For 20 years, the logo for Performance Financial has carried a small detail that almost no one ever noticed. The letter O in the middle of Performance is a clock face.
Sean Kirby grew up inside the company. He saw that logo on every business card, every wall, every email signature his entire life. He never asked why it was there. Last year, he finally did.
His dad, Mike, the founder of the firm, said it without flinching.
“It’s because time is the only asset you can’t buy more of.”
That single sentence is the reason this podcast exists.
The Asset Nobody Talks About
The financial services industry is built on the conversation about money. How to make more of it. How to keep more of it. How to grow it for the long haul.
But there is one resource Mike Kirby kept quietly pointing at for two decades that no one ever asked about. Not clients. Not employees. Not even his own son.
That resource is time.
You can make more money. You can save more money. You can invest more money. You cannot manufacture another hour. And the people who figure that out early build very different lives than the people who never do.
The Five To Nine After The Nine To Five
When Sean was 22, building his book of business, he had a different kind of currency. He had bandwidth in the evenings. After clients were done for the day, he could grind out extra phone calls, extra emails, extra prospecting. That second shift was free.
Now he has four kids. The evenings are not free anymore. They are a sprint.
Home. Dinner. Bath time. Bedtime. Homework. Repeat.
This is the moment most business-owner dads quietly hit a wall. Their business is still demanding the evenings their family now needs. And because the work feels urgent and the family feels patient, the work usually wins. Until the family stops being patient.
Sean wrote an article for Rough Notes Magazine called “Your Five To Nine After Your Nine To Five.” It struck a nerve. Not because anyone needed a productivity hack. Because every father with a growing business already knew the math and was hoping someone would name it for them.
Red Time, Green Time, Yellow Time
Mike Kirby taught Sean this framework on a paper calendar 20 years ago. It still holds up.
Red Time is family time, faith time, workout time. The things that feed the body and the soul. It goes on the calendar first.
Green Time is money time. Client calls. Sales conversations. Production. The work that actually generates income.
Yellow Time is admin. The bookkeeping, the inbox triage, the parts of the business no one likes but every business demands.
The order matters. Most business owners build their calendar from green to yellow and never make it to red. Mike’s rule is to flip that. Red first. Then green. Yellow last.
If you cannot find red time on your own calendar, your calendar is telling you what your idol is.
Three Ways To Make Money
There are exactly three ways to generate income, and most people only ever experience the first one.
- Man at work. You. Trading hours for dollars. Salary, commission, hourly.
- Men at work. A team working on your behalf while you take a margin on their output.
- Money at work. Capital invested in the market or in an asset that compounds while you sleep.
The third one is the only one that buys you back your time. The first one trades your time away. The second one trades other people’s time in exchange for a piece of theirs.
And Mike Kirby’s rule for any task in front of you is just as crisp. Do it. Ditch it. Or delegate it. But you cannot do all three.
Your Calendar Is Your Confession
Of all the lines in the conversation between Sean and his co-host TR, one stuck out.
“Your calendar is your confession.”
You can tell anybody what you value. Your calendar tells the truth. If your kids are an idol, your calendar will show them blocked off first. If your business is your idol, your calendar will show it consuming the family slot. If your health is your idol, the 5:30 AM workout will be there in ink.
Nobody plans to make their business their idol. The default settings of modern entrepreneurship just produce that outcome unless somebody actively pushes back.
This show is that push.
What To Do With This
Three small moves to make this week.
One. Open your calendar and circle the three biggest red time commitments of your year. Anniversary. Kid’s birthday. Family trip. Personal health milestone. Put them in first before any other meetings get slotted.
Two. Block your week into red, green, and yellow time. Not by topic. By color. Look at the ratio. It will tell you something.
Three. Pick one task on your plate right now that should be delegated or ditched, and stop doing it yourself. The rule is do it, ditch it, or delegate it. Most business owners pick “do it” by default. Pick differently.
