The Freedom Framework

The Business Owner's Guide to Earning More and Working Less

Cal Misener

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781683506386
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Time Management

The Freedom Framework shows business owners how to have the freedom and flexibility they're missing in their business. Many business owners start a business in order to gain freedom, financial security, and flexibility. Unfortunately, many also end up feeling like they have to do everything themselves. As a result, they become "chained" to their business or their business feels like a job instead of a way to have more freedom. Where Simon Sinek's book Start With Why and Tony Hsieh's book Delivering Happiness leave off, The Freedom Framework picks up. A must-read for those who are ready to take their business to the next level by unlocking human potential, it provides practical, real-world strategies for updating or creating the business of their dreams!

CHAPTER 1

A People and Culture Champion Is Born

In this first chapter, I want to give you a bit of background about myself and how I ended up working with other business owners and leaders to help them deliver extraordinary results by ensuring they are focused on the aspects of their business that they love and are getting help with the things they don’t.

What Is My Thing?

Having a sense of fulfillment in your business starts with knowing about the things you are passionate about. Here’s the story of how I found “my thing.”

When I was getting out of high school, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do career-wise (even life-wise for that matter!). The closest I came to even having an inkling as to what that would be was wanting to become a commercial airline pilot. Travel was, and is, one of my passions, so I thought perhaps I could be a pilot and travel the world. Unfortunately, I also had a perception at the time that there was no way I could afford to get a commercial license. When I see now what many people pay for a post-secondary education of any kind, I realize that the cost of becoming a pilot was not outlandish. At the time, it seemed too far out of reach for me.

I don’t recall anyone asking me what I was really passionate about. I was not aware of any process I could go through to try and determine that. Like a lot of young people, I simply tried a bunch of stuff to see if any of them were “my thing.” I worked in a warehouse. I worked as a laborer cleaning up rig sites. I worked moving mobile homes. I was a dishwasher, pipeline leak consultant, fuel transfer technician (gas jockey), etc., etc., etc. The longest stint I had in any one role was as a pipeline consultant, traveling to different parts of Canada. I thought, at the time, that if I could make some money and do a bit of traveling, I would be fulfilled. I soon realized that money didn’t lead to satisfaction, and traveling to many rural small towns in Western Canada and the Northwest Territories was not exactly the travel I had envisioned!

I eventually was hired by the Canadian telecommunications company TELUS and held a variety of technical and operational roles as a technician and then as a people leader, leading operational teams. To keep a long story somewhat shorter, I will not go into all of the roles I had. Let’s say they were all technical in nature, and I realized that was not my thing. I was with TELUS for a total of 21 years, and approximately fifteen of those years were in technical/operational roles.

Since I knew that technical work in telecommunications was not what I was passionate about, I started a variety of small businesses while working at TELUS, including a grocery home delivery service, an Internet marketing company, and a real estate investment company. I was looking for freedom, flexibility, and—most of all—fulfillment. I wanted to feel a sense of alignment and to feel good about the work I was doing.

I soon realized there were aspects of each of these sideline endeavors that I enjoyed, but there were parts that I did not enjoy. In my real estate business, for example, I was able to build up a multimillion-dollar portfolio, but I had to spend a lot of time on admin, bookkeeping, maintenance, dealing with tenants, and other things that I didn’t really like doing. Most of those tasks were not what I’d had in mind for my “dream business.” I was financially successful, but didn’t feel much in the way of freedom, because I had to deal with all aspects of my business—not only the aspects I enjoyed—and that left me feeling like I simply had found myself another job. I also did not feel a sense of fulfillment, as I realized that while there were definitely parts of the business that I loved, such as meeting new people and finding the next deal, working on all the other administrative tasks associated with an investment business was definitely not my thing.

At one stage when I was at TELUS, I was leading a team of technical people doing very technical work. While I absolutely loved leadership and supporting that team of people, I was not passionate about the technology side of things.

At this point in my career, I felt a little disoriented and I didn’t know why. I’d done everything I was supposed to do. I’d gone to school, gotten good marks, was hired by a great company, received full benefits and a pension plan, started my own businesses in the process, and had achieved the title and pay that I had hoped for. I had invested my money in real estate and the stock market and done all the things that I had been told would make me successful. Why did it not feel right?

I now realize that the feeling I was experiencing was misalignment in my life. I was not doing work that I was meant to do. I learned that the fulfillment I was seeking definitely did not come in the form of title, pay, benefits, or any of those things. I didn’t even really know exactly what I was meant to do; however, I did know that the hollow feeling I was experiencing was not going to work for me. I knew that doing work that did not feed my soul was not something I was willing to tolerate any longer. In the absence of knowing exactly what I was going to do, I took some steps in a new direction.

This is the story of the first step I took in order to feel more aligned with the work I was doing.

My boss was a gentleman named Dave, who was the Vice President of our area, and I remember having an epiphany one day. I just knew in my gut that I needed to do something that was more fulfilling, so I called Dave and we had a conversation that went something like this:

Me: “Hi, Dave, it’s Cal.”

Dave: “Hi, Cal.”

Me: “Hey, you know all that technical stuff I’ve been doing? Well, I don’t want to do that anymore.”

Dave (being a good leader, a friend, and one of my best mentors): “Okay. What is it that you do want to do?”

Me: “I want to support your team, but from a people and culture point of view.”

Dave: “Okay then, you got it.”

