What If Success Costs Your Kids with George Rivera

Your calendar might be the real reason you feel stuck. We sit down with entrepreneur and author George Rivera to talk about what happens when the founder becomes the bottleneck: the business can’t grow without you, your team can’t decide without you, and your family gets the leftovers. George shares the wake-up call that forced him to rethink success, plus the practical framework he now uses to help business owners buy back time without losing momentum.

We dig into the simple but uncomfortable starting point: a time audit that exposes the work you should not be doing at all. From there, we walk through the three decisions that create leverage fast: eliminate what doesn’t move the needle, automate repetitive tasks with modern AI tools, and delegate with ownership by defining outcomes and decision rights. We also talk about the hidden tax of interruptions, why “quick questions” destroy deep work, and how a short weekly meeting cadence can protect your zone of genius.

Then we get concrete about self-management: calendar guardrails, batching email, planning the week ahead, and compressing hours so priorities become obvious. George also points to the bigger why behind productivity for entrepreneurs, especially founder parents, because you only get so many summers with your kids and regret is expensive.

If you want more business growth with less chaos, listen now, subscribe for more conversations like this, and share it with a founder who’s burning out. After you listen, leave a review and tell us: what would you eliminate first to get your life back?

Transcript

The Three-Part Time Fix

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Well, I start everybody at the at the audit place because like we need to shine a light on all the things that you're doing. And you'll realize once you get that list of things, there's a number of things that you just should not be doing at all. And so once you get that list, there's only three things you could do with those. And that's eliminate anything that doesn't move the needle. So we're doing a lot of things repetitively that really don't move or advance the needle. So we can consider eliminating that. Um, we can automate, automate anything that repeats uh with AI. That's becoming easier and easier every day. I mean, tomorrow there'll be new technology that we don't know about today. It's crazy how it's advancing, it's making things easier. And then the last thing is delegating, but delegating with ownership and showing what the outcome looks like, not uh delegating the task.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Welcome

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:53

again to the Commission Code Podcast. We appreciate you taking the time to listen and join us here today. We're here to help you increase your business revenue and have time to enjoy it. I'm your host, Morris Sims, and I've been consulting and training business people for, well, let's just say over 40 years. We're focused on increasing revenue and having time to enjoy it. After years as a professional salesperson, I spent 32 years in the corporate world. I retired as vice president and chief learning officer of the sales department of a large insurance company where we designed and built and delivered training for over 12,000 professional salespeople. Now I get to consult one-on-one helping people grow their business and organize themselves to make the most of the time they have. We also build online courses to support business owners in their work as they strive to build the business that they've always wanted. Our objective is really very simple. It's this. We're here to help you get what you want from your business and your life. So, right now, let's get on with this episode.

A Founder Story And Wake-Up Call

SPEAKER_00 2:03

George Rivera is our guest today on the Commission Code for Your Success, and I'm excited to have George here because he's got a story that I think is going to touch a number of hearts, and a story that um has some real meaning in it for all of us, I believe. So, George, welcome to the show. Glad you're here. Thank you, Morris. Excited to be here and share with your listeners. Tell us a little bit about George.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

Yeah, so I'm a 31 years uh entrepreneur. I started when I was uh 17 years old in in high school. Uh, this was like 1995. I like to say that's when dinosaurs used to roam the earth and uh started my business in um in the direct response space. That's where I've been most of my career. Um, this was pre-internet. The internet was around, but it wasn't around anywhere like we know it today. And I started in direct mail, classified ads, and three years later, I launched my first website there in the late 90s and uh been online ever since. Um, I've had a great career over the years, and and over the last year, I would say uh I've made a hard pivot into a completely different direction. Uh, built most of my success uh through my online marketing. Um kind of to summarize it, it's you know, money in, money out, and that difference, hopefully it's profit, is how I feed my family and make a living and do all the fun things we try to do in life. And lately I've I've had this shift to more of a personal branding, more like, hey, I'm George. I can help you with something. And um I recently wrote a book. It's called Buyback Time Formula, and it helps people essentially remove themselves from being the bottleneck. And what that means is the minute they step away from their business to spend time with their family or to just have a life outside of business, everything falls apart and the business doesn't grow. And so that keeps the founder trapped in the business. And I have several uh runs over my 30 plus years of being that founder, and um, I managed to work my way out of it. And now my my goal, my intention is to help other people who are in the same trap that I was, say 10 years ago, uh, find the path. Because when you're stuck in your business, you're missing out on a lot of things in life. And I thought I was being a great provider, and I guess you could argue that I was, but uh the family had another opinion to that, and I was missing out on a lot of events and a lot of things that I'll never get back. Um, and it took my father pretty much his last words to me, almost like a deathbed confession back in 2015. He said, Don't miss Leo's games. I missed too many of yours. And that was a wake-up call that hit me like a ton of bricks. Um, so yeah, that's kind of the the foundation, how I started, where I'm at now, my reason why, and and we can take it anywhere you want from here.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