A Final Word
Time is the only asset you cannot buy more of. Performance Financial has been quietly saying that for 20 years inside its 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. Invest Your Time Wisely with Sean Kirby is available now wherever you listen.
And if you are ready to have a real conversation about how to redirect your time, your money, or both, the Performance Financial team is built for that. Book a consultation through the link in the show notes and let’s find a time.
Full Transcript
Sean: That five to nine is a sprint. Home, dinner, bath time. And then you guys still do homework. Now that I’ve got a six year old, there’s other things you’ve got to do. But once you have kids and become a dad, now you’re not giving away extra time of yours. You’re taking away time from the family.
Twenty years ago, my dad started Performance Financial, and he always put that clock as the O in the middle of Performance. Last year I finally asked, “Hey, why is there even a clock in the logo in the first place?” And he said, “Well, it’s because time is the only asset you can’t buy more of.”
[INTRO MUSIC | EPISODE OPENS]
Sean: Twenty years ago, my dad started Performance Financial, and he always put that clock as the O in the middle of Performance. I never thought to ask, as an eight year old kid, because why would anyone ask why there’s a clock in the logo? You just assume it always has been. So I think last year I finally asked. I said, “Hey, why is there even a clock in the logo in the first place?” And he said, “Well, it’s because time is the only asset you can’t buy more of.”
We’ve always been a financial services organization. Tax, accounting, insurance, financial advisory. And I thought, why have we never told anyone? And why has no one asked? In 20 years, people have seen the logo and they’ve just assumed that this is a performance organization ready to perform on their behalf. But nobody thought to even ask what the whole point was of the clock and the logo.
And he never even really truly thought to market it, or that it was a linchpin conversation we should be having with our clients. So as I’ve gotten older, and we’ve just now had our fourth child, I’m starting to realize that truly the only thing you can’t buy more of is time. And it is the hardest asset to find.
I don’t have a lot of money, but I’ve seen people with lots of money. And I’ve seen that the more money you have, you would think it would buy you more time. It’s been the exact opposite for a lot of those people because they’re always chasing that other idol. Whether it’s money or status or the next business goal.
So now that we’re reframing where we’re at, and through what our services are, we’re trying to really focus on buying people their time back. That’s all we do. We provide enough of a service to where we can just redefine where they spend their time throughout the day. Nobody likes admin tasks. Nobody likes bookkeeping, payroll, all the ugly parts that are required in business. People would rather just go do. So we’re just trying to reframe that to where let’s invest our time wisely, not only in the sense of business, but in the sense of the whole body.
So we’ve been working through it, and I know that you’re training for, what are you training for?
TR: Triathlon.
Sean: Triathlon. Hey, I don’t even think I introduced you.
TR: Hello world.
Sean: Hello world. Hey guys, my name is Sean Kirby with Performance Financial. Welcome to the Invest Your Time Wisely podcast. Today I’m joined with TR. TR is my outsourced chief marketing officer, my full time bro, a dad, a business owner, and a guy that I would say is on this podcast because we’re both trying to figure out how to invest our time wisely every single day.
So we came together. He was part of this big brand shift in our office in the last 12 months. Built our website, helped us reframe our entire brand around what we really want to try to do for our clients. So I’m going to pass this off to TR. TR, tell us a little bit about how you got here today.
TR: Push the button, steer the wheel, drive the car. Any business owner will understand the challenge of you reach a certain scale where your effort isn’t going to take it to the next level. You’ve hit that point where your effort maxes out what the business is capable of. We met sort of through a synchronicity of joining the local chamber and having conversations there. But I landed a giant contract at the time. What does this mean tax wise? How do I manage this? I’m dealing with the issues of the check doesn’t come in for 60 days after finishing the work, but I’ve got to pay subcontractors in the meantime.
