The 5 Freedoms Every Entrepreneur Needs

Most entrepreneurs chase success by optimizing for one thing—usually money—but real freedom doesn’t come from wealth alone.

In this episode of The $100M Entrepreneur Podcast, Brad breaks down the five freedoms every entrepreneur needs to build a business and life that actually works: time freedom, money freedom, relationship freedom, purpose freedom, and location freedom. He explains why true success isn’t about sacrificing one freedom for another—it’s about building harmony across all five.

Brad shares how to score yourself in each area, identify where you’ve overbuilt or neglected, and make practical shifts that create more freedom across the board. Because the goal isn’t just building a bigger business—it’s building one that gives you more control, more choice, and more life.

About Brad Sugars
Internationally known as one of the most influential entrepreneurs, Brad Sugars is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, and the #1 business coach in the world. Over the course of his 30-year career as an entrepreneur, Brad has become the CEO of 9+ companies and is the owner of the multimillion-dollar franchise ActionCOACH®. As a husband and father of five, Brad is equally as passionate about his family as he is about business. That’s why, Brad is a strong advocate for building a business that works without you – so you can spend more time doing what really matters to you. Over the years of starting, scaling and selling many businesses, Brad has earned his fair share of scars. Being an entrepreneur is not an easy road. But if you can learn from those who have gone before you, it becomes a lot easier than going at it alone.

Please click here to learn more about Brad Sugars: https://bradsugars.com/

Build a Business That Gives You More Time, Money & Life:
Get The $100M Playbook: https://go.bradsugars.com/100m-playbook-ebook