That's a pretty good overview, George. I appreciate that. Thank you very

Start With A Time Audit

SPEAKER_00 4:50

much. So tell me where you begin with someone when you when you interact with uh a person who is starting a business and they're all wrapped up in as we all get when we start a business. You know, where do you begin? Because I mean, the way I look at it, there are seasons in life. And there's a season where maybe I'm starting a business and and I've got to focus on that to get it going. And there's a season where I have time and I can spend and focus on the family. Uh, we had a season in our life where uh most of our seasons were me focused on business and work, so your story really resonates with me tremendously. But there was a season where my son at age 11 was diagnosed as a juvenile diabetic, and we spent the next two weeks in the hospital getting his insulin levels adjusted, and then spent the rest of uh oh a great period of time focused on him and getting him set up and getting him healthy. Uh uh quick story I was standing in the kitchen and he was counting cheeses and putting them in a little plastic bag. And I said, Ross, what you doing? Well, I'm getting ready for preparing for my lunches for this week. And he says, he said, you know, I can only have however many of these uh at lunch, so I have to put them in plastic bags and get ready. And it just struck me and it knocked me over, and I looked at him and I said, Son, I'm so proud of you, you're doing so good with this challenge because I don't think I could do that. I I just don't think I can do it. You're my hero being able to do this and put it all together and and deal with this as well as you have. And he looked at me, George, and he said, Dad, it's not that hard. If I don't do it, I'll die. And I thought, well, wow, what kind of motivation for an 11-year-old. And and you know, he's 36, 7, something like that. Got two kids doing great. But uh at the time, all I could think was this kid at 11 years old is more mature than I am at whatever age I was at that point in time. And it's just it's amazing how how kids and family work. But how do you how do you help somebody in in those kind of situations, George?