So Performance Financial and Sean helped me look at a lot of those. We’ve changed the way we’ve done our contracts. We’ve changed the way we handle our expenses and paying contractors. We’ve got new systems in place. So you’ve helped me invest my time wisely. We’re not perfect yet. Never will be. But the reason for being here today is to try to help more people figure out, on that journey of building a business, how do you invest your time wisely while managing the growth of a business with the demands of a family at the same time?
Sean: One hundred percent. So I recently was writing an article for Rough Notes Magazine, which is based out of here in Carmel. They’re a large scale national magazine for the insurance industry. And I wrote this article, it was called “Your Five To Nine After Your Nine To Five.”
When I was writing it, I was thinking about the early stages of my life when I first got into business. You had a lot more bandwidth in your five to nine, after your nine to five, to where you could just sprint out work. You could grind out those extra phone calls, those extra emails, that extra prospecting. The stuff that you don’t really have time for in that five to nine when you’re working with clients.
And now that I’ve gotten older, that five to nine is a sprint. Because it’s home, bath time, bedtime. And then you guys still do homework. Now that I’ve got a six year old, there’s other things you’ve got to do.
I will tell you this is the funniest, saddest, cutest story. Yesterday, we go softball game, straight into, I’m trying to get everybody home. Just grab Taco Bell real quick. Get everybody fed. I tell my wife on the way home, “Hey, I forgot to tell you I’ve got Bible study at seven.” She goes, “No, you don’t.” I said, “I do.”
So we get everybody dropped off. I get three of my kids to sleep by 7:30, and then I sit in my Bible study. And my daughter, Ruby, who’s in the background somewhere here, she’s my oldest. She’s my brightest. She wants to be a dentist. She gets nothing but good grades. She cares way more than I ever cared about school. My wife sends me this picture, and it’s a 4 out of 10 spelling test. F. It says, “Great handwriting” in the corner.
I looked at that, and I texted Casey, said, “I can’t believe it.” But I know that I didn’t work on it with her last week. So Casey says she’s going to frame it and keep it, because when she is a dentist someday, we’ll be able to show her her only F that she’s ever gotten.
I think that goes to say the balance, in quotation marks, the balance of being perfect at all of it all the time. The more you add in that five to nine period, stuff does slip and you just have to redirect and say we’ll be better next week.
TR: But that’s business in general. It’s all about getting that feedback loop. You’re one of those people that you’re really good about making sure you’ve got a great feedback loop throughout the process. So tell me a little bit about the difference between the feedback loop you get at home and the one you get at work. Because I know they’re so different. It’s a dangerous thing to mix those things. You can’t expect your wife to respond to a per my email response that you send out.
Mine’s a little different. We’re not as great at the 7:30 bedtimes. We’re a bit non traditional in our approach in that we’re homeschooling our kids. So I don’t have the pickups or the homework the way that you do. But my challenge becomes turning off the notifications when I get home. I try to get home around five at most times, sometimes even earlier. And then it’s demanding to be present. It’s the ask to play. It’s to get outside. And meantime, I still have subcontractors tagging me and clients sending emails. It’s always a dangerous thing of how much do I pick up this while dadding at the same time?
To your point about the previous time, my current business was built on the backs of grinding till 10:30, 12 at night and then getting up the next day. A lot of times you get client requests and they go, “Can we have it tomorrow?” And you look at the day and there’s no production time in the day to do it, but you have that evening and you can squeeze that evening out to produce the asset that gets the win. But once you have kids and become a dad, now you’re not giving away extra time of yours. You’re taking away time from the family.
So that invest your time wisely piece, I think, is as much about a sort of mental health dedication to your family thought of, okay, what is this time block that I’m in? And is it a mixed use between business and family? Or is it just family? Or is it just business?
I share with a lot of people, the one thing that really helps with that is, when I left my salary job to start my company seven years ago, I said, “I’m not doing a calendar. There’s no boss that can make me do a calendar.” Three, four years into that, it’s like I’ve got to have a calendar. And then we have kids, so the wife needs to see when I have meetings and when I’m approachable and not.