Transcript

The Freedom Scorecard Idea

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Do I have control over my own time? Think about a freedom scorecard for your life, or a freedom scorecard for your business. You know, we know that the business is worth more when it operates without you when you don't need to be there when you're optional. Have you mastered time freedom? I hear these things where, you know, you can't be rich and happy. Rubbish. Absolute trash. I can tell how you run your company just by looking at your garage. The five freedoms, let me just list them out for you so you understand them. True success is when you own all five freedoms. Yes, there's five freedoms of being the hundred million dollar entrepreneur. Then we're gonna look at all five of them today so you can look at your life and go, okay, where are those five freedoms? How do I rate myself on them? And where do I need to get more of each one? So the five freedoms, let me just list them out for you so you understand them: time freedom, money freedom, relationship freedom, purpose freedom, and location freedom. So let's break it down. Um it's it what I do notice a lot of people is that they chase one freedom at the cost of another, if that makes sense. So if you're chasing, say, money freedom, but you're losing time freedom, and you're, you know, if if that's the case, you've got no time, but you've got the money, then you're missing the whole point of being a hundred million dollar entrepreneur. It's about all five freedoms, not just one of them, not just a pair of them. You know, when you look at time, time is not just do I have a lot of time today? It's am I healthy enough? Am I going to have an extended time on this planet? Are we doing the health things, the time freedom? So let's talk about building harmony across all five and not just building the money freedom or the wealth, okay? Now I use the word harmony a lot in place where I see people use the word balance, okay? And to me, balance today is misconstrued. I love the original way people looked at it. You know, you have a balanced life. You can focus over here for a period and focus over there. It's not a balanced day or a balanced week. And so I've I've taken to using the word harmony a lot more. There's some weeks where I have zero balance, but I'm in full harmony. Like there's weeks where I'll travel for work and I'm on stage every single day. I'm in meetings, I'm doing podcasts, interviews, but my family's not with me. So I'm in pure harmony because I'm doing what I want to be doing that week. But then I'll come home and have a week with the family where I'll take the kids to school, pick them up, have a swim, and only work a few hours during the day while the kids are at school type thing. I do like the idea of you build a life with harmony rather than a life with balance, if that makes sense. So when I talk about the five freedoms, there will be periods in your life where you are out of balance. There will be periods in your life where, yeah, it takes a lot of relationship freedom building right at this point in time. You know, because that's what's important at that moment to build the strong relationships and do all the things that will lead to the money freedom and the time freedom further down the road. Okay, so let's take a look at the uh freedoms that you've already mastered versus the ones you've neglected. Okay, so when we think about the the five areas, time freedom. Have you mastered time freedom? It's almost like you want to give yourself a score out of 10 on time freedom. Do I have control over my own time? Am I in charge of what I do? Do I get to pick what hours? And again, give yourself a rating out of 10 for this and say, okay, if you're at a two out of 10 for time freedom, you don't have any real time freedom. Fantastic. That's okay as long as we recognize it. And as we go through the rest of this session, you'll focus more on how to fix that. If, say, you've got money mastery down pat, like you're a nine out of 10 on the money mastery thing, fantastic. You've got money freedom to burn. Life is great. Now we got to look at the other four. Now you might work out I've neglected uh location freedom. Yeah, I've got all the freedom in the world, but I I have to be in this area to have that money freedom, okay? I have to be doing this, or I have no time freedom, even though I've got the money freedom. I think being an entrepreneur of the 100 million style is about building the freedom for yourself in all areas so that you do have the ability. I remember when I ran my previous podcast, the big success podcast, there's about 160 episodes. If you ever want to go back and maybe have lunch with me every day for 160 days to meet all of my guests on that one, that was a pure guest-related. And it was talking about what's your definition of success and how did you achieve it type thing. What's crazy that the vast majority of people initially their definition of success was around money freedom. That was most people's original thought. Gradually, though, over a period of their life, they worked out that time freedom was necessary, relationship freedom was necessary, uh, that purpose freedom and location freedom became necessary for them. So it's really interesting for me when I look at which areas uh I had in my life neglected and which areas I had been strong in. Um it came down to a fact that I knew I was great at money freedom. I was great at purpose freedom. I was choosing what I did, I was great at relationship freedom. I chose who I did it with, where I did it with them. If I wanted to go to something, I would. And if I didn't want to go, I didn't. And I don't know. Sometimes my wife was like, you know, but you can come to that and just hang out with me. I'm like, yeah, no, no, no, no, no. I would rather go and be with the kids and do something with them or something different. Does that make sense? It's having that freedom to choose. I I go back to, I'll give you a simple example. A particular friend of mine, he traded time freedom for money freedom. And he got to the point where it was so obvious in his life that he was chasing the money, the money, the money, the money that he didn't have relationships. You know, and I'll say it bluntly, in coaching him, I asked him, Why are you doing this? He says, You know, I do it for my family. I said, The people that you don't know? He goes, Yeah, I know my kids. I said, Okay, dude, tell me all about your kids. What are they doing now? What are their best friends' names? Tell me, tell me, tell me. And of course, he's looking at me like I'm stupid at this point in time. He goes, Brad, I don't know my kids' friends' names. I'm like, huh. Get involved, dude. You know, and so it really came back to the you can have harmony in all five. I think he didn't think it was possible to have time freedom and money