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Yeah, absolutely. Um, the thing is just to to really like ask them why do they even want to make the change to begin with? Because a lot of founders they find themselves in the position similar to how I was, where you know, we tell ourselves, I'm the only one that can do this, you know, whatever. Insert the name of the task. And it's almost like this lie that we tell ourselves that we sincerely believe, but it keeps us trapped in that prison. And, you know, we we can't step away, even if we have a team. It just basically means we're adding to our plate by the more people we bring on because the more questions we invite in. And we think it's good leadership when we answer their question. But in reality, it it's poor leadership because the team is learning to depend on you and not think for themselves. And so, yeah, the the founder has to have their reason why they even want to do this to begin with. And there is a season of hustle that every business owner has to go through because it's like it starts with you. You don't have, you may not have the resources to start, you know, building and hiring a team right away. Um, but I I still encourage people that once they become aware that there's a better way to build a business, even from the beginning, start from there because you're either going to scale freedom or you're gonna scale chaos. And so even if you're just a one-person show getting going, you want to structure it in a way that, okay, you know, this isn't always gonna be small. This isn't always just gonna live in my head. Eventually we're gonna be adding people to this. So make sure that you're you're developing uh an infrastructure. Again, even if you're a solo entrepreneur that that can grow without um without you having to be pulled back into it. And so if you're the only one doing the work, then create systems and documentation so that as you bring people on, there's something easy to follow, um, or easier, I should say. And um, but once you've reached the level of quote, you know, cash rich, that's my avatar, or successful on paper, whatever that means, everybody has a different definition of that. But um once you reach a level of success, there's no reason to be trapped in your business any longer. You should use the resources that you have to free yourself up from that. And that's gonna have an exponential return on any kind of investment in doing so, because it's gonna allow you to reconnect and re restore the bond with your family that's been broken over years of, yeah, I'll be there. Oops, I can't. You know, the business pulls me back in. You you know how it is. And of course, the family just sort of forced to play along with that. Meanwhile, they're planning a life without you. Uh that's never fun. And um and it allows you to actually grow and scale your business quicker because now instead of being the firefighter for your business, you're only working in your zone of genius activities. And it allows the activities that you're working on to be exponentially more uh effective. You know, in my case, um, you know, that at the peak of the insanity for me, I was working 80 hour weeks, sometimes 90 hours. I was like, I didn't even know we had that many hours. I guess I found them all. And um, when I did what I consider the first step in the process of finding freedom, um, I do a time audit. You know, I take a look at everything that I'm doing. And there's a specific process in doing so. But once I did uh you know essentially documented everything that I did without any kind of judgment, um, I had a list of things and I realized that 40 of those 80 hours were working on tasks that were $50 an hour or less. And so once I have the the those number of tasks I need to remove off of my plate, I need to run it through what I call the 10K per hour filter. For me, when I'm in my zone of genius, I'm worth about $10,000 an hour. Um, it could be worth anywhere as little as a thousand, but it's definitely in that four to low five figure range. Your listeners might be like, hey, I'm worth $20,000 an hour or $200 an hour, whatever that figure is, you know, have have a standard for that because you'll take all the tasks that you're doing, run it through that filter, and then that's how you start getting the things off of your plate. Again, going back to my example, um, I realized that half of my time was $50 an hour or less tasks. And so, not a mathematician, but doing the quick math, that's $2,000 a week. At the time, I was scaling my business to $20 million a year. A couple minutes in the afternoon of sales will essentially provide all the revenue for that activity. Uh, you know, so like for just a little investment, I was getting half of my life back. Now the other side of that was another 40 hours there, but that's where my zone of genius activity lies. Um, but the old way of doing it, I was burned out, inefficient, stressed out, sometimes didn't even get to it all. Um, but the the new version of me, post-transformation, is like that 40 compressed down to 20. And now I'm working in a less stressed environment, very motivated, focused. Um, I'm respecting my calendar with guardrails, not working outside of that. My family's getting me back. And so that that's that's the direction that that we're going with that I walk clients through. So I know I threw a lot out at you, but wherever you want to pick it up from there.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

Well, you mentioned two things that that I think are are really, really important. One is is adding a team and building a team, but then educating or teaching that team the skills and the knowledge that they need to be successful so that they're not coming to you every minute. If if I've hired somebody and they can't make a decision on their own based on what I've taught them, then I'm not a good leader. Uh Warren Bennis taught us many, many, many years ago, long before the dinosaurs, that uh a leader's first responsibility is to develop their team and teach them and and guide them and and develop them into what they need to become for themselves. So if you're considering yourself a leader and you're not building that team up to to do the work and make decisions, then you're probably missing out. The other thing you said was building systems. And systems are my jam. I I just absolutely love creating looking at a process and creating a system to make it automatic or make it at least automated to some level or or some extent. And thus I don't have to spend a whole lot of time doing it. Um and I think those two things are are absolutely critical. Where do where do you begin with someone? George, uh, they've got that problem that we've discussed, and you've mentioned two major solutions there. If if they don't, let's look at it this way, if they don't have a team of people, then that may not be the key for them. But how do you help them eliminate the distractions and focus where they need to focus? Because focus is the key skill of the whole thing, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:48

Yeah, absolutely.

