I was at the office. It was around 8 pm.
My partner and I were both there, working on whatever it is you work on at 8 pm in a law office.
So, I ask him, “Man - what are we doing here? You’re missing dinner with your kids for the umpteenth time. I’m going to be here all night. This is not a way to work or live.”
To which he replies, “You think this is bad? I have a friend who does this every single day and hasn’t seen his kids in weeks. This is just how it is. It will be like this until you retire.”
My immediate thought was, “That can’t be true.”
I’ve always believed you can do it all - just not all at once (thank you, Barbara Sher). But, I also knew the way we were running the firm (and a law firm is a business like any other) wasn’t sustainable. More importantly, it wasn’t aligned with what actually mattered to either of us.
Every client wanted us. Every decision ran through us. We’d built a business, and then made ourselves its bottleneck.
Now, this isn’t an article about leaving law. I’ve written about that elsewhere (see below).
What I want to explore is something that happens to almost anyone who builds something. We start a business because we believe that if we do it right, it’ll give us more freedom. And then, somewhere along the way, it takes on a life of its own, and we end up less free.
At the beginning, the business is you.
And, then, at some point, it isn’t.
The problem is, you’re still working - and living - as if it is.
It doesn’t have to go that way. But getting out usually means looking hard at who you are, what you’re best at, and where you’re actually going.
Then you notice what comes up:
What am I afraid of giving up?
Where am I holding on to control?
Who am I worried about disappointing?
What possibilities am I not even considering?
That’s where the real work is. And, it’s where the big changes happen, like actually having freedom in (and from) your business.
This is what I work on with clients 1:1, and what we work on together in Pursuers of More.
It’s also why I’m getting clearer about who I work with. For years, I focused almost entirely on lawyers. Turns out I had it a little backwards. Back at that office at 8 pm, I wasn’t really a lawyer who happened to run a business. I was a business owner who happened to practice law.
And, that’s who I want to work with: people who’ve built something that works, and who are ready to stop carrying the whole weight of it themselves.
If that sounds like you, I’ve built a free 5-minute assessment that shows you where you may have become the bottleneck in your own business. You can take it here.
Because, no matter what anyone tells you, it doesn’t have to be like this until you retire.
Jordan Nahmias is the founder of Unstuck Consulting, a coaching and consulting practice helping high-performing entrepreneurs and operators go from the business running on them to the business running with them - so they can go back to doing what they are actually good at, getting their time back and getting their business to run without them, without burning out, bailing out or losing what they actually built the business for - their freedom.
This really resonates. It is easy to start a business for freedom, then become the person every decision depends on. Learning to let go of some control is part of building that freedom too.