I really didn’t even know what it meant to support a team of people “from a people and culture point of view.” All I knew was that the technical work was not doing it for me and my passion seemed to lie with helping others achieve what they wanted to achieve in their own careers. I was starting to get glimpses of real fulfillment in my role by supporting other people’s growth and helping them with alignment.

Can I Do This By Myself?

Trying to be everything to everyone within a role or a business can be tiring and does not make sense. There were certain activities that I loved to do, and they seemed effortless; and others felt like absolute drudgery. What I was learning was that by building the right team, I could work more on the things that excited me and less on the things that didn’t.

I’d had a lot of great mentors throughout my career (Dave being one of the most significant), and I felt like I was in a position to help others just as I had been helped. Although I was not excited about doing technical work myself, I was very excited about helping others get into the careers they wanted to be in, doing work they were excited about, getting the training and development they needed, and basically ensuring that our team was engaged and passionate about what they were doing. Dave was a visionary leader who realized that the way to deliver on the business results he was looking for was through supporting a great team—and that I could help him achieve that goal.

Dave had a team of approximately 700 people across the country at that time, and he was willing to create a role for me, at my suggestion, that was specifically to help build a great culture by supporting a great team. In a company of approximately 42,000 people, it is very rare, if not unheard of, for someone to create a role for themselves in the way that I had.

I was not only an employee at TELUS and an entrepreneur with my own businesses. I was also an “intrapreneur.” Even though my official title at TELUS was Manager of Planning and Engineering, I considered my new title to be People and Culture Champion. I was responsible for helping create and drive our cultural roadmap, which is fancy way of saying that my job was to try to ensure that our team was a cool group to be in, and that people on our team got to do work they were excited about.

One of the first things Dave and I discussed was implementing the idea of meaningful alignment so that people would be able align their personal passions with the work they were doing, which would, in turn, help us deliver on the business objectives that our team was working toward. In that new role, I was demonstrating to others that if I could create a role for myself that I liked better, then they could do the same. By identifying what I was passionate about and then working to align that with the business’ needs, I discovered that a person really could have fulfillment—and it didn’t come from pay, or a fancy title, or any of those types of things. The fulfillment came from doing work I was actually meant to do. I created a framework to help others on the team do the same and rolled it out to 70 managers and over 700 team members. I coached leaders on how to have conversations around alignment, did some discovery around people’s passions in a team environment, and then we determined how to align those findings with the work that the team was responsible for.

That new role of supporting the team involved a number of different aspects. Here is a list of some of the functions I was responsible for:

• Team leadership

• Data analysis

• Communication

• Learning and development

• Content creation

• Administration

The challenge with delivering on all of these functions was that I was only one person. I did not have the bandwidth, nor the desire, to do all of those different things myself, so I knew I needed to get help. I was passionate about team leadership and sharing the vision of where we were going as an organization, but I was not passionate about many of the other tasks that my new role involved. I knew that the way to accomplish all of those things and be successful was to surround myself with people who were passionate about doing the things I was not.

How do you build a team? One person at a time. I started by having a support person who could help me with administrative tasks, like scheduling and reporting, so I could focus on the development of the vision and the plan for the team. Once that initial support person was on board, I had the freedom and flexibility to focus on the things I was passionate about. Together, we did a much better job of delivering on our overall results than I would have done on my own.

Eventually, my own team at TELUS grew, and I was able to hire more people to support some of the other areas of the business that I was responsible for. I looked at everything that I was responsible for delivering, looked at the things I was good at that brought me energy, and then looked at how I could get help with the things I was not as passionate about. The key was to hire people who were good at and excited about the parts of the business that I was not. By hiring the right people, I was able to deliver on the things we were responsible for overall, but spend the majority of my time doing work that I actually enjoyed.

Initially, I had a limited budget for hiring full-time people, so I looked for creative ways to get help. I did hire some full-time team members, but I also got people to do some work while on loan to my area, so that I did not have to hire full-time people but was still able to get the help I needed. When it did not make sense to hire a full-time person, I hired people on a contract basis to help out with particular projects. I engaged summer students who could help out, as well, at a minimum cost. I even had some resources in the Philippines and India who contributed to the overall goals for our team. The cool thing was that I was able to manage that team remotely, since we were all in different geographic locations.

Can I Work From Anywhere?

With technology what it is today, it is not as important as it used to be to always work from one location. There are reliable and inexpensive tools available that can bridge the location gap. Sure, there are times when we physically need to be in a certain place, but by having the right systems and—most importantly—the right people in place, we gain much more geographical flexibility.

In my new role at TELUS I had an office in downtown Vancouver, which I initially went to five days a week, because I thought I needed to be there in order to support my team. TELUS had implemented something called Work Styles that allowed team members to work from home, at least a portion of the time. I realized, over time, that even though I was going in to the office five days a week, my team was starting to work more and more from home, so maybe I didn’t need to be physically present in the office as much as I previously had. Within my team, we implemented something we called Work at Work Wednesdays, so that everybody who worked locally would be in the office at one point during the week. It can be important to be physically together, with some degree of frequency, in order to stay in touch with each other as a team. At one point, in addition to the local team members, we had team members in Victoria, Vernon, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal, as well as overseas, and we were all able to work together to contribute to the team’s success.

The team members—including me—were doing work that we enjoyed, and we were able to work from home more and more often, which gave us all more flexibility. I wanted to experiment to see if I could work away from the office for an extended period of time, so that I didn’t necessarily have to be in Vancouver. My only real criteria for working remotely was reliable Internet access, so that I could be online and support the team as required, and have access to conference calling, voicemail, etc.

In 2011, I did a first trial of working from a geograph...