So the one tactic that I find really useful as a quick takeaway is I do blocks on my calendar that are communication and collaboration, and that are production blocks. And during those production blocks, I’m not checking my emails. I’m not checking Slack, Asana, Discord. Those are dedicated to creation time. And then I have dad duty times on the calendar where all my subcontractors can see my calendar. They’re not bothering me unless it’s urgent during this time. So the invest your time wisely comes about knowing when you want to spend that time and what you want to spend it on.
Sean: Yeah. My dad told me this when I was a kid. At 22, when you get started, at no point do you really understand nor care. I made $11 an hour and I thought I was fine. My bills were exactly how much I made, but I was still doing what I wanted to do.
He said there’s three types of time when you’re filling out your calendar. This is old school, like when you’ve got the big paper calendar on your desk. Red time, green time, yellow time.
Red time, you mark out first. That’s family time. That’s workout time. That’s things that are going to feed your body and your soul and your mind.
Green time is money time. That could be production. That’s when you’re making your money. For me, it’s when you’re making phone calls, when you’re in front of a client, when you’re making your sales.
And then yellow time is the admin time. It’s the part nobody wants to do. As the guy who preaches people that they need to set their time aside to get this stuff done, I’m also the worst at setting aside the time just to do my admin. Because I’ve always got something else I can tell myself is green time.
Set your calendar that way. We’ve got a Skylight calendar. We’ve got a family Google calendar. My wife will look at my calendar. My wife’s the one who told me I had a 1:30 today because I just hadn’t made it that far. I got so bad about my calendar that, you’ve got your week that you’re in and all your appointments for the week, and you’re living in that week. Then it’s Friday and you don’t go look at next week yet, or you haven’t looked two weeks ahead after you already confirmed with somebody else you can do something.
So I wasn’t taking a big enough scope of what my year looked like. Like, I know you’ve got a really big date on your calendar for your triathlon. That’s your Misogi moment. Jesse Itzler talks about putting your Misogi moments or your big family things on first for the year. Circle them. Highlight them. Never forget them. And then everything else you can back into.
It’s hard to get stuck in the minutiae of the day because your notifications are 24 hours a day. But as an entrepreneur, it’s a little bit different. It’s not a boss that’s bugging you to do some work. It’s an opportunity that might be knocking.
TR: It’s a bunch of little bosses. That’s all clients are. You may get rid of one boss, but you just bought a thousand new ones.
Sean: My dad’s always said, especially once you hit a certain level and you start to add people to your mix, there’s three ways to make money.
Man at work. That’s you, that’s me, that’s us going to work and getting paid per hour, per salary.
The second is men at work. That’s when I hire somebody else and they work on my behalf and I make the split on the margin.
And then your money at work. So when you can put enough shackles to the side that you put them in the market or into some sort of investment that your money can grow and give you mailbox money that you never think about. The power of compound interest.
He’s always told me you’ve got to be able to do it, ditch it, or delegate it. But you can’t do all three.
We’re good in green. We know we’re good at green. We can control green.
But here’s the thing. One of the things our pastor talked about this last week. He was talking about patience. And one of the little phrases he said was, control is an illusion. In the business world, when you’re really good at what you do, control is easy. You can control the inputs, the outputs and the outcomes. When you’re a dad of little tiny people who don’t know how the world works or how gravity works, sometimes you don’t get to control the next action and it pulls you from green time to deal with emergency red time.
We just got back. We did a couple stints in the hospital for our first recording that we missed. Then Casey popped a tire last week, the day after tax season. I hadn’t changed a tire in so long. Casey goes, “Do you know how to change a tire?” Yeah, I know how to change a tire. My sister lost a tire when we were kids, and it was 100 percent my fault on her way to Evansville. I didn’t tighten the bolts all the way. I was 16. Somebody should have double checked my work.
