30. What Does Freedom Mean to You?

Freedom is my top value. It's really why I started my business.  I wanted more financial AND time freedom.

It's also usually a top 3 value of my clients as well.

But freedom means different things to everyone.

Knowing what freedom means to you is important if you ever want to achieve it.

In this week's episode of Purposeful Profit, I'm talking all about freedom, what it means to me and how to get clarity on what it means to you.

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Transcript

Welcome to Purposeful Profit, where I help you take your business to the next level. I'm Carla Moats, Finance and Strategy Coach, and Fractional CFO for high-achieving female entrepreneurs. I'm here to empower women to build wildly profitable businesses that give them the freedom to live their dream lives. I'll use my more than 30 years of finance and consulting experience to take the mystery out of your finances, help you make more money, and go after your next big thing.

Hi there, and welcome back to the Purposeful Profit Podcast. I'm your host, Carla Moats, and I'm a financial mentor and coach, and all-around financial whisper to female founders. My mission is to help you get your finances in order and put more profit in your pocket.

Today, I want to have a discussion about “Freedom”. Something I've been thinking a lot about recently and freedom is my top value. It's super important to me. It's become more and more important later, as I've gotten older and when I feel resistance to something in my life, it's often because it's challenging my freedom. I'm feeling constrained in some way, and my clients are all building lifestyle businesses for the most part. Their primary goal is to create businesses that allow them to create and afford a lifestyle that they love.

Freedom is usually one of their top three values. It's often at the center of why they created their business. They wanted financial freedom and time freedom. The thing is, freedom can mean different things to everyone. I think in its purest sense, financial freedom means having enough money to not work again, and time freedom in its purest sense, means the ability to do what you want, when you want.

But the question I want to pose today is, “What does it mean to you?” “What do financial freedom and time freedom mean to you right now or 12 months from now?”, or “What do you ultimately want it to mean in your business?”

For some, financial freedom might be leaving their day job. It could mean they want to retire as a spouse. It could be that they want to have enough money, create enough money to start investing in real estate and create a passive income stream. And I think especially as you hit like that $200K area mark in your business, it's something you want to start to think about. Because before you're just trying to get that business up and running. You're trying to get it to cover your bills. I have some money left over. Once you start to get up to $200,000 and as you start to scale up to $1 million, you start coming into greater levels of money. You start to want to think about what type of financial freedom you try to create in your business over the long term and also over the short term. Because if we say financial freedom is to have enough money not to have to work again, that's not something we're necessarily achieving right now. It could be something we're aspiring to. But even if we're not there yet, we can think about, “What does it mean today or over the next six months?”

This is something that I've been thinking about lately as my own business evolves. When I got into business, it was just a side hustle. I started my business about three years ago. As of the time this podcast was being recorded, it wasn't the main source of my income. I worked in consulting. I had a six-figure job that funded my lifestyle plus some and allowed me some savings. It was a pretty good quality of life.  I was not just satisfied with my job at all, but my business was created to help fund my daughter's private college education and to allow me in a few years to retire early.

It kind of joked that it was my retirement plan but that early retirement was several ways away. But I was also a solo parent. There's no other legal parent in our house, and I'm 100% responsible for supporting us and I always have been. I also worked in an industry that can be unpredictable, so I wanted a backstop. That wasn't just “my savings” I wanted to have. Say a “Plan B”.

A little background on me, I was working in consulting. As part of the gig economy, I was salaried. So, I collected a salary and benefits, but I would work on a client for 3 to 6 months, and then I would get placed. Then, I would wait to get placed to move on to another class of 3 to 6 months, and then I could be off for anywhere from two weeks to a couple of months before I got placed with another client. But if they could place me—which I  didn't have much control over, it's based on the economy. It's based on what they have in the pipeline, and who they have on the bench. I could be furloughed and eventually terminated, and that happened for a short period last summer. Then it happened to get in December.

So I've been full-time in my business in 2024, and it's got me thinking about what I want my business to look like. What freedom means to me as a full-time business owner and what I found is that, it's not so much that what freedom looks like has changed, but how I get there has, and I think this can happen in your business as well. 

For example, one thing freedom looks like for me is to pay for my daughter's college education without taking out loans. She's looking at private colleges and even with some merit scholarships (I mean, it's not inexpensive folks), and originally, I had my salary to live on, so my business was on pace to do that. I have a six-figure job. It paid all of our lifestyle, and all of our bills, and left me some money for savings, and my business was going to just fund the college costs. I was on pace to do that, but now as I am full-time in my business and have a salary coming in, I need to either replace that lifestyle income my job provided or I have to go into savings. So I either have to get another job or I need to grow my business to achieve the freedom I want, I basically need to be able to retire earlier. If I don't want to either go into savings or have to take another job. 

You can do an exercise that I've been doing which is think about the life wheel. You may be familiar with the life wheel, but it's basically where you take your life and kind of categorize it into facets of your life. So for me, the categories that I came up with business and career were money, family and friends, health and wellness, personal growth, travel and home, and my environment.

