Founding business owners like you got into business for freedom, yet they wound up wearing too many hats and stuck in the weeds. To get out of this trap, you can build a Freedom-Generating Business that generates freedom for yourself and your team, while giving you more and better options to grow it aggressively, exit day-to-day management without selling, or sell the company.

Freedom returns when you reclaim what you love and are great at: Creating solutions to customer problems. And when you get out of the things you hate to do and are bad at, like managing projects and people, your people get the freedom to do what they love to do and are great at.

Customers get more freedom, too. Freedom from the problems you solve. A strong company creates better products that solve customer problems more efficiently and for a better price, for them and for you. 

Suppliers get more freedom. Freedom to expand using revenue from the increasing orders you send them. Your community gets the freedom to plan for your expanded investment there.

Everybody wins when the founder is free.

When you’re doing the work you were designed to do, your people step up, customers get better solutions, and the business becomes stronger and more valuable—without depending on you for everything.

A Freedom-Generating Business isn’t about escape. It’s about alignment.

Let’s build one that frees you to create more—and creates freedom and better outcomes for everyone around you.

How to Use This Tool

This tool is not a checklist, a workbook, or a project plan. It is a lens.

Do not try to “implement” everything you see here. That instinct—doing more, faster, all at once—is part of the trap this tool is designed to help you escape. A Freedom-Generating Business is not built by piling on effort. It is built by removing misaligned ownership and restoring leverage where it belongs.

Start by reading this tool straight through without taking notes. Notice what pulls at you. Notice what irritates you. Notice where you feel relief—and where you feel resistance. Those reactions are signals. They point to where you are still carrying work, decisions, or emotional weight that no longer belongs to you.

Next, use this tool to diagnose—not fix—your current reality. Ask yourself a few blunt questions:

• Where am I still the bottleneck?
• What decisions still require me that shouldn’t?
• Where is the business growing, but my freedom is shrinking?
• Where am I solving problems in the business instead of creating solutions for customers?

You are not trying to answer all of these. You are looking for the one place where the cost of staying the same is becoming obvious.

From there, choose one focus—only one. One CREATE step to work on. One DRIVE engine to strengthen. One constraint to remove. Ignore everything else for now. Freedom compounds when focus is narrow and ownership is clear. Trying to “do it all” is how founders stay stuck.

A warning: the most common way founders misuse this tool is by over-engineering the path forward. They turn freedom into a project, a dashboard, or a perfection exercise. If you find yourself building long lists, redesigning everything at once, or waiting until it all feels safe, stop. That’s the old pattern reasserting itself.

Finally, remember this: freedom is not finished. It is practiced. Each time you exit what isn’t yours to carry, align people and processes, or reclaim time for creative work, the business gets stronger—and you get lighter. If this tool makes you slightly uncomfortable, you’re probably using it correctly.

Read. Notice. Choose one move. Then let the business—and your people—do the rest.

What is a Freedom-Generating Business?

A Freedom-Generating Business gives you freedom now, not someday after you sell. It is built around you, the founder, doing the work you are uniquely wired to do—the creative, high-leverage work that originally pulled you into entrepreneurship—while the rest of the business operates without needing your constant presence. Instead of trapping the owner in management, decision fatigue, and emotional weight, the business creates space: space to think, to create, to lead, and to choose. Freedom isn’t a reward for endurance; it’s a design outcome.

In a Freedom-Generating Business, roles are clear, ownership is distributed appropriately, and decisions live where the information is. The founder is no longer the glue holding everything together—or the bottleneck slowing everything down. Systems exist not to create rigidity, but to protect energy. People are placed in seats that match their strengths, and the business is organized so that progress doesn’t depend on the founder’s availability, heroics, or constant approval. The result is a company that runs because of good design, not in spite of it.

Most importantly, a Freedom-Generating Business expands freedom for everyone it touches. The founder gets freedom to operate in their zone of genius. Team members get freedom to own meaningful work and grow without being micromanaged. Customers get better solutions delivered with consistency and care. And the business itself gains freedom—freedom to scale, to exit day-to-day management without selling, or to sell from a position of strength. Everybody wins when freedom is built into the business by design, not postponed as a someday promise.

Who You Need to Be to Create One

Who do you need to be in order to create a Freedom-Generating Business?

You need to be an entrepreneurial business owner who:

1. Wants a business that manages itself
2. Wants a business that’s ELF, not HALF
3. Is absolutely convinced there’s a next level for your business
4. Is absolutely convinced there’s a next level for yourself 
5. Loves systems and processes 
6. Wants to own an investment, not a business
7. Is allergic to reinventing the wheel

Read on for a deep dive on each.

