Unlocking Entrepreneurial Freedom with Jeff Kikel | Ep 107 |

Jeff Kikel  00:00

I didn’t I’d really never run a business before I tried to start them and, you know, basically had seven businesses fail, before I had my first successful one. But what I’ve learned over the last seven years is, as a business owner, you can’t just have one stream of revenue, you’ve got to look at every angle of your business and say, Okay, what other ways can I generate revenue? You know, and that strategy helped me in my business. Well, it helped me in my life, because we had almost lost our home. At one point we were, you know, we were in financial trouble. And, you know, I mean, I’m I say that because I, it’s a cautionary tale. I didn’t plan my exit from the company. I just said, done, I’m out. I’ll figure this out.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:52

Good morning, and welcome to the latest episode of Better Business Better Life. Today, I am joined by Jeff Kikel, who is the founder of Freedom Day wealth management. And what I love when I looked at the site, is that this little saying that he has it’s, it’s about getting you to that first day that you actually have a work optional lifestyle. So that is what Jeff does. He works with people to actually help them to get that state. Welcome to the show. Jeff, lovely to have you.

Jeff Kikel  01:16

Thank you, my friend. It’s my afternoon over. It’s my afternoon. Back in time. So.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  01:22

Yeah, that’s right. I’m way ahead. So it’s Friday over there, isn’t it? Yes. It’s

Jeff Kikel01:28

Friday. And it’s, and it’s Saint Patty’s day. So.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  01:33

Oh, of course. Well, yes. Happy, sad, funny to say. Great. So Jeff, you’ve got a really interesting story, because you spend a lot of your life actually working for other people. And then you suddenly had an AHA moment. Why don’t you tell us a bit about that?

Jeff Kikel  01:43

Sure. Well, it was about eight years ago, I had been in the financial services industry for almost 25 years, at that point, working for several major financial services firms, I had left that path and gone to work for a smaller financial service firm, kind of a mid tier regional firm in in Texas. And I was in the process of writing my first book. And my first book was a book that was the talked about retirement planning for police officers. And I was looking for a way to market the book. And so I thought, you know, maybe I’ll do a podcast. That sounds like a good idea. And then I realized, well, maybe I actually need to actually listen to a podcast, because I never had before and looked for a book on well, how do you do a podcast and just happened to come across a book written by a gentleman named John Lee Dumas, who had a exceptionally successful podcasts at that time, called Entrepreneur on Fire still is. And I decided, well, let me start listening to what John was talking about, and what he was talking about in his book. And I became obsessed, because what John was doing was he was interviewing all these entrepreneurs. And I became obsessed with this thing. I mean, I was commuting at least twice a week to Dallas, from Austin, which is about a three hour car trip. And I would listen to the shows at double speed, driving up and driving back so I could listen to like eight shows up a chose back. And what I realized was there all these people that were no different from my that I was, there were no smarter than I was, but they had taken the time to become entrepreneurs. And I was looking for my financial freedom. I was looking for my freedom of time to get away from work. And I decided, well, I’m going to, I’m going to take this step. And it all kind of started coming together, I came up with an idea to open co-working spaces. And I know you and I share that. Yes, that background. That was my idea. Well, we didn’t have anything like that in the town I lived in. So I decided I was going to open a co-working space, I still was going to stay in the financial services firm or industry. So I ended up deciding, okay, well, I’ll start my own practice. And I’ll do that. And it’s interesting in life when you I keep saying I have God moments in my life, and this was one of those I had my last ever review with my employer. And it just happened to be my boss and the president of the company. And we had had a bit of a strange relationship at that point because they had they kind of took me down a path that I didn’t want to go down. And it was something that what what they sold me on when I came to work for him was not what they really wanted. And I remember my boss leaving the room after giving me the worst performance review I’d ever and the president that was sitting in the room with me and he looked at me straight in the eye and he said, You know, I just got to tell you this. You are the worst employee we’ve ever had. you, you are, you know, too independent, you just go do things without asking. You don’t get approval before you do things. And I looked at him and I said, but that’s what you hired me to do. And that really led me down to the path of the next three months, I basically plan my exit from the company. And in March of 2016, I launched my business, I launched my new practice, and I launched the co-working spaces, where I was in the middle of building co-working space at that time. And I left and I started my career as an entrepreneur. From that point on, I started my co-working space wealth management practice and four other businesses over a seven year period of time, growing those, and, you know, over the last two years, two of those businesses grew to the point where I have sold them. Those two businesses I had seven-figure exits from, and, you know, it gave me my financial freedom. But during that time period, I was also exploring other alternatives and other ways of generating income streams. And that was something that I discovered my first couple years of running businesses, you know, I didn’t, I’d really never run a business before I tried to start them and, you know, basically had seven businesses fail, before I had my first successful one. But what I’ve learned over the last seven years is, as a business owner, you can’t just have one stream of revenue, you’ve got to look at every angle of your business and say, Okay, what other ways can I generate revenue? You know, and that strategy helped me in my business, well, it helped me in my life, because we had almost lost our home. At one point, we were, you know, we were in financial trouble. And, you know, I mean, I’m, I say that because I, it’s a cautionary tale. I didn’t plan my exit from the company. I just said, done, I’m out, I’ll figure this out. And I had to over that eight-year period of time figure out, okay, how can I extract from my life, every possible revenue stream that I can, you know, and today, I sit on probably four to eight revenue streams that come in from each of my businesses that I still owe.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  07:31