TR: Own your mistakes. Someone didn’t invest their time wisely to teach you that. When those emergencies pop up, the blessing of being self employed is that you can reallocate your time immediately. And I know you went through that recently as well. The first time something like that happens, it’s so easy to get jaded about that in the moment. You’re like, “I need to get this done. I need to deal with this.” But the prioritization of the invest your time wisely, I think one of the things that we put in the book was that your calendar is your confession.
Sean: Right. Your calendar is going to show you what your idol is. Money is important. Business is important. Clients and deadlines and all those things are important. But as we get older and have more kids, the more you really have to focus and reframe your brain. Even though it’s hard, because the world is telling you money is important. Status is important. People listening to your new podcast is important. And then you’ve just got to reframe your head to say the most important thing is the people I raise, who they follow, and then how can I get other people to listen to the good news along the way.
We’re blessed, but it wasn’t easy. It’s still not easy. People from the outside looking in, they go, “Wow.” And they don’t see the struggle along the way.
TR: Well, I think that’s also a different way of looking at entrepreneurialism in today’s world. It’s not all scaling to a certain ARR number so we can sell at a multiple and get out of it. Part of what we’re doing is investing our time so we have the leverage to make those choices. To drop everything, to be there for our family, and to not have to clear it with anyone. What an investment that is compared to a W-2 situation where you’ve got to clear with HR to get out of the building. So there’s a motivation beyond. You’re saying the calendar’s the confessional. Your idols you worship. Those dad duties become the most important blocks in the calendar.
Sean: And I think the pursuit of those things is the goal. I was meeting with one of my younger guys in my office this last week. You can’t control outcomes most of the time. Go back to most business owners are control freaks because we don’t want to make a mistake. We don’t want to have that hard conversation with the client. Something doesn’t go the way we want.
The actions are really the only thing you can control. The process. And the pivot points of saying, “I messed up.” Which I’ve done. And I’ve gotten better about. Not necessarily with my wife, who’s probably listening begrudgingly in my living room, because I made her sit down and watch this with me. She’s probably saying, “Yeah, he’s not good at saying I’m sorry.”
I’ve gotten better over time of owning it quick. Because the more you let something fester, the worse it gets. But owning something quick and just pivoting to the best next solution is really all you can do.
Another piece that I think is super important as we look at investing our time as a holistic human being. How important has health become to you? You’ve been on this big run in the last 12 months.
TR: Business up. I think broad picture, it’s a good thing to sum it up in a very sort of business way without getting too woo woo with it. There is a way that you set the expectations of a day when you wake up and the first things you do. For me, I’ve decided now, it didn’t start this way. It started as two days a week, then three days a week, then four days a week. And now, in this insane race prep, I’m six days a week cardio at the moment. Most times those are 4:45 AM alarm clocks and I’m in the gym by 5:30.
When you start the day with, “I’m deciding to get X done and I’m going to accomplish it,” it sets a tone for the rest of the day and sets an expectation of productivity. It’s way harder to get caught up in the, “This is going to be a bad day. Oh, what a rough day I have.” It more puts you in the perpetual motion of, “Today we’re getting things done.” Also it’s just easier to move through the day when you’re sub 40 pounds lighter. The meals fuel you a different way. That total thing becomes that investment.
Sean: That’s probably your biggest investment, right? Your body. One of the chapters we wrote is called Health Is Wealth.
I will say this to anyone listening. As a dad of four with a three month old and a two year old who lived in a camper all of 2023, who has a home gym and plenty of equipment, I’ve pretty much sucked at working out.
Finding the time at this point in my life with a little baby who doesn’t sleep and a wife who’s at home with four kids. She wants me to be healthy. She wants me to live a long healthy life because she knows I’m better when I’m in that frame of mind.
