You can have it all. That's right, you can have a fantastic business and still spend as much time with your family as you want. My name is Dave Lorenzo, this is the Inside BS Show.

If you wanna find out how, you gotta join me for today's episode. Today we're talking about how you can make a great living and live a great life. That has been my proprietary focus for the last 20 plus years.

I help you, business owners, make a great living and live a great life. The way that I do that is by teaching you how to build your business like an investment. And if you're listening to this today, you're watching this video.

I don't care if you're watching it on LinkedIn, if you're watching it on YouTube, if you're watching it in an ad, I want you to know you can have it all. You just have to agree that that's what you want. I was making great money as a partner with the Gallup organization working out of New York City.

I made seven figures, it was fantastic. And I decided to let that go. And the reason that I decided to let that go is because my life was a shambles at the time.

I was 50 pounds overweight, I was divorced, I had no children, no family, and was traveling and working all the time and was generally miserable. So seven figures, no life. And I let that go and I started my own business.

In the first year I think I made, I took home $11,000 in my first year on my own. And I was not happy about that. As time went on, I built the business back up to close to a seven figure business.

And I started a family, I was growing a family in it, it was wonderful. And then COVID hit. And now I'm in the process of recapturing all of that.

What I will tell you is that going from being a seven figure earner working for somebody else, I never got a good night's sleep because I thought to myself, only one person, that was our CEO, if this person wakes up in a bad mood, I'm done. And that is a huge amount of risk. So when I went into business on my own, I was okay after the first couple of years financially, but then I was concerned, always concerned about growth because all the growth was dependent upon me.

It was an owner centric focused business. As we went into COVID, I got wiped out in COVID, disastrous. Went from seven figures in my own business down to zero.

And I lost sleep for a whole host of other reasons. Are they gonna take my car? Am I gonna be able to put a roof over my family's head? Are we going to be able to afford food and to pay the electric bill next month? Those were the concerns that weighed on me. In rebuilding after COVID, I realized three important things.

Number one, the fallacy of working 18 hours a day in a startup as a requirement is just that, it's a fallacy. You go further with a team than you will on your own. And if you have the right team, what you bring to the table is up here as the CEO.

And it doesn't matter if you're working two hours a day or you're working 18 hours. It's better for you to have 10 people working eight hours a day than for you to try and work five days a week, than for you to try and work 18 hours a day, seven days a week. The second thing I realized is I'm not building a business.

I'm building an investment. And what does building an investment mean? It means that I'm building something that will appreciate and grow in value over time. And I'm also building something that will pay dividends, will pay distributions to the shareholders in the short term.

And I realized this now a year and a half into building this new business, is that the paying the shareholders is as important as the building of the value. So before I reinvest in the business, we reinvest in ourselves as owners, as shareholders. Our profit comes first.

The third thing that I've realized overall is that I'm building this business to serve my life. I'm not here to adjust my life to the needs of this business. So if it ain't fun, I'm done.

I need to make this business work for my life. I need to bend this business to my will. You as a CEO should be thinking of things the exact same way in your business.

Do not sacrifice any of the three things that I just mentioned. And if you're looking for a path, if you're looking for a formula, if you want the way to do this, Exit Success Lab is the place for you. We help business owners build their businesses as investments so that they don't need to spend 80 or 90 hours a week working in the business.

You don't even need to spend 40 hours a week working on your business once you get to the place where your business is an active investment. You'll have an asset that you can either sell to someone else or will continue to throw off cash until you're on your deathbed and then you can pass it on to somebody else. So if you're a family business owner right now and these three things are concerning you, you're not spending enough time with your family, you're not taking enough money out of the business, you don't have enough money to fund your lifestyle or you don't have enough money to fund your lifestyle and do whatever you want to do and you don't have a pathway forward, you don't see a window in which you can ever take weeks off or months off from your business, you need to give us a call.

I'm telling you that you can have it all. You can make a great living and live a great life and I want you to do that and that's our mission and our purpose in Exit Success Lab. Let us help you build a business that is an investment that will pay distributions to you in the short term and will appreciate in value over the long term.

My name is Dave Lorenzo and I'm here every day with another show for you but this message is the most powerful and impactful that I can share.