Step Off The Hamster Wheel To Find True Freedom, with Nicholas Schwarz

Dan Sullivan: Hi, this is Dan Sullivan. I'd like to welcome you to the Multiplier Mindset Podcast.
 
Dan Sullivan: On today's episode of Multiplier Mindset, we have a really marvelous entrepreneur from Vienna in Austria, Nick Schwarz, who is background financial advisor, but he took a big jump, worked for a big company in Switzerland and in Vienna, and didn't like the life that he was leading when he just had his first child. And so he took a jump in the deep end of the pool and just decided to be an entrepreneur. I enormously appreciate just the sheer courage that it takes to do that. And one of the structures that Nick talks about, which I think is really very foundational to Strategic Coach are the four freedoms, that entrepreneurs become entrepreneurs for the sake of freedom. That's a fundamental framework of a Strategic Coach. Money is one of that, but it's not the most important one. And the first one is freedom of time, that the real freedom that allows all the other freedoms to happen is basically that you control your time, you own your time. So many people in this world, they make big money, but they don't own their time. Nick talks about the decision he had to make because he had a very young daughter and he wanted to enjoy life with his daughter. So he went off in a difficult environment to actually go on your own. Also, he's obviously got a depth of experience, but he has a depth of knowledge, and he's taking an advanced degree at the same time. But the first freedom is freedom of time, and with the freedom of time, then you can focus on freedom of money. Not only you make the quantity of money that you want, but you make the quality of money that you want. You like the results, but you like the activity, and that leads us to the third freedom, which is freedom of relationship. Surrounding you in your company, you have people that you love working with, and surrounding you in terms of who your clients are, you have great relationships.
 
So we got three positives. We have freedom of time, freedom of money, and freedom of relationship. And then that gives us freedom of purpose. When you have those three freedoms going for you, more and more, how you're leading your life, what you're leading your life for, becomes very purposeful and you can't start with purpose. You have to start with time and you can't get to money unless you first gain freedom of time and that makes you very selective about how you make your money and then who you make your money with and then what's the overall purpose of your life. Nick really hits on a topic that I notice happening more and more in the entrepreneurial world, and that is that what's the point of being wealthy if you're not happy? And I see this day after day, I see this every year more and more, that Strategic Coach clients have the ability to actually arrange their life the way they want it, to feeling control of their life, to feel that they are the driving force of creating a world for themselves, for their family, for the team members who work for them and their companies, and then for the clients that they have. And they can create tremendous positive energy in a world where so many people are sacrificing everything for money. And as it turns out, those who put the emphasis on their freedoms actually, over time, end up with the most money. And it's happy money, and they lead happy lives.
 
Nick Schwarz: My name is Nick Schwarz. I've got a little multifamily office in Vienna, Austria. We serve our clients from all over the world. The focus that we have is what Dan calls the four freedoms. So we focus on helping clients find their four freedoms, the freedom of time, the freedom of wealth, the freedom of relationships, and the freedom of purpose, focus on the transgenerational journey that our clients go through. So how can they pass on those four freedoms on to the next generation? And also in the order of the four freedoms, the freedom of wealth is not always the most important one for our clients. I've been doing this, first I was employed, but in total I've been doing this for 24 years and I've been self-employed since 2011.
 
So my motivation to become an entrepreneur was based around a lack of those four freedoms. I was making a lot of money, I was well paid, I had a good job, but I just didn't like it anymore. And an added complexity on top of that was that the company sent me to Austria. I was first based in Switzerland, and they sent me to Austria to open up a new branch. Now, that sounds like a very good opportunity for a 30-something-year-old. And it was, but I was totally overworked. And on top of that, my daughter was just born. So I had this difficulty in trying to manage a new work role, being the head of a branch in an unknown country for us. And then also the new role as a parent. And this was extremely difficult to bring under one hat. I was working 60, 70 hours per week, came home and then my daughter was already in bed and I left the home before she woke up, et cetera So it was incredibly difficult.
 
And there came a point where it really didn't make any more sense for me to continue there. And I had a meeting with my bosses and we agreed that it's not going to work. That was a difficult point in my time because I had to then ask myself, what shall I do now? Shall I continue? That would have meant leaving Austria, going back to Switzerland, working for a private bank or something like that, or some advisors in Switzerland. And then I would have been back in this hamster wheel and there would have been no change. Or doing the unthinkable, really, and becoming self-employed. Unthinkable because in my line of business it's incredibly difficult to get clients because it takes two, three years to acquire a new client and then until you're finally paid it's not unusual to see three or four years pass considering you've got trust structures in place and their legal requirements et cetera So that was incredibly difficult. Despite this I was just overworked, probably at a burnout or if not in a burnout and I just needed to do something else. So I just stopped working and by default became self-employed and in that time, I thought, well, why not use the time as well to learn something new?
 
