Making It – Episode 156
Designing a Life of Intentionality and Freedom (Jason Friedman)
Jason Friedman: I’m Jason Friedman, and you’re listening to Making It. I run a company called CX Formula, and we help entrepreneurs and small business owners create massive results for their clients by understanding their customer journey.
One of the experiences I’ve had from my childhood that helped shape me as to who I am today was what I refer to as the beer stealing incident. I was about six, maybe seven years old, playing with my buddies. I lived down a hill from my grandparents. I knew where my grandparents hit a key to their house. My friends and I decided that we were going to go up and kind of hang out there because it was different than our houses, right? And so we climbed up the hill and got there, took the key, and we went in.
And one of my buddies was like, well, I’m thirsty. And he went into the refrigerator in the garage and it was full of all these Budweiser cans. And so we’re literally six or seven years old, and we were having a beer. I don’t think we really liked the taste, but we left all the stuff there. We didn’t think to cover our tracks or anything else, you know, went back about our business. And a few days later, I got summoned to my grandmother’s house and I had the riot act read to me. I just remember being in sheer fear and thinking, oh, my gosh, how could I have done this? I disappointed my grandmother. I lost her trust. I did something that I knew I shouldn’t do. I did it anyway, and I broke into her house.
That issue has stayed with me, you know, for, gosh, 40 something years. And it’s something I’ve thought about many times throughout my life of like, wow, I kind of knew right from wrong, but I didn’t follow that. And it’s kind of helped shape me. I have a very strong compass of what is right and what is wrong, and I don’t really do what I know is wrong. And I haven’t since that moment. It was kind of a gift really early on in my life that helped me understand and learn a very valuable lesson that is definitely with me to today.
I think I had a kind of an entrepreneurial spirit since I was very young. So I was prompted to start my first business as an accident. I was very young, you know, eight years old, to my recollection, I lived in the northeast New Jersey, and we had snow. I had to go shovel my parents’ driveway and get all the snow off that and the walks, and they would pay me $10, $15, whatever it was at the time. The rule was I would have to shovel my parents’ driveway first, but then I could go out and do it for the neighbors. So I started to go out and do it for the neighbors. In the winter, it gets dark very early.
I realized that I could only do so many houses, and it was exhausting, too, depending on how much snow there was. You like, it’s like back breaking work. And so I remember when I first realized I could get my friends to help me, we could split the money, and we could get a lot more houses done. And so I actually enlisted an army of friends, and we started doing this. And I had this little snow shoveling business that started as an absolute accident. And so it started then. And I’ve only had one job in my whole life. I’ve always had my own businesses.
I made a mistake many years ago where my identity became a part of my business. My business and I were inseparable. And when I sold that business, my identity and that business were extricably linked. Like, there was no difference between Jason and that company. When I sold that company, I experienced an incredible amount of depression and loss. And so I learned through that kind of coming out of that experience and the years of overcoming paralysis and fear and uncertainty and discomfort and all sorts of pain that came out of an amazing experience as well, that my businesses and I are not the same.
Our businesses may win, they may lose, they may succeed, they may fail. Hopefully they win and succeed more than they lose or fail. But there is a through line in my life of wanting to create success and results. Each of my businesses, I look through a lens of trying to make it successful, or how do I get the biggest results for my customers from my employees, for myself, financially, or even the impact we’re able to make. So that’s very important to me. But I don’t think that’s the same as making it.
What does making it mean for me? What jumps to my mind, heart first is a level of freedom. It’s not about the money. It’s not about the authority. It’s really about freedom to choose. Many years ago, I was in a coaching program for over 14 years called the Strategic Coach with Dan Sullivan. He’s changed my life and helped me in so many ways. But there was one conversation about the idea of retirement and what does it mean? And I learned at that time, or realized and learned to, that retirement wasn’t the end. It could be a beginning of something.
Retirement could be the beginning of your freedom to choose what you do with your day, every day. Earlier than when I officially retired when I sold my first big company, I thought of myself as being retired because I got to a place where I had freedom. And to me, that’s when I felt like I made it, when I actually could choose what I did with my days, I wasn’t a slave to my business, where I had to be there nine to five every day. I don’t think of making it in terms of my businesses. I think making it in terms of me. So I think it’s irrespective of the number of businesses as I think about it.
As you grow as an entrepreneur, you start to filter things more and have a slightly better lens to evaluate where you invest your time and your resource. And I think so over my journey, I think a lot of that learning has been how to say no to things and what to say yes to. I have not learned that lesson yet. I am learning that lesson today.
As I look over my journey, there was one key, pivotal moment when I realized, oh, my gosh, I’ve made it. It was a holiday party themed as a Vegas night. We hired different dealers to come in. We had a roulette table, craps, poker tables. Like, you know, it was a theme thing. Everyone dressed up, and we had overdose. 100 of our team members came, plus their spouses. So it was a very big affair. And I remember standing there with my partner Drew, and we were just looking out at what we had built and the people whose lives we were able to impact on our team. And wives of husbands that worked there, husbands of wives that worked there came up and thanked us for everything we had done.
And it was at that moment that I realized not only did we have some of the freedom, but we had built something that was so special, so unique, so invaluable. That was a moment when I truly felt like we made it. And I remember Drew and I standing off from the side. We often joke that we’re like the Waldorf and Statler, the two judges from the Muppet movie, kind of sitting up in the box, heckling what’s going on around us. And we were standing there observing, and we were thinking, oh, my gosh, what have we created? This is amazing.