Delegate Outcomes And Protect Focus

SPEAKER_01 13:50

Um it's it's basically well, I I start everybody at the at the audit place because like we need to shine a light on all the things that you're doing. And you'll realize once you get that list of things, there's a number of things that you just should not be doing at all. And so once you get that list, there's only three things you could do with those, and that's eliminate anything that doesn't move the needle. So we're doing a lot of things repetitively that really don't move or advance the needle. So we can consider eliminating that. Um, we can automate, automate anything that repeats uh with AI. That's becoming easier and easier every day. I mean, tomorrow there'll be new technology that we don't know about today. It's crazy how it's advancing, it's making things easier. And then the last thing is delegating, but delegating with ownership and showing what the outcome looks like, not uh delegating the task, because delegating the task is what I also call delayed involvement. It's just a matter of time before I'm gonna get involved and looped in. And so delegating the outcome, showing what the finished result looks like is how essentially you transfer ownership. And then you hand over decision rights. You give your people um boundaries on where they can make their own decisions. And then if it escalates beyond uh outside of the boundaries, then there's a structured format on how they approach you. Um, it could be a weekly meeting cadence where it's like we're gonna meet for 15 minutes. You bring all the issues that you've compiled over the week and and uh bring them in that meeting where we'll discuss it. And that gets rid of the uh, you know, in the middle of the day pings when they say, Hey, can I borrow you for just five minutes? And we know it's never just five minutes. And you know, you're working on your zone of genius, like in my case, it's it's marketing and copy, and I'm deep into that. And then somebody asks me a question about some, you know, web server or domain or something. Some the context is completely different. I'm shifting over there. I'm trying to help out because I want to be a good leader. I want to be the firefighter, I want to be the hero to my company. And then I shift back to what I was working on, the stuff that actually brings in revenue for the business that moves the needle. And now I'm completely off my my mind game here. And and and there's there's statistics there. I sometimes get the number off, but something like 23 minutes or something on average, it takes for you to get back on track. And sometimes, like, that's all the time you had allocated, and you're you're like done. And you know, another task comes up or another thing on your calendar comes up. And so it's very important to guard that what I call zone of genius time uh against those interruptions. And so I I know I went into another list of things over there, but uh structuring it that way is how you best protect your your own personal time so that you can keep advancing for the company while you know you have the team doing the rest. And oftentimes my clients are people that have resources. Um usually they already have a team, they're just sort of not managing it correctly, or um, or if like if the current pieces of the team are missing, we we find those pieces to fill in those holes. But the goal is at the end of the day, so this is like where we're going, is that you are working less and you're making more money as a result of that, and you're getting your time back. Now, we could stop there, and that most people would consider that a success. But I'm like, that's just the first step. We need to get back with the family. And so there's frameworks to restore the bond with your family. It's not just, hey, good luck and hope you you give it back to them. Uh, it's an intentional framework to uh to to reconnect over the years of of broken promises, intentional or not.

Cut Meetings Email And Busywork

SPEAKER_00 17:12

Yeah, I mean, if I if I have I hate to say this, save some time. You can't save time, time runs and it it we don't control it. But if I find some time that that I have a choice on what I want to do outside of business, I have a choice to make. I can either go play golf by myself or I can spend time with a family. And then then I have another choice to make down that road. Let me let me back up a minute though, George. I love what you said. You do that audit and then you have to make a decision. Is this test something I can eliminate, automate, or delegate with ownership? And I I love that. I think that's a great way to put it. What are some things that uh a business owner, a solo preneur part type person who is out there doing it all themselves and consequently, yeah, you I I do that. I am one of those. So, yeah, you get to the point where you think, well, I'm the only one that can do that. What are some of the things that you had to consider eliminating that you see in your clients?

SPEAKER_01 18:18

Yeah. So just high level is eliminating anything that doesn't move the needle. So some of those things that we've identified with clients is just meetings. Um, you know, I look at their calendars and they're just back-to-back meetings, and I'm like, what's the purpose of this meeting? Do you really need to be on it? Um, a lot of these things could be handled over on email. Um, and if they do have a team or a VA, you can always send somebody in on your behalf. And now that we have these super cool AI note takers that, you know, I wonder where have you been all my life? Because they've sort of uh simplified a lot of the process of the note-taking and the detail that we used to have to like stress over getting in great detail. And um, yeah, so oftentimes uh you can have a note taker attend the meeting on your behalf as long as you have somebody on your team there. It doesn't have to be like the decision maker, it could just be somebody representing on your behalf. And then you get the note taker and say, hey, is there anything in here that I need to be aware of? And you let AI sort of do the heavy lifting of going through the conversation and because it knows you already, it's gonna know you need to be aware of making it something up, you know, inventory levels or or critical uh benchmarks for revenue or or anything of the sort. And it'll sort of like discard, not in a bad way, like you're being neglectful, but just like not show you the things that aren't relevant for you. And so, for example, I had one client that had nine meetings per day. That was like almost their whole day. I'm looking at like, when do you actually get work done? And we were able to cut that down to two meetings, and I feel like eventually we'll even get those off of his plate, but it's it's sometimes it's tough to like rip the band-aid completely, but we need to start slowly. And once you start getting your time back and you start to to really like believe in this because you feel it, you're gonna get addicted to do this as much as possible to like everything you can. You'll be a believer. You're like, oh my gosh, I thought I was the only one that could do this. First, I'm like, well, what kind of ego did I have to really believe that? And then secondly, it was like, I'm so glad I released it because now the person I released it to, you know, the old saying is if they can just get 80%, let's say if I'm 100%, get 80%, you could kind of live with that 20% breakage or or difference. But what I realized is fine, call it 80%. I get out of the way, their 80% goes to like 120. And I'm like, why the heck was I ever even worried about it? Yeah, keep it. I don't ever want to see that again. And so um, yeah, that that's that's how I see it.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