Okay, that’s fantastic. Yeah, I guess is the question that normally people actually ask, they just kind of assume that that one business is going to be it and then I’m not even sure people plan for the exit. To be honest, I think that sometimes we just build a business because we love it. And we haven’t really thought about what the long term looks like. Yeah. Okay, so fascinating kind of story to get to where you are, has it all been smooth sailing, because we get taught in business school that, that we have this beautiful, you know, got a hockey stick growth, and then eventually tapers off doesn’t really work like that in real life.

Jeff Kikel  08:01

No, not even close. You know, I mean, and that was really, I discovered around 18 months. And and I always say for, you know, for business owners, there’s, you know, you have that first year of business, the first 12 months, you know, it’s all unicorns and, you know, butterflies and all that, you know, we’re building something that we love, we love doing what we’re doing, we’re not making any money, and it’s okay. Because, you know, we had to do that. And then you hit that next 12 months, which is what I call the sock, it is really that period of time where you start to realize, hmm, I’m working a lot hours, and I’m not making any money. I’ve got to do something. And, you know, I’ve, I’ve experienced watching this from the outside with a lot of the people that came into the co-working spaces, you know, and I’d worked with, you know, kind of helping and getting them to go, and the point that I would watch them just fizzle out was about 18 months, they just gave up and you know, well, I’ll go get a job or I just can’t do this. It’s not going to work. And I look back and I say, Well, why was why was I successful, and these other people weren’t. And I’m looked at, you know, in our community as Oh, you know, Jeff’s a super successful entrepreneur. And you know, he does all these things, and I, and I look at it and I said, Well, I’m no different from anybody else. The only difference is I just didn’t give up. And honestly, there were some points were really at about 18 months, which was our first full summer in the co-working business because we kind of came in it during the selling season. And our first full summer was horrible. We had realized we were running out of money fast. And what I hadn’t anticipated was that entrepreneurs really don’t work as hard as they should. And we hit summertime in our ER summertime and all All of a sudden people are like, Oh, well, I’m just gonna take the summer off and not come in. And, you know, I won’t need my office anymore for you know, I’ll just pick it up in the fall. And it’s like, yeah, well, I still have rent to pay during that time period. So that was, that was somewhat shocking it was I had sort of anticipated it. So I was already shoring, you know, shoring the business up, and cutting out expenses wherever I could. But I mean, it was it was tough. And we started having to put money out of our own pockets into the business to try and keep it afloat. Anticipating, hopefully, we will get to the fall, and we’d pick up again. So I mean, I could have easily given up and there were days I came home from work, and my wife and I were talking and I was like, well, we just got to shut this down. And I, the only reason I didn’t shut it down was because I felt a responsibility for the people that one had invested in the business. And to the people that were you know, that were our renters or our members. I just couldn’t give up. So I just didn’t I figured it out. At that point. Yep.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  08:06

Perfect. Yeah. I mean, I remember those days myself, and I’ve had a number of businesses, a couple of nice successes, a couple of spectacular failures. And I think you’re right, I think people underestimate that. There’s that whole kind of Yes, things are going along, as you said, the first 18 months is exciting, it’s fun, you don’t mind that you’re not making money, and you keep telling yourself, it will come right, it’ll all be fine. But then, as you said, the next kind of 12 to 18 months, and when it’s really, really hard. And I think for other people, they just don’t have the resilience, they don’t have the tools. And also sometimes sometimes we actually follow an idea that maybe isn’t the right idea. And we’re not prepared to make the change think. So thinking about what’s working, what’s not working. So the co-working spaces, where did they get to?

