business, you get caught up in the whirlwind in the day to day. And there’s so much noise. There’s so many things that need to be done.
6:20 – Sometimes you get done with the week you get done with the month and you can’t, there’s still a thousand items on the to do list and you can’t even recall you can’t even really put your finger on what you accomplished over the course of the last month when you’re running a million miles an hour and growing a business oftentimes you get caught up in the whirlwind in this regard.
6:36 – And so Dan Sullivan and his infinite wisdom, did a really good job in my humble opinion of kind of trying to crystallize how you should bucket your individual days.
6:46 – So a free day is basically any sort of 24 hour period of time where you have the luxury of kind of doing what you want when you want with who you want completely outside of work and just rejuvenating yourself for the betterment of everybody involved.
6:58 – And you know, I’ve come to realize in time that I actually enjoy working hard. I actually really do I’m an a type of individual that’s exceedingly driven one of my, I guess maybe most proud moments or something that always struck me was when I was in college.
7:14 – I was a captain of the team at the University of Kentucky and I remember I was, it was in the fall. So it’s like 8 p.m. on a Friday night in the fall.
7:21 – And in baseball, the spring is when the season starts. So I mean, we’re months and months away from our first game, but it’s 8 o’clock at night. I’m in the batting cages. There’s nobody else around. I’m by myself. I’m, you know, listening to music and I’m just smashing balls inside of the cage.
7:35 – And the coach walks in and he goes, you know, Brian, you know what I love about you. He said, you have an extreme sense of urgency. You have an extreme sense of urgency.
7:46 – You know, for me, it felt as if, you know, game seven of the World Series, bottom of the ninth, two outs, bases loaded down to no fear. You have to always had that. So I’m always on. That’s kind of how I typically operate.
7:59 – But I enjoy that. It fills me up because I’m trying to ultimately achieve my closest version to self actualization as I can.
8:05 – But what that does is because I’m always on its tough to rejuvenate what I’ve come to realize is by giving yourself freedom to actually have those free days where you intentionally shut off your mind and you can be fully present with your wife, with your children, with your family, with your friends for an entire 24 hour day period. What ends up happening is this. I didn’t know it at the time, but after taking this practice to heart.
8:26 – When you do take legitimate time off, what ends up happening is that you come back to work and you feel more reenergized, reinvigorated and you’re able to get work done exceptionally well.
8:37 – And then when I get to go home after that, I feel like I can become a better father, a better husband, a better family man by virtue of being fully present and separating that time.
8:48 – By trying to compartmentalize these two things of having true freedom to be present with your family when you need to be and then also being completely locked in when you’re working that allows you to become the best version of yourself or at least that has been true for me.
9:04 – The focus stays, or if you would just envision being up on stage in the theater production, you’re literally on stage doing the thing live, you’ve got to be focused.
9:11 – You’re doing what you need to do. If you’re a dentist, you’re in the chair performing. Whatever the case may be, you are doing the most valuable thing that you are born to do.
9:19 – Your unique value proposition that you bring to the marketplace.
9:24 – And then the buffer days are all those other days that I would basically use the whirlwind to exemplify those days.
9:31 – And prior to really understanding how to compartmentalize the days, what you would come to find is the vast majority of people end up having almost every day as a day where they’re caught up in the whirlwind in this buffer sort of mind frame where they’re not need to focus on anything in particular.
9:44 – It’s just scrambled throughout the course of the day. And if you could try to find a way to compartmentalize those, you can end up being significantly more productive, get significantly more traction and be much more healthy, I think personally and professionally, you can get more done.
9:56 – So take that for what it’s worth. I think it’s a great way to frame one of the pieces of wisdom that, again, entrepreneurs have been using for decades and decades to great effect. That’s very, very helpful.
10:06 – One of the really high quality golden nuggets that Dan has taught me over time is the idea of freedom and the real freedoms that many folks are seeking when they ultimately take the leap and end up starting their own business.
10:21 – Again, whether it is an entrepreneurial business or you’re starting your own personal family office, when you’re doing so, what are you actually trying to achieve?
10:29 – I would take the position that the vast majority of folks are trying to have complete and total independence, total control of your individual calendar.
10:39 – And so Dan calls it the four freedoms, freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of relationship and freedom of purpose.
10:46 – We have complete autonomy to live your life the way that you see fit.