1. You want a business that manages itself

You need to be the type of business owner who wants a business that manages itself. One of my business coaches, Dan Sullivan, wrote a book called The Self-Managing Company. In the book, he writes:

Having a company that manages itself to greater growth and success without the owner having to be involved in all aspects of the day-to-day management of the business is a universal desire for all entrepreneurs.

A couple years back, I was speaking to a business owner peer group, and I read that quote to them. I expected nods, smiles, maybe even a person jumping out of their chair waving a handkerchief in the air and shouting, “Glory, hallelujah!” 

Instead, crickets. 

Turns out they were business owners, not entrepreneurial business owners. 

An entrepreneur named Reid Tileston cleared this up for me. He wrote a helpful distinction between business owners on the one hand and entrepreneurial business owners on the other. Tileston’s book, Grit It Done, defines business owners as people who “own their upside.” 

That is, they take home the profits of whatever improvements and efforts they implement, yet often the business owns them more than they own the business. Business ownership too often becomes a dead-end job that pays the bills while leaving calendar control and financial freedom on the table. Businesses like this have limited resale value.

Tileston keeps twisting the knife. He concludes his definition of business owners with this quote:

Business owners often trade the security of employment with good benefits, which lacks autonomy, for self-employment, which has autonomy, yet lacks the benefits.

Ouch. 

Then he defines an entrepreneurial business owner. An entrepreneurial business owner is, “living the dream.” They:

• Own their upside
• Control their calendar
• Experience true autonomy
• Apply the entrepreneurial mindset to business ownership and have the systems in place so the business can operate without them. 

Tileston concludes:

When they choose to work on the business, they do the blocking and tackling when it comes to creating equity value.

A business that runs itself is the ultimate prize because when you don’t have to work for it, that’s when you truly own it. 

2. You want a business that’s ELF, not HALF

You’ve got to want a company that’s ELF: easy, lucrative, and fun, not HALF: hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating. 

What makes a business easy, lucrative, and fun is that it:

• Runs like clockwork.
• Has industry-leading profit and cash flow.
• Enables you to do what you want, when you want, with whom you want, where you want. 

In other words, it gives you The Six Freedoms:

1. Freedom of Time: You spend your working time doing only what you love to do and are great at, and have plenty of time for other pursuits.
2. Freedom of Relationship: You surround yourself only with people who light you up and whose company you genuinely enjoy.
3. Freedom of Money: There’s no limit on the money you can make for creating value for customers, nor limits on how much of it you can keep. (Except for, you know, taxes.)
4. Freedom of Purpose: You don’t have to divide your time and attention between your business and causes you care about, because your business is a vehicle to advance causes you care about—whether philanthropic, or simply improving standards and practices in your industry.
5. Freedom of Location: You can work from anywhere on the planet. Your physical presence in the office is 100 percent optional.
6. Freedom of Action: You can run your business however you like because ... it’s your business!

What makes a business hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating, on the other hand, is:

• People who don’t fit your core values.
• Having to micromanage people, not because they’re incompetent, but because you’re the only one who knows how to do the thing, which means you’ve made them incompetent. They didn’t start that way; you made them that way.
• Having to reinvent the wheel every time, because you haven’t written down the steps.
• Not moving in the direction you want at the speed you want. Having to slow down; running into roadblocks, speed bumps, and traffic jams.
• Hard as in hard labor, you’re chained to your desk, breaking rocks all day.

Businessman and author Tim Fargo says, “You don't get any points in life for doing things the hard way.”

So don’t put up any longer with a hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating business.

ELF vs. HALF is a Joe Polish concept.

3. You are absolutely convinced there’s a next level for your business 

Three inspirational quotes to get you started on the path to absolutely convinced. 

One:

Every step you take toward making your business more sellable makes it more valuable and enjoyable to own right now. 

Two:

On a five-year time horizon, an ordinary private business can feasibly grow its revenues by two and a half times, by growing 20% a year. Such growth necessitates and forces internal process improvements and external differentiation, which can double net profit margin, resulting in a 5x or higher growth in the value of the business.

Steve Preda and Gregory Cleary,  

Three:

A business without profit is a job with extra stress. A business with predictable profit is a freedom machine.

4. You are absolutely convinced there’s a next level for yourself 

When your business doesn’t depend on you, you have the mental and financial freedom to pursue other dreams, whether that’s starting another business, traveling, retiring early, spending more time with your family, or all four at the same time. But the reality for many business owners is high stress, low pay, and being stuck in a J-O-B. 