Jeff Kikel 11:49

Well, we, we today own three spaces in the Austin area we’ve grown, we’re actually kind of tacking the business. So as I sold some of my businesses last year, I started looking at, okay, well, I don’t function well, if I’m not doing a bunch of things. So I literally could not work and be fine. But I don’t function well in that world. So I had to kind of change up a little bit. And one of the areas, you know, I had been investing in real estate. But what I realized was one, if I you know, when I analyzed the co-working business side of my life, it was kind of maxed out. I mean, it’s one of those things, you start reaching a point where you could only rent so much space between the doors. And so I really had to start looking at okay, what can we do? What are the different revenue sources we have? What are the what are different ways we could do this? And how can we raise, you know, the money that we’re making on that business? And so I ended up analyzing and saying, Okay, well, what else could we do in that space to raise the revenue. So one of the things we did is actually, we partnered with a pretty big-time testing company, where we became a testing center, or we’re in the process of becoming a testing center for Todd or for this major testing company that does all kinds of different testing for, you know, IT certifications, things like that, as I started to analyze those seats, so like one office in my building, or one office in our office, you know, it makes x revenue. Well, when I started to analyzing this, even if it didn’t do maximum effort, it’s almost triple the revenue. So it’s almost three acts for those same three seats. So we made a commitment to basically convert half of our space into those and this is really an anticipation of eventually selling that part of the business. So I needed to look at, well, what’s the sustainable revenue model? What is controllable for me, versus kind of being at the mercy of the renters we have, because a lot of times we have a company that might come in that, you know, they’re, they’re there for a while, and then all of a sudden, they kind of outgrow us. And so we’re always on this never-ending cycle of replacing people and then getting new ones in and all that. So this was a way to have some revenue that I felt like I at least had some control over from that perspective. And then the other side of it is, I started to look at well, you know, hell, we’re a real estate company. And I’ve been doing real estate, you know, and on the side as my own side business. So I decided, well, you know, what, we’re going to become a real estate. Yeah, we’re gonna just take the real estate to the next level. So you know, this, is that whole, okay, what other revenue sources what other things can you do within that company? And that’s really, you know, this year has been extremely successful at that. We launched A real estate wholesaling operation. So this was something that when I was selling my business, I just had a bunch of time on my hands. And so I literally took every real estate course I could read every book I could. And I came up with the idea of starting a real estate wholesale operation. So, you know, we go out and we find a residential property, basically, that is not pretty. But it’s something that could be fixed, we gain control of that, and then we sell that to another real estate investor that’s down the food chain from us. You know, so that’s one way, we are also doing midterm rentals. So we’ve acquired some properties through different ways. And we’re doing midterm rentals. So you have short-term rentals, like Airbnb, and you have long-term rentals, which is, you know, the traditional rental market, well, there’s this kind of interesting spot in between for people that are that need a, you know, need a place to stay for 30 days beyond, typically up to a year maximum. And we started to market those properties to traveling nurses, which is a major thing in the United States, traveling nurses, you know, there’s like 2.5 million of them in the United States. And they, you know, they travel on like, 13-week contracts, to different places. So hospitals that need more staff, they’ll hire them to come in, and they’re basically a hired gun, and they don’t want to live. Yeah, they don’t want to live in a hotel for you know, 13 weeks. So they typically are looking for a furnished apartment or house or something like that. Sometimes they have kids or pets, and they just want to be more comfortable and feel like they have a home. And so we found I found that little way of doing things. And it’s it’s actually a very profitable way of doing things. It’s the profit levels very similar to the Airbnb model. Without the the problem of every single day. Yeah, you’re turning them over every you know, and you’re constantly cleaning these places. I mean, we clean them once every three months. Instead, yep. So it’s,

Debra Chantry-Taylor  17:13

I actually, I actually had a similar idea a few years ago, and I’m my market was actually a much more niche, it was the divorce market, because I realized, so often when you get divorced, you know, you end up splitting up, and you’ll need somewhere to go, but it’s only for its for maybe three to three months, or 12 months, depending on how long the divorce takes. And depending on what’s going on. And you want to have your pets, you want to have your home comforts, and you just but you don’t need to buy or rent a place long term. So interesting.