10:51 – And that’s what most people believe. Most people want when starting their own business. They want to have complete and utter independence.
10:58 – And I’ll use the terminology that’s a little bit off-putting, I’m sure to some, but this is how I would define, what is FU money?
11:07 – What is FU money? It is not having a billion dollars or a hundred million dollars.
11:12 – I believe that the definition of FU money is where you have the luxury of having passive income in excess of your monthly expenses.
11:21 – It’s the old adage of Buckminster Fuller’s definition of wealth. How many days forward can you live?
11:27 – Can you survive if you were no longer working? And if you have your monthly passive income in expense of your monthly expenses, then you can live on into perpetuity.
11:37 – And the reason that I would define this as FU money is because it ultimately allows you should you choose to walk into work the next day and literally say FU to your boss and you don’t have to actually work there.
11:46 – You have complete and utter autonomy and control of your life and do whatever you want with who you want for the rest of your life.
11:53 – That’s a beautiful thing. And I think that’s step one and ultimately achieving significant amounts of wealth and control over time is to actually be able to control your own schedule and have those freedoms, right?
12:04 – Freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of relationship and freedom of purpose.
12:09 – How was I able to tie this idea back into the EOS framework and again, EOS is a business framework that is meant to ultimately help you grow.
12:19 – That’s what EOS is meant to do is meant to take small businesses and help them get traction to grow in a material manner.
12:26 – And that’s what we were doing. We were growing gangbusters. It was absolutely phenomenal and love every bit of it.
12:31 – But strategic coach helps helps you ensure that you have your feet planted firmly on the ground and you’re not just growing for growth’s sake.
12:39 – You should be growing the business for the betterment of your family with intent in mind. And so how do you do that?
12:47 – How do you ultimately create some semblance of lifestyle design and what I would pose to you is the following.
12:55 – You need to run your life very similar to how you run your business. Every year when you sit down inside of your business, you have the annual meeting where you plan out, you have a big hairy audacious goal, what you want to achieve in the business.
13:07 – You have an annual goal, what you want to achieve. You have kind of a five-year goal, a three-year goal, a one-year goal, then you have quarterly rocks down to the day-to-day tasks, you reverse engineer the ultimate outcome along the way to grow the business.
13:18 – And you should ultimately do the same thing to achieve the outcome that you want for you and your family along the way.
13:24 – And so what we’ve done is we run our family in the same manner. Every single year we sit down, we have annual goals that we want to achieve as a family.
13:32 – We have quarterly meetings where we sit down and talk shop. And what we began to do was leverage a tool inside of the EOS platform.
13:42 – Historically, this has been called a VTO, a vision traction organizer that basically allows you on a two-page format to put the vision for the business out there.
13:51 – And then traction, page two is the traction page where you’re basically given an idea of how we’re actually going to achieve that bigger vision.
13:58 – I might say Gina did a good job of after hearing this conversation a thousand times with a million different investors, with a million different entrepreneurs, ended up creating a book called The EOS Life.
14:10 – And inside of the EOS Life, they also introduced this idea in this concept of a personal VTO, not just a VTO to grow the business, but a vision traction organizer for yourself and your family.
14:21 – And so my wife and I, we do this on an ongoing basis where we, in order to put this in place, these foundational pieces in place.
14:28 – It took a healthy amount of effort, I would say, on the front end, where we carved out two or three hours on the very first iteration to make sure that we were on the same page.
14:38 – And now we just have an ongoing quarterly meeting where we sit down, talk shop, make sure that nothing has materially changed.
14:43 – We have a version of a same page meeting where we’re on the same page that we were just a few months ago.
14:47 – We’re still tracking towards what we want to achieve as a couple and as a family over the very long term.
14:53 – Very much like in a business, you always start with core values, right?
14:56 – It’s the very foundational piece of who you are and what you’re trying to achieve. And so we did the same exact thing.
15:01 – It was a really fun exercise for us. We actually went online, there’s a couple of different tools over there that you can just Google up.
15:07 – And we did a core value exercise, I believe, think to perform. And this might be outdated, but that was the one that we had used where there’s about 50 different individual flip cards.
15:17 – And I took this little online tool by myself and my wife did the same.
15:24 – And it basically helps you crystallize what are some of the most meaningful individual core values that you hold personally.
15:31 – And then after I went through the exercise, my wife went through the exercise, we crossed reference them.
15:36 – And I was very proud to see that we had multiple overlapping core values.