Yeah, I mean, you you delegate something with ownership, as you mentioned, and I love that line. And then all of a sudden you realize that whoever you delegated it to, whatever that task or that responsibility was, they're handling it and doing it better than I ever could. Boy, it took me a long time to learn that because uh I moved up the ranks by doing it all myself and and working harder than anybody else. I always thought, well, nobody can ever outwork me. And then you get up to a level where there is too much, there are too many responsibilities, too many things you've got going on. You better have a team because it's all gonna fall apart if you don't. And that team better be more than just okay, go take the trash out. Now come in here and do that, now go do that, now go do this. If I'm not delegating responsibility for, you know, your job is to keep the office clean, go go make sure it works, then you know, we're in deep, we're in deep deep trouble. But I I love that. Anything doesn't move the needle probably needs to be eliminated. And my word, in a corporate environment, meetings are probably the biggest waste of time there ever was. Um had a boss in in New York at one point that said, you know, we need a bell system like we we used to have in school where the Bell rings and the meeting's over. And then you've got 10 minutes to go run to the restroom real quick. And then another bell's going to ring, and that means your next meeting starts. And I thought, oh my God, I don't want to live like that. And but yet that was a lot of time. That was the way we we were living in that corporate world back then. So yeah, man, if you can eliminate it, meetings are probably a good one to eliminate. Anything else you can think of that that especially the the younger, I say younger in business, uh folks ought to be thinking about eliminating?

SPEAKER_01 22:37

Yeah, other things. Um, you know, so sometimes the owner will find themselves in things that they could have like a lower cost VA do, um, you know, like doing research or even AI can like handle a lot of that. And like I said earlier, it is changing so much. But now, you know, with Claude, they've got this clawbot thing, and you can like set it up to do like research on your behalf. And and so, like, honestly, the role of doing research could could be eliminated from a personal perspective from having to devote financial resources to and just have AI doing the research on your behalf, um, or or have somebody manage the researching of a ISO that it's not even on your plate. Um, but that's that's another example. So that's a combination of eliminate, automate there. But um, yeah, yeah, there's there's uh you know just a number of things, and and every every business is gonna have its own list of things that that don't move the needle. Like, like for me, for example, was just like constantly checking email. It's like almost like I was constantly on call. Um, if if I bash my time, I realize that you know, I might have been spending three, four hours a day in emails just randomly being pulled in in a reactive sense. But if I bash my time where I'm checking email three hours, I'm sorry, three times a day, it might compress all that time into like less than an hour, uh, you know, something like a morning schedule, afternoon, and evening, so that um so that I'm not just bouncing around all day, jumping from this context to that context, because that kills productivity, like we discussed. Um, so even just like structuring and batching the things that you do in an orderly fashion is almost equivalent to just eliminating a lot of waste. And so, um, so yeah, but every business will have their different little things, but I think there's some commonalities with emails, with meetings, uh, research. Those things could be applicable across the board.