Jeff Kikel  17:42

Once again, you don’t want to live in a hotel for that time period. You know, we found a couple of times to people that maybe their home got destroyed by a fire or something. So they have nothing. And they you know, they they’re trying to rebuild their lives, rebuild their homes. And you know, it’s a place that hey, they can come in most times the insurance company actually pays us directly in those cases for for housing them for that time period.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  18:08

Perfect. Yeah. Hey, it takes me back to my days when I was running the common co-working space. And I had a similar moment where after 18 months, we were starting to kind of break even. But it was really tough because as you said, you’re always looking for people to replace the people that in they had a limited number of desks. And we had to kind of pivot away a bit too and go, what else can we do this space. And so we actually ended up going out, we took a big chunk of the space and actually converted it into an event center. And we installed a bar and had high end kind of business events. That was very unusual building. But I have to be honest, it wasn’t me that kind of came up with that idea. I was actually feeling a bit kind of like, Oh, this isn’t working. What am I going to do? And I actually brought some some advisory board team together to say, Hey, give me some ideas. Help me with that. Because sometimes it can be tough, right? Because you’re so so in there fighting the fires, trying to keep the fires burning, if you like, what do you what do you suggest people do when they’re feeling like that?

Jeff Kikel  18:59

Well, and I think you said it perfectly. You had an advisory board. You know, what I what I have done really what I discovered early in my career, I always have I’ve always had mentors. I’ve always had coaches. So I’ve paid for coaches and mentors throughout that time period. And, you know, I think for me, one of the things that I did when when I was really looking at okay, well, what else can we do? What else can we tack to? What are some other ideas? You know, at those early days, holy crap, you know, I don’t know where money is gonna come from, you know, I was still paying for a coach who I worked with and you know, Stan, Stan was always he was the guy that always said, you know, I can’t teach you how to do your business better. But what I’ve always said about Stan was he made me a better me at that point. So he was able to kind of pull me out of me and get myself out of the way, which is what a good coach does and You know, I’ve paid for business consultants to come in both good and bad to look at the business and say, Okay, well, what can we do, but I’ve always had mentors, and I think that’s one of the real critical things. Being a CEO, a president is probably one of the loneliest jobs you’re ever going to have. Because it’s not something that, you know, I’ve been fortunate because in my co-working business, my wife has been my business partner for almost six of the seven years. And you know, she, I get to go home, and we can kind of blow stuff off. And I mean, we both, we both have our days where we come home, and it’s just like, wow, I can’t take it anymore. You know, and the other one’s kind of sitting there going, alright, alright, alright, love, you know, let it out. And then we go. So we’ve been fortunate from that perspective, but not everybody has that. And the problem with being the CEO of a company is, is not like you can go to any of the people that work for you and go, Holy crap, I don’t know how we’re going to keep this thing alive have because they tend to then leave and go away, because they’re worried about their paycheck. So I think you need to find people who, you know, I look at, I have a three-stage world, when it comes to the people that I interact with, I always have a group of peers that I hang out with. So we can only share, you know, hey, we’re all out fighting alligators in the alligator pit? What, you know, what’s, what are you doing? What are what am I doing, I’ve always had people that are mentors, who I’ve looked up to who are where I want to be. So I’m always looking for those kinds of people. And then, you know, I look at giving back to, so I do a lot of mentoring for, you know, entrepreneurs that are not where I’m at, and want to be where I’m at. And so I just kind of break by, I break my interaction time up into those three different groups. And that’s been helpful for me, quite frankly, through masterminds. And and, you know, mentorships. And I don’t necessarily look for coaches anymore, because I look for I hire mentors, because I look at a coach sometimes is somebody who may or may not have actually done what I do. And are they theoretically talking about this, they’re talking about the theory, but mentors that I hire, they’re, they’re actually out there doing it. And that’s.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  22:37

Actually one of my one of my bugbears is that anybody can actually call themselves a coach, and you can go your coaching course, and you have all the theory in the world, what I loved about EOS, and the reason I kind of joined them was they have the all of the EOS implementers actually have to be business owners or have been business owners. And so if we both a coach and a mentor in that it’s really impossible.