15:41 – So we had three out of five overlapping core values prior to beginning to whittle them down and put their family core values on paper.
15:47 – And that was great to see. Why? Because obviously, you know that I felt really proud of selecting the right beautiful bride to meet my life partner and my soulmate.
15:56 – Somebody who shares unbelievably deep values alongside what what I do. So that was great to see.
16:03 – And then we kind of narrowed the field down to the five core values that we wanted to have be the foundational pieces of our personal BTO.
16:09 – Then we spent some more time digging into the passions that we have the things that we love doing personally.
16:13 – And where do we like to spend our time together as we progress? Some of the fun things that we like to do over and over.
16:18 – Some of it had to do with traveling, all inclusive travel. When we when we get out and about, we want to we want to just shut our minds down.
16:24 – I want to worry about picking and choosing 8,000 things I wanted to kind of be taken care of when I arrive and just actually be able to turn off my brain.
16:31 – Another one that we love doing is just exploring cuisine, right? Just enjoying a cuisine doesn’t mean it has to be Michelin star restaurants everywhere we go.
16:39 – Just a really highly rated food in the areas in which we we we are and just enjoying those certain things in life.
16:47 – And then we spent some time right going through this exercise where you know acts as if somebody’s a genie and they just granted you the wish of being able to have all the money in the world all the time in the world.
16:57 – Nothing is a restriction for you and just write down what is your lifetime wish list all the things that you would want to be able to do over the course of your entire life.
17:04 – If somebody waived that magic one and gave you the luxury of being able to do so. So I went through that exercise sheeted as well.
17:09 – And then we just spent some time kind of cross referencing them to find out what are the massive things that we all each individual love.
17:15 – And we wanted to put on the big board of kind of the bucket list items as it were over the course of the next 30, 40, 50 years that we’d be able to check off.
17:22 – And we knocked down maybe 25 of those that we wanted to try to hit over the next several decades.
17:27 – And then after you put that big vision in place right the big vision stuff then you can actually reverse engineer over the next three years.
17:36 – What do we need to do over the next year? What do we need to do? What should we chip away over the next quarter?
17:40 – And it is important to ultimately have all of this foundational stuff in place before you go set the business objective.
17:50 – Because you should be building the business objective to serve your family and not the inverse.
17:57 – Another tool that is absolutely wonderful from the world of strategic coach is this idea that can be summed up in three words.
18:04 – Who not how? Who not how? Dan wrote a book on this.
18:08 – It’s absolutely exceptional. If you’ve not had the luxury of reading it, I would implore you to do so.
18:14 – It’s a great way to change your mindset in terms of where you can spend your best time, energy, and effort along the way.
18:21 – If I were to try to concisely share how I feel about the book, who not how? I would state this.
18:27 – Many individuals when they’re provided with a problem, if they don’t have a really solid backbone and somebody asked them to solve a problem, they might say, I can’t do it.
18:39 – I can’t do it. If somebody does have a backbone, they might say, I can do it, but I don’t know how to do it. They might say, how can I do it?
18:49 – But the individual that ultimately gets the fastest and the farthest does not say, how can I do it? They say, who can do it for me?
18:59 – And if you change your mindset whenever you’re prompted with a problem to immediately revert to who can solve this for me, it expedites the process significantly and helps you grow tremendously.
19:13 – And very much in short order. Example, it’s provided as a guy that’s a multi-millionaire that has a problem with his roof and he’s got to change a couple of shingles.
19:22 – So he walks outside and he gets up on the ladder, he’s climbing up the ladder and he’s trying to go fix those shingles and ultimately slips off the ladder and is hurting his back in a massive and tremendous manner.
19:32 – Now the truth is the amount of time, energy and effort that he was taking to go do that was was diminishing on an hourly wage basis.
19:40 – He had all the money in the world to go pay somebody to go solve that problem for him in short order, but he did not with a subtle tweak instead of trying to say, how can I solve that problem on the shingles?
19:51 – By stating who can solve that problem for me, he could have saved himself months and time, energy, effort and heartache. Dan puts it succinctly that if you have enough money to solve a problem, then you don’t have a problem.
20:05 – If you have enough money to solve a problem, then you don’t have a problem because you can just go hire somebody to solve that little riddle on your behalf.
20:12 – And ultimately continue to stay focused on what is most important to you. So that’s one of the additional really high quality thoughts that he brought to the table, little golden nugget there.