Calendar Guardrails And Weekly Planning

SPEAKER_00 24:27

There is um uh a phrase that is commonly used in the world today called time management, and it is the biggest misnomer I've ever heard of because we don't manage time. Time moves along. Time that that second hand on my watch never stops. It keeps going, and I can't control it. I can't stop it, start it, or change it. So it all really comes back down to how we manage ourselves and creating that personal operating system, I think. And in fact, I think it so much I just wrote a course about it. But the the question I have for you, George, is this how do you manage, George? How do you handle managing yourself during the day so that you can get the required time in that zone of genius? What do you do? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 25:18

I'd say the main thing I do is I respect my calendar boundaries, my guardrails, and I structure my week so that I don't work more than 30 hours per week. And so what that naturally does is it compresses my availability so that I make the most of my time. So I'm not just you know willy-nilly scheduling things into my calendar. I'm I'm like, does this make sense? Does this move the needle? Because I don't have all day. I have to make it work um in within these hours. And and I need to be careful to not break that because when you do, then then you you'll sort of like slide and and you know, you slide a little bit here and there, eventually you drift away so far, you're like, okay, I'm I've totally blown the thing up. And so yeah, maintaining guardrails is the best. I I don't work beyond 5 p.m. And you know, if it's a task that I'm in the middle of, uh I just have to pick it up tomorrow during during my my work time again. And and again, naturally it compresses everything that I'm doing is to through the lens of does this move the needle? And if it doesn't, then I'm not gonna do it. I'll I'll run it through my uh you know, my system there. Is it something that I even need to do? Or can I automate this? Or who who can do this? Delegate it with proper ownership.

SPEAKER_00 26:25

So when you get up in the morning, you go to work, your calendar is your uh that's your your line for the day. That's where your everything you're gonna do is on that calendar somewhere. Is that correct? Is that how am I understanding you, Brian?

SPEAKER_01 26:40

Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, it's it's structured. I have personal time in there too. Uh, we want to make sure that we also have white space for for creative thinking, not just you know, tasks, but we want to think, all right, what, what relationships, what connections can I make today? For example, what podcasts can I go on that can help me get my word out? Um, those are all activities that help bring awareness to what I'm doing and potentially revenue generating activities when you're you're out there getting the word out. And so if it if I didn't create that opportunity to do that, then I'd be stuck putting out fires all day long in my business and then coming on podcasts or making relationships in from a burned out, stressed out perspective. And um, I've noticed a massive difference when I'm coming in with you know mental clarity, uh, well-rested, low stress versus the the the hustle and grind and oh my gosh, at the top of the hour, I got another call, another call, another call. Um, and it gets a little insane.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

It does. It really, really does. Do you take time to to plan your week before the week begins, or or is this a daily kind of a thing where you worry about planning tomorrow?

SPEAKER_01 27:46

Yeah, I I do plan uh for the week. Um it's not any sort of uh you know formal like structuring session or anything like that, but um, I'll look at the week ahead and I'll see, okay, what what's what's coming ahead? Because there's things that I've you know booked in there from weeks in the past, just events. Is somebody coming in town? Is there something I need to travel for? Um, and and then I'll I'll think, okay, who do I need to contact this week that'll help me move the needle? Um, who do I need to keep in touch with, you know, um, you know, vendor relationships that I need to maintain and things like that. So I'll sort of prioritize that during the week. I'll get some emails out, try to set some some appointments. Um, so I do a little bit of that. I I wouldn't say that it's uh super, super detailed or intense, but um I do like to have like a look ahead just to sort of see where the where the priorities are and and what the week ahead looks like.

SPEAKER_00 28:35

Yeah, it makes sense. That's yeah, I'm with you 100%. I I talk about it all the time. Uh, Darren Hardy does a thing that that I just love. Uh it's called the Sunday planning system. Uh Google it, you'll love it. Yeah. It'll fit right into what you're talking about. But it it it begins with uh you know clarity about where you want to go and what you want to do, but then it comes down to all right, let's look at all the things that need to come up in the in the coming week, which ones support my strategies, which ones move the needle, which ones don't, and uh deciding then for all the ones that do move the needle and all the time that I do want to to spend, where am I going to get that done during the week? And it um I love it,

Book Links And Founder Dad Dinners

SPEAKER_00 29:21

it's a cool thing. Anyhow, George, tell us how we can get in touch with you. I want to hear a little more about your new book. Uh, what's going on with George?