And I then learned to program. I had no knowledge of programming whatsoever, and I just started from scratch. At the same time, I had my little office next to my daughter's bedroom and at the same time while learning how to program I then also got to play a lot with my daughter. We played with the Playmobil and Lego and I brought her to kindergarten and picked her up from kindergarten and all those little mini interactions were possible for me to have, and I feel incredibly blessed that I had that chance, that opportunity to spend the time with her and not having to work. And financially, it was possible. I had some money saved up, so it wasn't really a big problem. And looking back, it was probably the best two, three years of my life just doing that, learning how to program and spending a lot of time with my daughter also knowing that it's a unique opportunity to do something like that.
 
So one of the insights or one of the questions I actually have to ask is, are you afraid of risk or are you afraid of uncertainty? Risk is always perceived as something negative and uncertainty can go both ways, right? You can have a positive outcome, you can have a negative outcome, but uncertainty also gives you the possibility of something positive happening and looking back at that juncture where I had to make this decision I was more focusing on the risk and it was a very scary thing to do and I completely blanked out the uncertainty part, I blanked out all the positive things that can come out of this, all the positive interactions with my daughter that still pays dividends and the relationship that we were able to build up in the family. I didn't see that. Only after a couple of months and years, I was able to grasp what the positive aspects of that decision were. In hindsight, it would have been better to have a more positive approach towards uncertainty, saying like, okay, whatever happens, I can do this. I can do it for six months. I can do it for 12 months. I can do it for 24 months. Why not just try it? Sometimes we stumble on those rocks that we put down ourselves. Sometimes we just have to try.
 
So what does life look like today? We are still very small, five employees. We have our office in Vienna, but we also have a branch in Bulgaria. We are developing a lot of the tools that we need for work ourselves. And applying the tools of Strategic Coach, I was able to carve out a lot of time for myself. And I'm perhaps not the best example for free time, because what I've done with those hours that I carved out for myself, so roughly 200 hours a quarter, what I've done with that time is I'm spending it on a doctorate that I'm doing in Milan, Italy, where I'm focusing on exactly this type of question that we are looking at for our clients, the junction between how family values and the family vision impacts the quality of the advice given by external advisors. And that's a very unique question that hasn't been tackled yet. And I've been working on it for one and a half years, still have another one and a half years. But out of this question, we then developed new software tools that we can use to mitigate this divide between those two silos, really, between the client and his advisors.
 
So I've been in The Strategic Coach Program for I think seven years or something like that. The first time I came across the Program was actually in a book by Michael Hyatt, I believe, on time management and goal setting. In one of the paragraphs, he then describes his interactions with Dan, and I thought, well, why not go to the original source? And I looked up Strategic Coach, Dan Sullivan, and there we are. And that was the beginning of a wonderful journey for me because in the beginning you get to know the concepts and what this is all about. And then later on, year five, six, for me it started to transcend into something else and to something more meaningful because I find the Strategic Coach community very helpful as a sounding board but also as an emotional support group. Because what we do as entrepreneurs is sometimes very lonely. Depending on your circle of friends, you may or may not have a lot of entrepreneurs as friends. But in my case, I don't have any entrepreneurial friends or friends that are entrepreneurs. I think that would be a better way of describing it. And then when you then talk about your issues and struggles, but also successes, then it doesn't quite resonate as much as if you talk with somebody who's gone through the whole process, all the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. And it's just a different reaction that you get out of that.
 
At the moment, we are also trying to set up a subgroup within the Strategic Coach group that I'm in where we then also coordinate our efforts. So all of us are fantastic entrepreneurs in one way or another. We've got our unique abilities. And I thought, well, we have all these unique abilities in this one room, why don't we start to coordinate and work on new ideas together and engage in what I call relaxed entrepreneurship, where you don't have the stresses of having to make as much money as possible, but you can do it still economically successful, but it's not the main reason why you do it. We want to do it because we like building stuff, we like creating stuff out of nothing, we like that kind of challenge. Sometimes when you are in year five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten of your company, then you start to think about processes, et cetera, et cetera, how to grow the company. That's also very interesting and everything. And I also love that aspect of it. But sometimes I also miss the fun days of having to create a company out of nothing. That is a unique challenge.
 