Those tend to be pretty custom. Your wheel can be custom for you. For instance, I have travel as a category because travel is important to me. It's a big part of my retirement (what do I want to do as I am becoming into “empty nester”), so travel is one of my categories.

Your faith or spirit spirituality might be a category for you. But within these categories, I want you to think about what freedom means to you in relation to that area, and don't just think about financial freedom. I think about time freedom. When I think of freedom, yes, money is a piece of it, financial is a piece of it, but time is also a piece of it. I took a pretty substantial pay cut from my corporate job when I went into consulting, and it was primarily to get greater flexibility and a greater quality of life. I had a child who was going into middle school. I wanted to be accessible and available to her more. So when I left corporate and went into consulting, that was a major reason that I did it was to create more time freedom for me.

So as you go through each of those categories, I want you to think about where you are on a scale of 1 to 10. With 10 being your ultimate dream scenario. If you think about money, “What is your dream scenario of freedom?” Again, even with money, there could be a time component to that. But what does it tend to look like?

So for me, I'm just going to give an example, under money, what a ten might look like for me is being able to pay for my daughter's private college education without needing to take out any loans, and without impinging on my lifestyle. It also means to just be able to do the things I want to do without money being an issue. So we travel—I've said it is important to both me and my daughter, and so we want to go on a safari in Africa. I've wanted for a while to take a month. We visited Costa Rica a few years ago. I wanted to go back and live for a month in the winter and just live in Costa Rica. One of the things I'd like to do is that we camp and hike. I want to buy a smaller travel trailer, and travel the country, visit a lot of my small business friends, and I want to do all these without giving up my home.

Some other things that are in there are, I want to generate enough money in my business to support my lifestyle without needing to go back to my day job and I also want to be able to help my parents move closer to me. I have parents who are getting older, they're over 80 now. They live four hours away. We recently had a bit of a medical crisis with my father and being four hours away makes it difficult. So I'd like to be able to bring them closer to me or to help them financially with that. That's what a ten looks like for me and I take a category that's maybe not so financially oriented.

Let's say family and friends and in this category, freedom for me kind of looks like, I can be available to pick up my daughter from school without being chained to an office desk. It means when my dad took his fall in January, that I was able to go out of town for a week and work on my own schedule while I supported my parents and relieved my brother. It means I could afford to be generous financially with my family and friends. That might mean helping them out financially. That might mean gifts at Christmas. It means more experiences like booking a house and bringing my parents and my brother and his family all together for us to spend time together. It means that I can just be generous financially.

And once you know what a ten looks like and where you are now, you can start thinking about what it would take to get to attend. Because if I list out these things, some of these things I already have but some of them I don't. So I can sit here and say, “Okay. “Where am I at now?”

On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being I don't have any of this and 10 being I'm already there. “Where am I at now?” Then, “What would it take to get to a 10?” “How can I move closer?” If my end goal is to be able to pay for my daughter's college education without needing loans, and if I'm not there now, what would that take?  What would move me? What would move me closer?

I think knowing the answer to this is important because this is your profit purpose. The name of this podcast after all is “Purposeful Profit”, and one of the ways it got this name is because I believe that having a higher purpose behind your profit other than just the money. To me, money is the means to an end. It's what the money can do for your life, and your lifestyle, and how it can allow you to have a greater impact on your family, your friends, and your community.

So have a purpose behind your profit instead of just saying, “I want to make a profit”. I want to make a profit so that my daughter is not $100,000 in debt when she graduates from college, or that I haven't had to dip into retirement funds to help pay for her college. That's the purpose behind me building my business and wanting to generate a profit. This keeps you focused and centered, and it makes building a consistently profitable company easier because it gives you a guide, like a guidepost for when you're making decisions about investments that you want to make in your business or expenses. It keeps you intentional about the money in your business.

In conclusion, what I'd like you to do is tell me what freedom looks like to you. I'd love it if you'd email me back because I would like to just continue this conversation. So if you listen to this podcast, I would love to hear from you what freedom looks like to you, where you're at now, and where you want it to be. You can email me at carlamoats.com and just send me your comments. I'd love to hear them. I may come back on a future podcast and talk about what I hear back from people, and if you want help to figure out how to get to your 10, I invite you to book a financial health assessment at www.carlamoats.com/workwithme to schedule one. We will continue this conversation, and I will see you next week.

Thanks so much for listening to the show. Remember that your finances deserve some love. Finance doesn't have to be complicated or overwhelming, and you do not have to do it alone. I'd love to talk to you about your business, so please come on over to www.carlamoats.com to learn more. Or if you're ready for financial and strategy support that will uplevel all your business, go to www.carlamoats.com/workwithme to book your free financial assessment. And the last favor I'll ask is for you to help me get out the word. Tell your friends about this podcast and share it on your favorite social media. Until next week. Go create some purposeful profit.