SPEAKER_01 29:30

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you for that and the opportunity to share. Yeah, you can find my book at buybacktimeformula.com. Um, there you'll find a link to, like I said, my book. Um, I post daily on socials. You can find the links there. I host local events as well as virtual. Um, I run a dinner at my home for six to eight founder dads who just have no other place to go to to talk about the the pressures of running a business and having a family at the same time. Uh, do that a couple of times a month. You could see that on the website or founderdaddinners.com. I also run a similar virtual event to those that aren't in the Austin area or or don't want to come. Um, it's called 18summersroundtable.com. And again, virtual version of the dinners, but um it's called 18 Summers because 18 Summers is all we get with our children. So uh, you know, I'm like, wow, I only got six summers left. And so it really puts things into perspective. And yeah, and and and like you asked about earlier about the book, um, I put all of my frameworks and strategies in the book, and there's a link to it. You can grab it there. Um, some people might get the book and be like, wow, this is so concise and detailed. Like, I don't need to contact George, and that's fine. Have at it and get your time back, get your life back. Um, but if you're like the me of 10 years ago, you get the book, you're like, wow, he knows his stuff, but I'm not gonna have a minute of the day to implement any of it. I'm there and available to to reach out and walk alongside the founder to get that implemented. And most importantly, um, stop giving your family the leftovers and give them the best of you instead of the the worst or the grumpy version of dad, husband, uh uh, and what have you. Um, so I'm there to walk alongside the the journey as well, if that if that uh if if that's the the path that they need.

Why We Miss Family Time

SPEAKER_00 31:13

George, I do have one more question for you. Why do we why do we wind up there? I mean, that's a story that is not unique to me and you. It's a story that is uh all over the place. I everybody I talk to, uh especially if they've experienced it, will will normally say, gee, I regret not prioritizing time with my family because well, I had to I had to earn a living, had to make a living, had to make things happen, had to get, had to and my kids, I guess I said that often enough. My kids now, when I express that regret, they're very quick to say, yes, but dad, you made sure we had a place to live and food on the table. So I thank God that my children respect that part of it, but still I regret the time. Why do we do that, George? What's the problem? How do we fix it?

SPEAKER_01 32:04

That's a great question. And and honestly, I mean, it's something I, you know, we we struggle with continuously. We just have to be aware about it because yeah, like your children are right. You you did the best you could. You made sure there was a roof over their head, and that's something to be proud of that that you provided. But there, there's like this tension. It's almost like there's never gonna be a point where we're like, okay, I got it a hundred percent. Like, there's that's just how life is is rigged, you know. I I God rigged it that way because otherwise there's there's no desire to strive and improve. And so, yeah, at the end of our days, and I can say this because I've seen it with my own dad, you know, we're never gonna say something like, I'm so glad I blew your game for that client meeting. You know, like nobody's ever gonna say that. Um, you're not gonna remember the name of that client or insert business excuse at those days, but you will remember if you made an effort to go to the games and how you feel about that, because that's something that just sticks with you forever. And I also know, like, most of these high net worth individuals that are stacking all this cash, sacrificing it, but you know, doing it for the family, um, they'd give up every single penny they've ever accrued at that point in their life to just have 10 more minutes with their kids at the age that they have them now. So, like, why can't we think of that now? And why do we have to wait till then to then regret it and lament it? And my goal is okay, we're all gonna have regrets, you know, we're gonna, hey, could have done this, could have done that better. But my goal is for for your listeners and anybody who adopts this message is, you know, it was an interesting path to get here. But once I got it, once I became aware that there's a different path and different way to do things, I made the change. Maybe I wasn't perfect, but I did my best. And I think that that's gonna help us minimize those regrets later down the line. And we can kind of hang our hat on that. Hey, I wasn't perfect, nobody is, but I did my best. And I'm I'm I'm going out uh with that in mind. And uh that that's just my goal is to bring that awareness.

Closing Challenge And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 33:59

George, this has been great. Thank you so very much for being here and for the conversation. Thank you, Morris. It's been fun. Absolutely. Everybody else out there, y'all go out and make it a great week. Go find somebody new to talk to and spend some time with a family that uh maybe you don't have on your calendar right now, but you should. Well, that does it for this episode of the Commission Code Podcast. This is the place where we want to help you find the Commission Code to success in your business. Remember, go to Morris Sims.com for more information. And in the meantime, hey, have a great week. Get out there and meet somebody new, and we'll see you again next time right here on the Commission Code. Best wishes, I'm Morris Sims.