freedom and location. Like he didn't believe it was possible to have them all. He personally believed you must do this in order to get that. There's no way I can have freedom of relationship and only be with the people I want to be with. I have to do these things. And it's like, no, no, actually, you don't. You don't have to. You can have all of it. I I once in my life worked out that I was an and, not an or. Um, you know, that if I wanted that and that, not that or that. I hear these things where, you know, you can't be rich and happy. Rubbish, absolute trash. You can be rich, happy, successful, healthy, have good relationships. You can have all of it, but you got to choose to. Okay. So the five freedoms, let's think about this the step-by-step growth across each one. How each freedom starts to compound the other, by the way, and it comes with focus. So if you wanted more purpose freedom, you got to start working more towards your purpose. And amazingly enough, when you start working towards your purpose more, you get better financial results, you get better relationships. It just they compound each other. And I think it's it's a little known or a little thought-of fact that the compounding impact of doing all of these and focusing across the board is where a lot more success comes from. Being in harmony in all five areas breeds more success in all five areas. It's like when I first start coaching people and they ask me, well, Brad, you know, my business is a mess, this is going on. I look at them also, tell me, uh, what exercise do you do? And they're like, I mean, what's that got to do with my business? Just answer the question. What exercise? Well, I'm not really exercising much, I'm not doing this. Great. Tell me how often do you go on a date with your wife? Well, you know, and so when I look at the greatest CEOs fix Tuesday night before they fix the company. The greatest CEOs, I can tell how you run your company just by looking at your garage. Show me your garage at home or your closet or your kitchen or whatever it might be, and I can see because how we do small things is how we do all things. And so that nature of understanding you can have across the board, you can be able to do all of those things, and they do actually make each other better. I I know when I went back and looked at when I thought money freedom was the thing, and uh I got money freedom, and then I realized, well, hang on, I've got money freedom, maybe I want time freedom. And then I was looking at time freedom and I was like, well, hang on, I don't want just one or the other. How do I get a harmony in my life? At the time I thought it was the word balance. I used the word balance, but it wasn't really about the balance, it was about that harmony of having a life that worked brilliantly across the board. And I think that when, you know, people often follow me on social media. If you're if you haven't already, dive on my Instagram and when you do, DM me uh playbook, and I'll send you the$100 million playbook. If you jump on my Insta, DM me playbook or any of them, DM me on any platform, playbook, and we'll make sure I send you the$100 million playbook. But when I look and when people look and follow me on the social media channels, they're like, dude, how do you fit so much in? Because we work in harmony. I don't need 80 hours a week to do my work. I have so much more time to do other things when I'm not doing 80 hours a week of work. So think about a freedom scorecard for your life or a freedom scorecard for your business. You know, we know that the business is worth more when it operates without you, when you don't need to be there, when you're optional, uh, and when you can just do the highest value tasks. But look at your life and look at your freedom levels. Because going for the$100 million business is you're not gonna get there if you're doing things wrong in other areas of your life. I'll give you a real simple example. I was employing someone just recently in the company, and uh I asked them during the interview, I said, Hey, would you mind if we walked out so I could just take a look at your car? And they're like, Huh? Just trust me, I like to look at things. And I went out to see this particular guy's car. Now he was going for a position that meant he needed to be detail-oriented, organized, things needed to be in place, right? I've got no way of knowing this guy of what he's telling me is true or not, but I can go take a look. Took a look at his car. Well kept, immaculate. I'm like, got it. All right, everything's in its place, so I know what he's gonna do. And people are like, well, that's an unfair way to employ people. Yeah, it might be, but it's just a little tool I use to help me understand where someone's at, sort of thing. You get on their social media too. If you don't get on someone's social media before you employ them, I think that's crazy in this day and age. So let's get some action steps. All five freedoms. Give yourself a score out of one to ten, and let's get a next level focus. If you're at a four, don't go for a ten, go for a five. Okay, what's one or two things you can do to go from a four to a five? If you're at a seven, what's one or two things you can go from a seven to an eight? These are the things. Obviously, as you get how many across all of them, you know, that's what's going to make the biggest difference. And I find that if you try to just be focused on one area and you burn out another area or you neglect another area, it does change your success trajectory. Your success trajectory when you're good at all five of these things, and again, I'll just list them out to make sure you got them. Time freedom, money freedom, relationship freedom, doing stuff with who I want when I want, you know, purpose freedom, doing the things that mean something to me, okay? And location freedom, being able to do it from anywhere in the world. I could film this podcast anywhere in the world, and it wouldn't really matter. I happen to do it in my wine cellar because it's the quietest place in my house, of course. You know me, five kids. There's always something going on in the house. But ultimately it's this: if you rate yourself across all freedoms and you get to build in each area of freedom, you do them better across the board. It'll impact, it'll compound in all areas. The richest entrepreneurs in the world have balance, not burnout. That's where we got to be. How do we get to you the harmony that you want all five freedoms? Thanks for joining me on the Hundred Million Dollar Podcast. If you've got value from today's episode, make sure you've subscribed and share this with all of your friends. Never miss a strategy that could change your business and your life. And remember, the fastest way to scale is to learn from those who've done it. That's what this show is all about. See you on the next episode.