The dream, that next level for yourself, is financial freedom, flexibility, and controlling your own destiny. 

Michael Gerber wrote the grandfather of books about systemizing your business and getting back your freedom. He wrote in The E-Myth Revisited: 

Freedom does not come automatically. It is achieved, and it's not gained in a single bound. It must be achieved each day.

When you’ve got your eye on both the next level for your business and the next level for yourself, you’ll work to make those achievements each day, and they’ll be worth it. 

5. You love systems and processes ...

... or at least likes the idea of them enough to hire someone who loves them. 

1. Edwards Deming was the father of the modern quality movement in manufacturing. He said, “Each system is perfectly designed to give you exactly what you are getting today.” 

And I say, “Therefore, if you want different results, you’ve got to change the system.” 

Systems and processes are what create profit in your business. I’d say more than half of the 40 business owners I’ve worked with were pretty reluctant to fall in love with processes. So I like to share a little nautical comic relief to warm us up.

To create a Freedom-Generating Business, you’ve got to shift your mindset from an owner-run business to a process-run business. That’s because in the words of one of my coaches, Greg Cleary,

Processes run businesses. People run processes. And processes take pressure off of people.

Another way to look at this: Systems permit ordinary people to achieve extraordinary results predictably. 

You yourself are extraordinary if you’ve started and grown a business. Few people try and even fewer succeed. 

You got through those early days through extraordinary, “do whatever it takes” effort and the sheer force of your will. 

You can’t rely on other people to put in the same extraordinary effort you did. That’s why you need systems.

Your motto, which worked then, was “If it is to be, it has to be me.”

Your new motto?

“If it is to be, it can’t be me.” 

6. You want to own an investment, not a business

Wait, what? Yes, most business owners optimize for annual income and their business depends on them. Our friend Michael Gerber writes: 

If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business. You have a job and it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic.

As you create your Freedom-Generating Business, you’re going to change what you’re optimizing for. Optimize for taking dividends from your investment in the business you own, not for annual income from it. 

If you’re a fan of Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad books, you’ll know that optimizing for investment income moves you from the self-employed quadrant, where you own a job, up and to the right to the B-type business owner quadrant, where you own a system that works for you. 

That might sound familiar to you because Reei Tileston said essentially the same thing in the Grit It Done book we looked at earlier. I think it’s worth repeating what Tileston calls the entrepreneurial business owner:

They apply the entrepreneurial mindset to business ownership and have the systems in place so the business can operate without them. When they choose to work on the business, they do the blocking and tackling when it comes to creating equity value. An effective entrepreneurial business owner owns their business and in so doing owns their life.

7. You are allergic to reinventing the wheel

That’s because all the steps to grow a world-class business are already written down. When you follow them, you can save your creative energy for solving customer problems. 

“Wait, what? I thought we were creating a business that manages itself. I thought I wasn’t going to do anything in the company after that. In fact, to be honest, I was sitting here kind of worried that you and my team are trying to put me out to pasture.” 

Not at all. Friends, when you have a Freedom-Generating Business that manages itself, it does free you up to not work in it at all, certainly. And here’s the more exciting part, I think. It frees you up to work only in Your Creative Genius—that handful of one, two, at most three creative acts God put you on this earth to excel at. 

For most entrepreneurs, coming up with creative solutions to customer problems is one of their creative geniuses. That’s how they’ve grown a company that’s different from and more valuable to customers than its competitors. And that’s how they’ll keep growing it. Spending their time, energy, and attention on solving problems for customers, not on solving problems in the business. 

Where are the steps to build a world-class business written down? Three places.

1. Right here (see the How to Do It section below)
2. Business operating system books
3. Buyable and Built to Sell

There are important bits and pieces in business operating system books like Traction, Scaling Up, Summit OS, Pinnacle, and Business Made Simple.

For a special focus on building a sellable company, the two instruction manuals are Buyable by my friend Steve Preda and Built to Sell by John Warillow. 

I like book subtitles a lot because the good subtitles summarize the book’s value proposition. For Buyable, the subtitle is “Your Guide to Building a Self-Managing, Fast-Growing, and High-Profit Business.” Sounds like a perfect fit, right? 

For Built to Sell, the subtitle is “Creating a Business that Can Thrive Without You.” Another perfect fit. 

Friends, it’s been done many, many times before. When you’re allergic to reinventing the wheel, you can do it too. 

How to Create a Freedom-Generating Business

The Freedom-Generating Business model rests on two truths:

1. Your company’s number one growth engine is Your Creative Genius.
2. You don’t scale your business, your people do. And they can’t scale what depends on you.