20:21 – And again, and I guess I’ll share one final one prior to moving on.
20:25 – There are an inordinate amount of stories of unbelievably quote unquote successful individuals that made hundreds of millions, sometimes billions of dollars.
20:35 – Many books have been written about these individuals, right? But if you read these biographies, you come to realize that many of them have personal lives that are absolute dumpster fires.
20:45 – If I have gone through my entire life and we’ve built multiple billion dollar business and we’ve done some unbelievable things and our personal net worth is, you know, nine figures and beyond and unbelievable congratulations.
20:56 – But if I get to the point where that occurs and, you know, I’ve been divorced multiple times, my kids no longer want to speak to me, I will not consider that a success.
21:06 – You want to be able to build the business in such a way that it serves your family and it would be the same if you don’t actually run an actual business, but rather just your own individual family office.
21:17 – And if you keep that same mind in place, the family office should be making investments to ultimately serve the objective of you and the family.
21:27 – And so reverse engineering that beginning with the end in mind.
21:31 – And it’s a good way to kind of bring up an idea and a story of one of our, you know, current investors. I just had a conversation with him about a month ago about this.
21:38 – On paper, this individual had succeeded. It’s done an exceptional job. Right. Again, in this moment really has stuck with me. We’re having dinner with several different partners over time.
21:48 – This was an incredibly successful group and one of the guys built a massive portfolio right over about 40 different individual single family home significant network.
21:56 – Change the family tree in one generation. It’s got a handful of different kids. His daughter was there and I had the luxury of asking her.
22:03 – So, you know, would you want to take over the real estate portfolio? Would you want to take over the real estate business someday?
22:10 – And without hesitation, without fail immediately out of the gate. She said, no, absolutely not immediately that was her response. So I asked why.
22:20 – And her answer hit me a little bit harder than expected. She said, because I saw what it did to my dad.
22:30 – Now let that sink in a little bit. He built the wealth, but the cost was visible. The time, the stress, the energy that it took.
22:40 – And the next generation didn’t want to have anything to do with it. They did not want to be actively involved in that.
22:45 – And that is a really important signal because it tells you something deeper. Ownership owning assets does not automatically equal freedom.
22:54 – Sometimes it creates complexity. Sometimes it creates an obligation or a job.
23:01 – And you should be trying to ultimately have lifestyle design. At this point, right, with multiple millions, eight figures on the balance sheet, life is good.
23:10 – But have you really crafted the lifestyle design that you want, and not only you want, because at this point in time, you likely have the passive income to be able to do what you want with friends and family along the way.
23:19 – Beautiful life is good. But then the next generation, do they want to actively manage 40 different individual homes running around, you know, unclogging toilets and the myriad of things that are necessary to run that portfolio?
23:30 – Maybe they do, but maybe they don’t have the same sort of intrigue into in a grabbing the wheel into in the alternative investment space and actually running the business the way that you do, maybe they do, maybe they don’t.
23:43 – But you should know these things in advance and have thought through them and ultimately craft your portfolio in such a way that it provides the lifestyle design for you that you would want, as well as the family down the road.
23:56 – Right. Should you have an interest in passing along the legacy to the next generation, you would want to ensure that it is indeed a gift and not a burden.
24:03 – How do I ensure that I stay on track that I’m locked step with my wife along the way that we’re building the lives that we want for our family along the way?
24:12 – We start by getting that personal VTO in place. Once that is in place, we now have big hairy audacious goals, lifetime goals.
24:20 – The bucket list that we want to achieve is a family. And then we reverse engineer how to go about knocking that out. Right.
24:26 – We’ve got the three year plan. We’ve got the one year plan. Then we’ve got quarterly goals along the way in every single quarter.
24:31 – We sit down and we reflect back how have we done over the course of the last 90 days or year depending upon what time we’re meeting if it’s the annual or just quarterly.
24:41 – And then we sit down and we plan out what should we be trying to attack and knock out over the course of the next in this example 90 days until our next quarterly meeting.
24:49 – Are we still on the same page? Are our core values still the same as they were previously beautiful?
24:54 – Because the thing is people change over the course of decades, right. Things happen, people change. You want to make sure that you’re still on the same page with your spouse over time.
25:01 – We still have the same sort of passions and interests. Again, people change. And that’s okay. But you want to make sure that you are in agreement with what you’re trying to achieve together as a family.