Jeff Kikel  22:55

And every EOS implementer I’ve worked with, I mean, they’ve always been somebody that has been they’ve been there or they’re still there, you know, and they are really any how because they’re building their EOS business on top of it. So you know, I mean, it’s, it’s true from that perspective. But yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s the thing I’ve always loved about EOS is, okay, these are people that have taken the time to learn, you know, the model of EOS. But they’ve also brought a crap ton of experience before that, of both good and bad. I mean, you know, you’re a great example, that when you’re on my podcast, you know, me, you’ve had great experiences, and you’ve had tough times. And yeah, you’re running a co working space in the middle of a pandemic, which just is awful. But you bring all of that when you’re sitting down with your client. So I’m, you know, I always recommend people, and I really, lately more, I would say over the last two to three years, I’ve hired what I call mentors, and I’ve hired mentors, not just gone to them and said, Hey, I expect you to just give to me, I’m gonna pay you. And I really want your honest advice. And what I find from hiring mentors is they don’t have time for BS. They’re not sitting there and saying, Oh, well, let’s you know, let’s coach for six months and I’ll walk you through and I’ll be your your accountability partner. You know, the mentors I’ve hired have been pretty brutal, and they don’t suffer fools. So when, you know, when I go to them and say, Well, I didn’t get that done when I told you I was going to do because I was so busy and they look at me and go, Well, I’m not you know, and you’re wasting my yeah, you’re wasting my time, my time. I can make a lot more money doing what I do for a living than helping you right now. And that’s, you know, it’s helped me to then be okay, I’m really accountable and I I value what these people do. I’m willing to spend the money with them and I value what they do. And I don’t want to lose access to that, because I didn’t do what I was supposed to do.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  25:11

It’s what the advisory board I paid for it as well. It’s similar thing. You can look at your strengths and weaknesses and go, where am I weak? What do I need somebody to hold me accountable, who’s been there, done that, in that particular area, that particular skill set, and happened to hold you accountable. I want to talk a bit about peer groups as well, because peer groups are actually really, really interesting. And I’ve been a member of EO I’ve been a member of, I’ve been involved with tech and things like that. And I think that it’s actually really important, and we run some masterminds ourselves for some of our clients. And I will just have one yesterday. And I have to say, every time I run these things I actually get to learn to so you know, it’s just that being in a room with people who are going through it or doing it. It’s just such a great way to tap into other people’s experience.