The steps to create a Freedom-Generating Business are:

1. Create More

Get back to what God made you to do: Create cool new products and services to solve problems for customers. When you do, you’ll leap over your next Freedom Gap. Then you’ll win more and enjoy more freedom, in business and at home, because you have the time, space, and energy to make tough decisions; solve problems, together with your people; and watch with pride and joy as your people drive growth. You’ll use these steps to Create More:

1. Clarify Reality: See the real problem you—and other founding business owners—are living inside, and why effort alone won’t fix it.
2. Reclaim Your Creative Genius: Reconnect with the work you were designed to do—the thinking, inventing, and problem-solving that create disproportionate value. Energy returns. Growth follows.
3. Exit What’s Not Yours to Carry: Identify what no longer belongs to you—decisions, tasks, and emotional weight. Release overfunctioning, control, and rescue at the identity level, and they lose their grip for good.
4. Align People & Processes: Create clear roles and scorecards so letting go doesn’t create chaos. Processes run the business. People run processes. Pressure comes off.
5. Tune Your Leadership Rhythm: Restore margin, presence, and pace—so freedom holds even under pressure.
6. Elevate Yourself, Your People, and Your Profit: As you grow, your people rise. As they rise, predictable profit and cash flow follow. 

2. So You Can Leap Over Your Next Freedom Gap ...

The next Freedom Gap, not all your Freedom Gaps. Get enough energy to make the next decision only you can make. Trying to “do it all” is how founding business owners like you stay stuck.

3. So You Can Make Better and Faster Decisions About ...

1. People: Demand nothing less than people who share your values, don’t need to be managed, and completely own their roles.
2. Strategy: Achieve and protect industry-leading profit and cash flow.
3. Execution: The basic blocking and tackling of business has already been figured out and systemized. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Choose an execution system and go.
4. Cash: Cash gives you options and prevents business failure.  

4. So You and Your People Can Solve Problems With ...

1. Home Life: Your home life isn’t separate from your business—it’s the environment your leadership is produced in. When the business consumes all your energy, everyone pays the price. A Freedom-Generating Business restores alignment so success at work no longer comes at the expense of the people and relationships that matter most.
2. Time: You don’t have a time problem—you have an ownership and leverage problem. When everything depends on you, time disappears. As your people and processes mature, time returns—not as “free time,” but as space to think, decide, and create instead of constantly react.

 

• Team: Your team doesn’t need more motivation—they need clarity, ownership, and trust. When roles are clear and authority is real, people rise. When everything routes back to you, they stall. A Freedom-Generating Business turns employees into owners of outcomes, not renters of responsibility.

• Money: Money is rarely the first problem—but it’s often the loudest symptom. When creativity is blocked, decisions are delayed, and people depend on you, cash stays tight. As leverage increases, profit and cash flow become predictable, giving you the fuel to invest, breathe, and choose your next move from strength instead of fear.

 

5. So Your People Can DRIVE Growth In ...

1. Profit: Create predictable profit and cash flow growth.
2. Revenue: Create predictable, sustainable revenue growth, because roller coasters are only fun at amusement parks.
3. Value: Make your business sellable by increasing its value to buyers.
4. ELF vs. HALF: You get a business that’s more Easy, Lucrative, and Fun (ELF) and less Hard, Annoying, Lame, and Frustrating (HALF) almost automatically when you upgrade the Profit, Revenue, and Value engines.

6. So You Get the Options a Freedom-Generating Business Gives You:

1. PE Yourself™: Grow your business almost as aggressively as a private equity firm would, while protecting your non-financial values like loyalty to employees, customers, suppliers, your community, and causes you support.
2. Exit Without Selling: You can exit day-to-day management of your business and keep it as a highly profitable cash-flowing asset. 
3. Sell the Business: Sell when you want, to whom you want, on the terms you want, for the price you want. 

Two Beautiful Things

There are two beautiful things about Step 5, “Drive Growth,” and Step 6, “Get Options”:

1. There’s no wrong place to start with “Drive Growth.” No matter what you choose—Profit, Revenue, Value, ELF vs. HALF—they all power up each option. They all make your business more scalable, exit-able, and sellable.
2. You can bop back and forth between the options and not lose much, if any, ground.
1. PEing Yourself for a while makes your business more exit-able.
2. Working on Exit Without Selling for a while makes your business more sellable.
3. Working on Sell the Business for a while makes your business more PE Yourself-able. And, your business gets easier and more fun to run. Which is why you may just decide to keep it, instead of selling it!

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