25:11 – We still have these big visions of grandeur with our bucket list items or should we pair it down to these other items.
25:18 – Now that maybe you’ve got at this point kids, grandkids, etc. Things have changed. Priorities have changed over time. Right.
25:23 – So just making sure that you actually are achieving the things that you want to how do I actually make sure on a day to day basis that this actually gets done after having crafted our personal plan.
25:33 – What we want to achieve is a family after having crafted that I could then go build the business to achieve the outcome that our family wants along the way.
25:43 – And so how do we do that? We then go to the business VTO. We have the annual the quarterly and all the myriad of things that are necessary to grow the business to ultimately serve our family.
25:52 – And the way to keep it top of mind for me personally, every single week I sit down and I have a clarity break. I get outside of the office because you get caught up in the whirlwind every single Monday morning.
26:05 – I head over to the local Starbucks and I spend a couple of hours over there two, three hours, you know, just depends on what’s going on that respective week.
26:13 – But I’ll spend a handful of hours over there. And one of the things that I do in that clarity break without fail as I open up our personal plan, our personal VTO and I’m reminded every single week why I’m doing what I’m doing and building the business to create the outcome for my family that we actually want.
26:33 – Because if you don’t do that and you don’t put family first and all of this, what ends up happening is you grow the business or you grow the investment portfolio and the business ends up growing to such a way that it takes over all of the waking hours of your life. And what happens is you snap your fingers and you wake up inside of a single wide mobile home.
26:52 – After having been on site for three months and not seeing your wife and not seeing your friends and not seeing your family and taking a shower where the water pressure is just barely dripping out of the shower head and you’re wondering how did I get here.
27:05 – So just make sure that as you go down this path of building your business whether it is your business or your family office that you always put family first and doing so.
27:14 – Now feel free to take some of the tools and things that I’ve learned along the way for the betterment of you and your business. I hope that that provides a little bit of insight and a little bit of help as you look to try to build your portfolio in such a way that you’re creating exceptional lifestyle design.
27:27 – Not only that so that you have the cash flow to live life that you want today and live life that you want with your family, but also to build wealth in such a way that you could pass along a legacy to the next generation and change the family tree.
27:38 – In one fell swoop that’s what I’m trying to do for my family and we’re going to help as many people as possible do that along the way and again I’ll share all the secrets that I learned along the way but I hope that that helped you on this in this journey.
27:49 – So maybe in rounding it out here if I could you know provide a little bit of a call to action.
27:53 – If you have not already done so kindly carve out some time with your significant other carve out some time with your spouse to sit down talk shop.
28:02 – Make sure that you guys are in alignment in terms of what you’re trying to achieve as a family because if you’re building a business or you’re building an investment portfolio and you’re not really in alignment with what you’re trying to achieve.
28:13 – You might be building that business in an imprudent manner that steers you in a different direction than what should be where you should be driving it and the same thing with your investment portfolio.
28:22 – If you’re not kind of in agreement with core values and ultimately the vision with with your spouse of what you guys should be trying to achieve together.
28:29 – Then you could be building a portfolio that is in conflict with what the family actually needs.
28:37 – So I’d implore you to spend a little bit of time and quiet solitude having that conversation with your spouse to ensure that you guys are on the same page.
28:43 – I hope that that inside helps.
28:45 – If this episode resonated with you please take a couple of minutes just to think about where you might need to add a little bit more structure or a little bit more clarity in your life because that’s really where real change starts.
28:58 – On the next episode I want to cover something that goes a bit deeper on living on purpose.
29:05 – The concept of die was zero. It’s a book by Bill Perkins. It’s a really good book that helped me similar to how strategic coach helped me and ultimately Gina Whitman and EOS helped me tremendously.
29:15 – I think die was zero was really really helpful as well in terms of understanding when to spend money how to spend money.
29:23 – How to do it prudently because I’m the kind of guy that if you’re going to implement the Stanford experiment right with the marshmallows.
29:29 – I’m the kid that’s going to implement compound interest for decades and decades and decades and decades and you’re going to be hard pressed ultimately find me and open up my wallet and start spending capital in a flippant manner.
29:42 – But I think die was zero is a good book to try to help provide a framework on how and when one might be interested in spending a little bit of that money along the way.
29:50 – So with that, we’ll get the heck out of here. Until next time, you’d be great.