Jeff Kikel  25:51

And especially if you get in, you know, I’ve been invited to multiple masterminds over the years. And what I always tell people is, I don’t really always like masterminds, because I’m typically the most motivated person in the room. And what I found over the years was, it all became Well, Jeff, what are you doing? What are you doing? Okay, well, what are you doing? And like I said, it would be some of those list instances where I typically today, if I’m going to be part of a mastermind, I probably am going to spend 10 to $20,000 a year in that mastermind. And I’m going to be in there with people that are like me. And there are people that aren’t like me, because there are people that are so motivated, that I get in there. And I’m like, Wow, I’m an idiot. I mean, I don’t even know what I’m doing. I mean, you’re making millions of dollars a year, and you’re doing all this and you’ve got, you know, all this successful stuff going on? Why am I in this room. But that’s, you know, that’s, I think, to take it to that next level. You know, I’m at that point right now, in my own personal life. You know, I really the whole Freedom Day stuff, all that all that stuff around Freedom Day, really started to coalesce last summer, when my business partner wanted to buy me out of our practice or financial practice, because I didn’t really fit anymore. I was I was really tacking over to a different thing that just, you know, it was a round peg in a square hole, and it wasn’t going to work. And he felt like I was kind of distracted from what we were doing within the practice, which I really was. But it allowed me then to say, Okay, what is it? You know, if I were to just say, I’m going to restart over, and I’m going to do things a different way in my life, and I want to work with people and help them achieve their freedom day. Well, what would I need to do? And that’s really what I’ve spent the last eight months working on. I think when you and I talked, I told you, I was working on a book, still working on the book, mainly because what I what I started to discover, as I was writing, I’m like, crap, I don’t know all the pieces of the story. And not all the pieces had been put together. They were kind of out there. And I had to figure out how they all went together. And that’s really been the last, I would say five months, was pulling the pieces together and seeing how they fit. And then looking at okay, now, how do I get all these disparate pieces of my life that I’ve had, for really the last seven years? How do I get those all into one common thing, which is something that had not been for the last seven years? How do I get into a common thing? So from the communications perspective, okay, I do a podcast. I do you know, I have a YouTube channel, I write books, I write articles. I have web pages, okay, how do all those coalesce into that Freedom Day story? And how does that then get to the end client? And I think that’s important. I think a lot of businesses as they start adding things, and I did this, you got to make sure that those are all kind of pulling in the same direction. And that was with the old practice. I wasn’t pulling in the same direction anymore, because I didn’t really what we were doing with my old practice was the old way of doing things. And I just don’t think the old way of doing things works anymore in the financial world. I think you have to think of cash flow first, instead of amassing dollar amounts. Well, that’s something that if you’re a wealth manager, the only way you get paid is to a mass dollar amounts, and not necessarily to help people create, you know, revenue streams, yeah, and cashflow and so that was kind of what I had to extract myself from now. I still file I still built a wealth management practice. I do have that now. But the wealth management practice is just a small piece. Some of what I do for my clients, you know, I put together strategies, I help them, if they want to get into real estate, I help them do that. If they want to start businesses, you know, I’ll help guide them. But then I work with partners like you that, you know, it’s like, okay, you’ve got this business up and running, but how are you going to get to where you want to be, and I don’t want to do that. That’s not my skill set. And I’m not going to be good at that. That’s just not what I what I enjoy. So I work with partners that can help them kind of move them along the path. You know, on the other side of things, I work with a lot of business owners that were who I was, you know, if you looked at me, prior to the pandemic, I was working, typically I get up at six o’clock in the morning, get up at, I’d be at work by about seven, 7:30, I would work until like 7:00 at night, all the way through, I would take it, I’d eat at my desk at the time. And I I focused my whole day on work. If you looked at my calendar, it looked like a fruit salad, because it was all these different colors on it. And every minute of my day was accounted for. And I would come home and I’d have dinner with my wife, you know, for like 30 minutes, we clean the dishes up. And then I would start working from let’s say 8 pm until 1. You know, rinse and repeat every day. And then every Saturday, every Sunday, we might go out do a little bit of running around in the morning, I would come back and I would be working the rest of the day. So I was working 70-80 hour weeks, I was beat down. But I just am one of these people that can keep up that pace. And when the pandemic hit, it was interesting, because all of a sudden, everything went stopped overnight. And all of a sudden, I was like, you know, with the co-working spaces, well, nobody was in, except for the few people that had rented space, they were coming in on a regular basis. We were still we had most of our people still with us. We started to add new people and but you know, we’re like, well, most people, you know, we were having to do all this idiotic cleaning, which we now realize was completely worthless. But, you