For 20 years, the letter O in Performance Financial has been a clock face. I grew up looking at the logo. I never asked why.
Last year I finally did. My dad answered without hesitation.
“It’s because time is the only asset you can’t buy more of.”
That sentence is the reason this podcast exists. And the reason I wrote this article is that last week, I almost missed it.
The One Asset Money Can’t Buy
We are a financial services organization. We always have been. Tax, accounting, insurance, and financial advisory. The whole point of our work is to help people build, protect, and grow their money.
But for 20 years, the most important asset we talk about has been quietly tucked inside our own logo. Time. Not money.
I don’t have a lot of money. I have seen plenty of people who do. And the thing I have noticed is that the more money someone has, the less time they seem to feel they have. They chase the next deal, the next status marker, the next milestone. And the years go.
Money you can earn. Money you can save. Money you can replace.
Time you cannot.
The Five To Nine After The Nine To Five
I wrote an article for Rough Notes Magazine recently called Your Five To Nine After Your Nine To Five. It hit a nerve, especially with younger business owners.
The premise is simple. When you start a business in your twenties, you have something you don’t realize is precious. You have bandwidth in the evenings. After your client day ends at five, you’ve got four or five hours to grind. Extra calls. Extra emails. Extra prospecting. That second shift is where you build a book of business.
Now I have four kids. The five to nine is gone.
It’s home, dinner, bath time, bedtime, homework. And it’s a sprint. The business doesn’t know that. Your inbox doesn’t know that. Your clients don’t know that. The work shows up like it always has, but the hours to absorb it have disappeared.
This is the moment most business owner dads hit a quiet wall. The business is still demanding the evenings the family now needs. And because the work feels urgent and the family feels patient, the work usually wins.
Until the family stops being patient.
The 4 Out Of 10 That Said It All
This week, my oldest daughter, Ruby, got her first F.
Ruby is six. She is the smartest kid I know. She wants to be a dentist. She cares about school more than I ever did. She gets straight A’s because that’s just who she is.
She got a 4 out of 10 on her spelling test.
In the corner, her teacher wrote, “Great handwriting.”
My wife sent me the picture. I was in Bible study. The same Bible study I had forgotten to tell my wife about until we were driving home from a softball game with Taco Bell in our laps.
I knew exactly why Ruby got a 4 out of 10. I didn’t sit with her last week to study. Casey is going to frame the spelling test. We’re going to show it to Ruby when she becomes a dentist someday. The only F she ever got.
What I’m not going to forget is that the test arrived the same week I forgot a Bible study, and the same week I told myself I’d grind through the evenings on a big project. The math caught up.
Your calendar doesn’t lie. It tells you what you actually value, regardless of what you say.
One Tactic That Actually Holds Up
The simplest move you can make this week is to block your calendar into two kinds of time.
Production time is when you create. No email. No Slack. No notifications. You sit down and you make the thing the business needs you to make.
Collaboration time is when you respond. Messages. Meetings. Calls. The reactive work that fills every modern entrepreneur’s inbox.
And then there is a third block that matters more than both. Dad duty time. Or whatever you want to call it. Family time, presence time, the time when your phone goes face down.
The point is not that the calendar fixes your life. The point is that the calendar tells the truth about your life. And once you can see the truth, you can decide what to change.
What This Show Is About
The world will keep telling you money is important. Clients are important. Status is important.
It’s all true.
And none of it will buy you back the spelling test you weren’t there for, the recital you missed, or the years your kids were small.
Time is the only asset you can’t buy more of. My dad has been quietly saying that for 20 years inside our own logo. The conversation just took us a while to start out loud.
If anything in this article landed for you, the podcast version of this conversation goes deeper. And if you are ready to actually look at your time and your money the way you keep meaning to, the Performance Financial team has this conversation with business owners every day.
Book a consult. Let’s talk.