I bought a sauna four weeks ago. Still not put together. It’s tax season, so I will give myself a small break there. I did hire somebody. They’ll come put it together this week. The sauna is a good way for me to at least get hot, sweaty, and tell myself that hour alone to reframe my mind. It’s usually where I read my Bible on my phone until it overheats and then I’ll just sit there quietly with my own thoughts. It’s where I actually wrote the original Invest Your Time Wisely book, in the sauna, just typing away.
Those moments feel selfish because I know my wife would kill for an hour alone for herself. And she just doesn’t get it. Trying to be okay with taking that time for yourself, that investment in yourself. You’re not going to see market appreciation in it, but you’re going to see compounding growth long term. I think it’s going to start to affect all the things you do. It’s cool to watch the kids want to exercise now. It’s hard to tell my five year old that she can’t go on an hour long jog with me. That’s not the time for her, but she’s enthused about that.
TR: I also think the early thing is, that’s the time where they’re sleeping. So I’m not taking time from them. Sundays are my distance days where I’m running or biking for two to three hours. And I try my best to come back before 9 AM. So the kids haven’t been up for too long. The wife hasn’t had to do that solo too much. In the idea of promoting entrepreneurialism, if it’s your business, you get to set that schedule. That’s an investment that might not be the cash you could make somewhere else, but it’s the freedom and the leverage of your own entity that you get to choose what to do with.
Sean: And then it feeds into the other things you do. The better you feel, the better you work. The better you work, the happier the client. The happier the client, the more the referrals. The more referrals, the more green time in your pocket.
TR: Maybe to close on here, hit a third chapter. The investment part. You might not see those returns for a while. You were starting to talk about that. The investment of choosing to wake up at 4:45 AM. Choosing to block your calendar a certain way. Choosing to communicate in a certain way. All those might take a long time to compound. So there’s an investment strategy that’s sort of optimistic about the future to even begin to invest. So for you, where does that sense of positivity and willingness to invest come from?
Sean: Truly, it’s the rule of 72. The rule of 72 says that as long as you’re consistently putting your money into the market, the market doubles every seven years. So if you want to double your output, it’s going to take a long time. It’s going to be those consistent drips. You’ve seen the videos of the constant drip on a rock. Slowly over a million years, it erodes the rock to where it creates these large caverns.
Most people, including myself, it is so easy to get stuck in today and not be able to reallocate that energy and dollars into where you want to be. That’s the fatal flaw of all human beings, because emergency equals urgency.
Going back to the message we learned at church this last week. Aaron Brockett was talking about patience. He said, “Faith doesn’t have to be perfect, just persistent. And your interruption may be someone else’s miracle.” Just because it’s not happening right away doesn’t mean you’re being overlooked. It doesn’t mean it’s not working. It just means you’ve got to be persistent.
You think about entrepreneurship. You think about life. We’re going to be here for a long time. You want to be able to be persistent in your pursuit every single day for the long term. Where do you see yourself in five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years? What do you want your kids to say about you?
In the background, I’ve got this little picture book, Our Great Adventure, of when I took a giant billboard cutout of my grandparents from their 50th wedding anniversary, and I took it on this big trip out west, because they never got to go. They were raising babies, working at GM. My grandmother was a general manager at McDonald’s for 30 years. They didn’t go experience things because the world just wasn’t open to them the same way it is today.
So if I can tell myself, I want to be at 50 the same way that their grandkids looked at them, and they didn’t have all the access we have today. What a blessing. We have such an opportunity. It’s just, what we put in every single day is going to come out on the back end. Which you might not realize for a while. That’s your patience thing. At the end of the day, you may not realize it at all.
To land the plane. Guys, where we’re going with the Invest Your Time Wisely podcast. This is, we want to meet with people who feel burnout, overlooked, people who are stuck trying to do all things for all people. As opposed to doing something for themselves that will set themselves up for the long term. Entrepreneurs. Dads. Moms. Everyone runs into this. There’s 24 hours in a day. The investment truly is going to compound over time. And we’re right there along with you making the same mistakes. We only hope that at some point we all can realize that we’re just trying to get better.