know, we said well, okay, well open from instead of 8 until 5  will open from 9 to 4. And that gave us enough time at the beginnings of the end of the day to clean. Well, after the pandemic kind of started to subside. We’re like, why are we opening before 9:00? And why are we staying open after 4? Because nobody comes, you know, most of the time, nobody would come in until nine if they wanted to. They are most of those people had 24-hour access so they can come and go as they please. Because after 4pm Most of the people that were there, you know, that didn’t have 24 hour access were already gone. So why are we staying staying open after those times. So all of a sudden I went from, okay, I was working 7 until 7. Now all of a sudden, I’m working from nine until four and I realized there was actually a life outside of work. And I then started to look at okay, what am I doing. And I realized that a lot of my life and this, this was kind of a sore point with my business partner. Because what happened, especially during the pandemic, like all of our staff started working from home and this was in the financial practice. My business partner and I were the only two that were there for a long time. And the staff all of a sudden started to take advantage of that and say, Oh, well, yeah, if you need to drop in a check, you know, Jeff will be there at the office, Jeff can do that Jeff can do this. And all of a sudden, I realize, wait a minute, why am I working so hard, and everybody else isn’t I’m being delegated to, and I run the place. So I flipped the gears on them. And I, you know, kind of redesigned my life and said, Now you’re gonna work on this. And if somebody’s dropped by a check, you better get your butt here to the office because I’m not going to be here to do that. And that kind of started to create a little bit of a rub with my with my employees, but I didn’t really care anymore. I was I was looking at I’m not going to live the life that I was living. And that was the big change for me. And so I I now do a I do a keynote speech that I call procrastination for fun and profit. Which is really okay. Okay, how do you how do you fix your life? If you are that person that was me? Were your schedule was all covered up, you know, and you had everything planned out for the day. Just use a simple acronym in your life. And so this is what procrastination for fun and profit is use the acronym IDEA. So it Yeah, so one IDEA The first thing is identify. So identify what’s coming in at you don’t take action on it, but identify what’s Coming in at you, then you take that what’s coming in at you. And the first thing is delegate. So I might have a task list of everything that’s kind of coming at me for the day. And instantly I go through that and say, Okay, this can be delegated to my wife, she can handle that this can be delegated to my virtual assistants in the Philippines, this can be delegated. To my, to my, you know, one of my other community managers that works for me, and does social media stuff. Okay, great. Done. That’s off my plate. Now, the remaining things that are on there, what can be eliminated? Okay, is this just something stupid that we just keep doing, and there’s no reason for it. A great example of this is my email. So I used to get on a on every single day, I would get about six to 700 emails. So I had about six to eight different email accounts for different businesses. And I would get about 800 emails a day. And what would happen is I just wouldn’t take any action on them. So I would have, you know, then 800 turned into 1600, then to 2400, it was just this never-ending thing. And I would eventually just go, oh, I go through. And, you know, I would realize, as I’m looking through all these things, they’re newsletters that people signed me up for. People just automatically made my name part of their their list. And all these things that kept building and building and building and really only about a quarter or less of the messages I was receiving, were worth anything. So I found this tool that I was able to go in, and it basically was called unroll, and unroll, you can go in, you can sign your email attached to it. And it goes through and it helps you unsubscribe from all these things. So I went from 800 emails a day, now down to about, I’d say less than 100 at that point between eight email accounts, and they’re all actionable things that I need to do. Okay, so that was eliminate from my life, then the last thing is automate. You know, I’ll give you an example of my financial practice. So I’m part of a lead generation group that generates leads. And what I was finding is, and I saw this back in my old firm, what happens is, you know, they they generate at least one to two leads per day, well, that’s fine, it’s easy to manage one to two leads per day, until you get two leads today, two leads tomorrow, two leads after that, and you’re not getting a hold of the clients. So all of a sudden, now I’m getting bald, you know, bold under our solution with my old firm was, well, we just need to hire another person. And we need to hire another person. Well, what I ended up doing with that, with my new business, I was like, why don’t really want to hire any more people, I want to run this for as long as I can with just me. So I just simply created an automation that does everything for me. So I get I get a lead in, I put them into the lead system, it actually does outbound, it actually makes an outbound call and leaves a message. It does a it sends an email, it sends a text. And then I have kind of a 14-day process where it’s sending texts and emails and outbound phone calls and all that. So I don’t do anything. At that point. Yeah. And I’ve found that it’s almost I’ve still tweaking it, but it’s almost as effective as what I was doing it. So I’m typically I’m converting about 50% of those leads into conversations, which is about where we were when I was sitting there making phone calls all day.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  38:52