A big lesson that I’ve just recently scratching the surface on learning is one of receivership. For a really long time, I’ve been the giver and right, wrong or indifferent, it’s been a pleasure. It’s a gift for me to give to people and help people and support them. But I’m not very good at receiving that help and support and love and gratitude and those kinds of things where I haven’t been, and I’m keenly aware of that now, and I’m working on that, being able to receive.
I’ve been talking about this a little bit with some friends and colleagues and masterminds, and people are like shaking their head, yeah, like, I get that. Me, too. And I think it’s interesting to see how many of us, when someone loves you enough to turn a mirror to you and say, hey, you’re not receiving, listen to what I’m saying. Let me help you. And you actually let your guard down and you don’t feel weak in doing that, or you don’t feel obligated to the other person. You just open your heart and your mind and your arms to take that in.
It’s a powerful experience and it’s a very connecting experience. And so I’m grateful for my friends that have helped me see that, and I’m still learning that. There was a very dark day in one of my businesses. This was one of the darkest days, I think. We were working with a big financial client, one of the top banking institutions in the world. We probably did 30 plus million dollars a year in revenue just from this one client. They were a good chunk of our business.
They had just bought another bank, and we were rebranding that other bank to their bank. And the customer, day one, when the new branding would roll out and the new brand-new store in Times Square in New York City would roll out on this specific day. We were part of the team, we created the whole experience, designed for it. We were in charge of all the technology being used. So we did design, we did content, we did installation and technology, installation and support. And so the storefront of this was this gigantic led Jumbotron in Times Square.
And so we had a vendor manufacturing this for us and we thought everything was good. And when they were supposed to ultimately come a couple days before that, they told us that they weren’t going to make it. And so this was going to stop. Final inspections and all the construction and like all the electricians and contractors, not to mention this was the biggest project that this gigantic behemoth institution had ever undertaken. And we were the ones that were going to cause it to fail.
I’ve never been more sick to my stomach in my life. I’ve never had more sweat pouring down my face. I’ve never felt more like wanting to crawl into a ball and cry. I didn’t know what to do. I remember thinking, failure is not an option, number one. And number two, we can solve this. Whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve. I couldn’t go to them and be like, sorry, we can’t do anything. That was not going to help us. And literally, our business would have tanked. Like, that would have been such a large hit if we lost that client. I don’t even want to think about what that would have been like.
But I also knew that we would come up with some solution, even if it was an interim solution. And so we brought the whole team together, and we, you know, I did my little motivational speech, and, like, what are we going to do? I want every possible idea. No idea is a bad idea. All I want to hear is ideas. We’re going to put them all on the whiteboard. And we had a couple people writing and scribbling, and then we started to look at, like, hey, what’s possible? What’s impossible? And we workshopped this.
And literally the next day, I got on an airplane. I flew to where the headquarters for this institution was. I sat down with my client, and she’s like, why are you here? And I was like, listen. I said, I have good news and bad news. I said, which do you prefer? She’s like, give me the bad news. And I said, we’re not going to have the sign. She’s like, what? I said, we’re not going to have the sign. We were lied to by our vendor. I said, I’m not blaming them. We should have done more. It’s our fault. I said, but it’s just not going to be here. That ship has sailed.
I said, so the good news is that I have a list of 40 ideas that we can do to solve this. And I have the three recommendations of those 40 ideas. I said, so we can do those three. We can combine, we can look at all 40, or we can brainstorm other ones. I said, but no matter what, we are going to make sure this works. And she said to me, Jason, this is why we hired you guys. You don’t come to me with problems. You come to me with solutions. I will never forget that day. And I remember the relief.
And then I remember I was driving back to the airport in my rental car, and I called my partner Drew, and I was like, dude, like, we survived. Did it cost us more money? Sure. Did it cost us as much as losing a $30 million client? No way. So it didn’t really matter that it cost us some money. Like, we were heroes. Like, they were talking about how we were the most amazing people ever and they gave us more business after that than we even had before. They almost doubled our business the next year.
I want my kids to design the life that they want to live. I’ve been exposed to so many interesting people, I mean, my whole life, obviously. But over the last ten years, specifically, I’ve been in a group of entrepreneurs from all around the world with very different perspectives on the world and very different ideas of what business is. Some of them were more like me, where they wanted to make big revenues and have a big team. And there’s other people in there that, like, they want their business to be 20% of their life and 80% of their life is life.
And that thought never even occurred to me until I met these people in this group, because I didn’t grow up seeing that. I grew up and people worked long hours and multiple days a week. And I, it never dawned on me that I could be a digital nomad, or I could work two days a week and play five days a week or work five days a month and play 25 days a month. Like, those ideas, just for whatever reason, didn’t enter my mind, and I didn’t see people doing that.
And so as I look at how people are designing their lives, opportunities are endless. Like, making it can be as simple as that kind of freedom as well. And so for my kids, I want them to really be intentional about how they design their life and how they think about what they want to be doing with their lives and that they find things that they love to do and that they’re able to do them. To me, that’s, I think, what I would most want my children to do with this whole idea of making it.
I’m Jason Friedman, and you’ve been listening to making it. You can find me at cxformula.com. C-X-F-O-R-M-U-L-A dot com. You’ll find the link in the show notes, and I also have an amazing resource for you called the Power of Being Unreasonable. You’ll also find a link to that amazing PDF in the show notes.
Melinda Cohan: Making it as part of the Mirasee FM podcast network, which includes such shows as To Lead Is Human and Course Lab. To catch the great episodes that are coming up on making it, please follow us on Mirasee FM’s YouTube channel or your favorite podcast player. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a comment or a starred review. It is the best way to help us get these ideas to more people. Thank you, and we’ll see you next time.