Over the last decade or so, my thinking in terms of entrepreneurship has changed dramatically. I started off with thinking that I need to know everything, I need to do everything. The family office business is a rather person-focused type of business, but still there are ways to implement ideas such as Who Not How and other related concepts. And that's definitely a change that I've seen in my own way on how I approach entrepreneurship. Nowadays, I'm trying to keep myself out of it as much as possible, delegate whatever is possible. But just having fixed points within a week where I say, okay, now I have two hours or three hours where I can really focus on this one entrepreneurial question that we need to focus on. And then I can bring in other people. And for the most time, I actually just listen to what the other people have to say. And then when things start to get out of control, I then unmute myself and say something and then bring it back into a certain lane that I would like this to progress on. And that is, I think, the biggest change. Perhaps it's also to do with my own level of maturity but I think also a lot of experience on how you look at things and how you approach things and also what I've noticed is that over the years, my focus has been less on the idea. So I'm less likely to fall in love with an idea. And it's more becoming a question of, okay, how can we actually generate some cash flow out of this idea? And ideas become more abstract. But the business side of an entrepreneurial idea becomes more important to me.
 
So what gives me the most joy at the moment? That's a very good question and I'm definitely or unfortunately not very big on the free time. We had a Strategic Coach workshop a couple of quarters ago and there was a kind of intervention by the group outlining that perhaps I should take a day off or two. And I try, I try. So after my workshop a couple of weeks ago, I consciously thought of this intervention that the group had. And I thought, well, because I was in London, I could just as well take a couple of days off. And then I had golden Free Days. And I went to Wales to some little seaside town and just spent some time there. It was absolutely fantastic. I'll definitely do that again. That was a very good experience. But what gives me joy, my wrong understanding of free time is also what gives me energy. And at the moment, I get a lot of energy out of my studies. Having worked in this industry for 24 years, you kind of think that you know everything and you've seen a lot of things working in practice or not working in practice, but then you have no idea what the theoretical concepts are behind it. And then vice versa, you also see theoretical concepts that are developed in academia, and you know that in practice, this is not going to fly at all.
 
So this duality between the two worlds, between the practical world and the academic world, is very interesting for me, and I really like this complexity between these two worlds. And I'm spending a lot of time on it, but I'm really loving it. And then also work, I mean, in those 13 years now I've worked as a self-employed, I think I had about two or three weeks that I really didn't enjoy. The rest was all fantastic, which is also a function of being your own boss with all the pros and cons. But just having this flexibility is definitely worth it. And I work from home. All of us actually work from home, so we don't have an official office where we work or don't work. And this also gives me the ability to have, again, mini interactions with my family. And that's also something that I couldn't have if I was employed somewhere where, you know, working from home and being called back into the office, et cetera These are questions that I can let be, so to speak.
 
Another point that is giving me joy is that our business is growing, that we are developing new and interesting tools for families, but also for advisors. We're testing them out, and we've got very positive feedback so far. And this is all very positive, so to speak. It's a very positive environment that we're working in. Fantastic program. I really love it, keep at it, keep these new concepts and ideas rolling. But for me, although the concepts and the ideas are very important just to get your brain cells working, for me it's now turned into more about the community and exchanging with other entrepreneurs. And, you know, depending on the group, I think also on the group dynamics, this will work better in some groups and other groups are perhaps not that communicative, perhaps. It would be interesting to see if you could kickstart something more integrative in those other groups as well, so that they can have the same positive experience that we have.
 
One thing where I will talk to Sarah at least is this university project. So I'm looking for financial advisors especially who would like to try out or take part in this study where they could use that tool for free with their clients. And then we do a lot of measurements and have questionnaires, et cetera, so that we can measure if the tool has made a difference, number one. Number two is what kind of relationship is there between the perceived quality of the advice and how much the advisor knows about the background of the family through their visions and values. And that will be end of the year, beginning of next year. But I've already spoken to Sarah and she said she could spread this around in other workshops as well. And that would be great if I could have some help there where you could at least spread the word and then they can decide for themselves if they want to participate or not. That would be great. The more the merrier. The website is thececilygroup.com, Cecily being the name of my daughter, so everything is about transgenerational wealth and that's where you can look up what we do, who we are, how we do it.