That’s fantastic. Okay, cool. So I’m just gonna do a quick summary, what we talked about is a few things here that I think are really important. So the first thing was like, make sure you looking for multiple streams in your business place, right? So what are the different multiple streams you can look at? The next one I want to use would have a sports analogy, it’s like playing when you play tennis, and I’m a big tennis fan, you know, you should play with someone who’s better than you. Because that is the only way you can actually improve your game. So right so surround yourself with people who are either at a similar level or or better than you so that you can actually improve yourself. And, and then use the idea framework, which is identified delegate, eliminate and automate, to actually free up your time and say no more often, right? So people who say no to things that actually help free up your time. Brilliant. Okay, so what are your kind of three top tips based on that that we’ve discussed? What would you say are the three top tips that you’d offer as advice to people who are on that journey?

Jeff Kikel  39:38

I would say if you do not have somebody if you’re a solopreneur, or you’re a small business owner, if you don’t have either an advisory board, like you were talking about, or you don’t, yeah, paid advisory board. And if you don’t have a paid mentor, you need to figure that out. out quickly. That is absolutely, it’s an absolute must, because you’re just not, you know, you either are not playing at your top game. And you know, I mean Tiger Woods, still, you know, he’s a wildly successful golfer still pays a coach to teach him, you know, swing mechanics and everything else. So every top athlete in the world, and every top entrepreneur that I’ve ever met, has mentors that they can go to, and most often they’re paying for those mentors. You know, I mean, sometimes that might be, you know, I mean, I looked at one, and I just didn’t have it in my budget, but I figured out how to do it. And I mean, it was a really big check. It was one of the biggest checks I ever wrote to somebody. But that one thing turned into a seven-figure exit from my business, one thing. And what I invested was about a eighth of that. And last but not least, you know, what I would say is, you’ve got to, you’ve got to look at your business and say, am I maximizing what the business can do? If you’re, let’s say, a physical business, what can you be doing on the internet? And most people will be like, Oh, well, I, you know, I don’t have any way of doing that. No, everybody has different ways of making money. Everybody has different skill sets, and things that you have experienced that. You know, in my practice, one of the things I realized was, I don’t want to work with individual clients as much anymore. I want to work with a small subset of clients. But I still need to help all those other people. So I developed and am launching very, very quickly here, a new program, that is me taking people through the the Freedom Day process, without necessarily me being there. Some kind of course, yeah, it’s an online course that’s, you know, much more affordable. And then if they reach a point where they’re like, you know, what, I really need somebody to help, then I’m there, and I’m available to him, but I need them to get through that first. So that’s another revenue stream for me at that point, you know, and then I think the last thing is, you need to make sure especially if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re who I was, who was working myself to death, you’ve got to stop. And you’ve also got to not feel bad. When you step away from the business for a week’s vacation or something. I just, just in the last seven years, I have taken one, seven-week vacation. Why? Because one, I just didn’t feel like I could be away from the business. And two, I didn’t trust the people that work for me. And I have consciously worked on building my team to where they can take advantage or you know, they can actually work without us being there. And my wife and I, you know, my wife is even more controlling than I am sometimes. And she’s like, well, I can’t, you know, I’ve got to be there. I said, what we’re paying people to be there. Why are you there? Also, we’ve got to trust them, we got to trust them that they’re going to make mistakes, and we can’t come in and beat him in the face and say, Well, you made a mistake. It’s just okay, you made a mistake, what do we do differently next time, but I need them and I’m working super, super hard, that in the next 24 months, we’re going to take a full month away from the businesses, all of them. And we’re just going to go over to Europe, we’re going to probably go to France, and spend a month in France. I’m gonna buy some real estate when we’re over there just to have a little bit of fun. But we need to be able to step away from the businesses and I want to be able to have maybe a 10-minute call on Monday morning with my team. Alright, what’s going on for the week? What do you got? What, you know, is there anything you need? Other than that, I’m done. Don’t call me unless, unless the buildings burning down and I expect you to call the fire department first. And if somebody’s robbed it, call the police department because I can’t help you. Other than that, I don’t expect to talk to you until next Monday.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  44:11

And that’s what we called letting go with EOS, right. It’s like if you can actually build up the structure and the accountable and the people around you should be able to let go. And that’s when life really does become you know, doing what you love with people you love and having time to pursue other stuff.

Jeff Kikel  44:25

Well, it’d be it’s when you become a business owner instead of an operator. The biggest difference, don’t be an operator, be an owner of a business and an owner of a business does not work in the business.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  44:40

Completely agree. Jeff, we could talk all day. I know we could but we are running out of time. I really appreciate it. It’s been great to hear your side of the story because we’ve talked before about my side of the story. Love the stuff that you’ve shared there. If somebody wants to get in contact with you, how would they do that?

Jeff Kikel  44:55

A couple of different ways. So if you want to kind of follow the Freedom Day journey, I would recommend listening to our podcast, the freedomnationpodcast.com. I share actually other people’s stories Deb’s been on there before. So we, you know, I share people’s stories that have gotten their freedom. Certainly, you can reach out to me directly, jeff@jeffkikel So J E F F KI K E L .com. I’m more than glad to do that, or connect with me on LinkedIn, or Instagram. Those are my two places that are my jams. Love to connect with you. And I love to help people all over the world that I work with.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  45:37

Brilliant. And also we should mention the book because the book will be ready by the time this podcast comes out. So the book is on freedomdaybook.com. Is that right?

Jeff Kikel  45:45

Yes, it is freedomdaybook.com. So, for the for the listeners, you’ll be able to go on there and get the first chapter for free, which kind of tells my little story that I told you at the beginning here. But also, for those of you that download that and your debris listeners will actually give you a really, really discounted price on the book, as well.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  46:12

Oh, that’s awesome. Hey, Jeff, thank you so much. Always a pleasure to talk to you really appreciate your time and we’ll keep in contact with you soon.

Jeff Kikel  46:19

I look forward to the next time you’re over here on this side of the pond or I’m on your side of the pond.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  46:23

So, we’re definitely gonna have to catch up in person. I agree. Thank you.

Jeff Kikel  46:27

 All right, my friend.