Last June Allan and I sold LessAccounting. The sale brought us very close to retirement, we should easily be able to retire within 10 years. If we’re smart and continue to be lucky/blessed we can retire much sooner.
As we started planning the future of LessEverything without LessAccounting we suddenly had a new goal: retirement. Since the sale I’ve found myself having a very different thought process when it comes to business decisions. Instead of asking myself “is this good for the business?” I’m asking myself “will this bring us closer to retirement, and how much closer?” It reminds of what Little Finger says to Sansa, in Game of Thrones, about his goals.
I recently realized that for most of the last 10 years I didn’t have proper goals. I thought I did, but I didn’t. I had wants. I wanted to have money, a successful product, and a successful business, but those are not goals. Goals would have been I want to be make my first million, I want LessAccounting to have a million happy customers, I want to have an annual profit of a million. I know exactly how much money we need to retire, that’s a goal. It’s measurable, I can make a spreadsheet and track my progress.
Now I have goals: I need a certain amount of money to retire. The people who are going to replace us in the day to day of LessEverything need to be found at least two years before retirement so they can be mentored so they can successfully carry on the business.
It’s interesting how a life event changes your perspective at problems and what “progress” actually is.
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In the past few years I've built go-carts, built a 200+ sq ft workshop, written several eBooks. How do I create a life where I have time to work on side projects?
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