In this revelatory episode, Ryan Finley, Owner and Founder of Freedom Financial Services Group, shares how neglecting your marriage while building your business can destroy both. If you’re a stage 1 founder feeling pulled between launching your venture and maintaining your most important relationship, you won’t want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why keeping your spouse involved in your business journey protects both your marriage and your company

- How to maintain open communication about finances and pressures as you grow

- What balanced time management looks like so your family gets your full attention

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 4 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Ryan Finley is the Founder of Freedom Financial Services Group, a divorce finance advisory firm assisting families, attorneys, and courts with the financial challenges of divorce. With over twenty years of executive experience in finance and forensic accounting, Ryan has led hundreds of families across the country to financial clarity and assurance. As a CPA, CDFA, CVA, and court-approved mediator, Ryan combines technical accuracy with empathy, bridging financial analysis and human insight. His skill in clarifying complex financial matters and encouraging constructive dialogue makes him a trusted ally for attorneys and clients.

Want to learn more about Ryan Finley's work at Freedom Financial Services Group? Check out his website at https://www.freedomfsg.com/

Connect with Ryan thorugh his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanfinley/

Email him at [email protected] and his phone number is 941-315-5535

Hello, hello, and welcome. Welcome once again to

the Start Scale and Succeed podcast, the only podcast that

grows with you through all seven levels of your journey as a

founder. I'm your host, Scott Ritzheimer.

And here's something that almost no founder plans for: you spend

years building a business or even a nonprofit, but the

question is, at what cost? Because if you win at work, but

it costs you your marriage, it may end up costing you your

organization too. And to help us figure all of this out, navigate

this very tricky terrain, is my guest, Ryan Finley, who's the

founder of Freedom Financial Services Group. He's a divorce

finance advisory firm that assists families, attorneys, and

courts with the financial challenges of divorce. With over

20 years of executive experience in finance and forensic

accounting, Ryan has led hundreds of families across the

country to financial clarity and assurance. As a CPA, CDFA, CVA,

and court-approved mediator Ryan combines technical accuracy with

empathy, bridging financial analysis and human insight. His

skill in clarifying complex financial matters and

encouraging constructive dialog makes him a trusted ally for

attorneys and clients alike. And he's here with us today. Ryan,

welcome to the show.

I'm excited to have you on. To be honest, whenever we got your

proposal, it was like nothing that we had seen. I didn't know

that this existed, at least this particular position. And what

got me really excited about this conversation is not so much the

mechanics and the realities of what has to happen deep down in

it, but when I, when I get folks on the show who specialize in

really tough times, I'm always interested in the lessons that

they've learned that could have prevented this whole thing. And

so, while I want to talk through a little bit of, you know, what

you do, how you do it, and how relevant that is, I'd love to

see if we could get some wisdom right out of the gate here on

what keeps people from having to come to you in the first place.

Well, you know, as you said, well, first, first of all, thank

you for having me on the show today. I appreciate being here.

It's been.. it's looking forward to it, and it's most of your

audience is founders and business owners and things like

that, so you know, a lot of people we get are people that

start off as owners or they are business owners, and then life

gets away from them, you know. They start off, it's where they

marry their best friend, and they, you know, end up having a

family, and

usually the spouse stays home, raises the kids, and they're,

they either off busy with their business and everything, so you

know that's what we see quite often, you know, where

the branch just splits, you know, one life goes one way,

business goes the other, so you know

it's common, and it's common in divorces, and we see it a lot,

and there's a lot of, I get brought in a lot to value the

business and to figure out what went wrong, you know, but most

of all, you know, I think

advice I would give, you know, it's back to simple, it's back

to basics, it's back to communication, it's keep your

spouse involved with everything that's going on, you know, we've

got

so often they get busy with the family and get busy with the

business, as they don't talk about what's going on with the

family or the business, and so you know, I think a major step,

as simple as it is, is just keeping communication, keeping

your spouse updated with the business activities, the

financials, and things like that, just keeping them

involved. So I think that's a big key to

keeping marriages together and keeping communication going, so

yeah, I think one of the hardest occupations in the world is

being a founder's spouse,

whether wife or husband, whatever it might be, that

because you basically have all the same risks as the founder,

but a fraction, if any, of the degree of control that they

experience, and so this idea of communication, I think, is so

vital, and it's so easy to miss when you see these things really

come into full bloom and blossom into full on fights, possible

divorce, court, the whole nine yards.

Where do you see the biggest gaps in these relationships?

Well, I want to touch on kind of what you said there, you know,

because the business takes time, and someone that's a founder of

a business, it's a lot of work, it's it's not eight hour days,

it's 12 and 14 hour days, and it's seven day work weeks, and

so, as you can see, where I'm going with this, you know, you

have a family, your family needs you too, your business needs

you, and your family needs you, so

it's, it's a split on your time demands, and so it, you know,

you, you, you're working all these busy days, and you come

home,

and your kid.

You're tired, and you know you still need to make time for your

wife and your kids, and you know, plan date nights, spend

time where you're away from your work, and they have your full

attention. Business has your attention a lot of the time, but

your family still needs you. Your family needs your support,

they need your leadership, they need your, you know, financial

ability, your earning ability, but most of all, they need your

guidance and love, and you know, I think a lot of that gets kind

of pushed aside because the work involved to make your business

successful, to found your business, and you've got other

people at your business that depend upon, so you've, they

need your time, but you don't forget your family, you know

it's that's one thing that I see as far as what causes a lot of

divorce, I think it just, it's a time management and it's a

communication issue, and I think that's kind of the biggest

ranch in what's going on, yeah, yeah, and as you mentioned, it

starts small and gets bigger and bigger in your world,

I don't know. Anyone sets out hoping that it'll be that way,

right? But even within that, there are some folks who get

through it more gracefully than others. Let's say it that way.

When it comes to that impasse, where it's just like, hey, we

just have to go our own separate ways, and there's a business

involved. Walk us through kind of what that looks like, like

what happens in those cases, and then maybe even speak to what

makes for a more graceful process or a more cantankerous

one.

Yeah, in, you know it, it gets complicated, you're right, and a

lot of times when I get brought in, you k now, first of all

if the business was started during the marriage, it becomes

a marital asset, you know,

it could complicated if it was started before, because then you

have to still part of it is marital income, and you have to

go back into it, and then you have to look what the baseline,

what value was when they got married, so it could get very

complicated,

but you know,

let's assume in our, for discussion purposes, that the

merit, that the business was started during the marriage, you

know, then

from a

marital asset perspective, you have to go in and determine the

value of the business, you know, and look and see if how that's

going to get separated, you know, the thing you want to do,

what happens a lot is the divorce takes a lot of time too,

and so you want to keep the patient alive, meaning you want

to keep the business operating, you want to keep the operations

going, you want to keep the cash flow going. You don't want that

to suffer

as a consequence of the divorce. You want to keep that going, so

you know

you keep that going. You keep that, you know you want to keep

what the value is. You want to, you have to determine what the

value is, but you know it is a mayoral asset, and

you have to look about if,

how do we divide that? Is that something that the founder

keeps? Is there enough assets where

the spouse can take that, and the business can take this? You

look at division of assets, and you know how that happens. It,

what it gets complicated, because then you have

conflicting

directions. You have

a founder that wants to reduce the value of the company because

of divorce. You have a spouse that wants to increase, so

typically you get

competitive appraisals to see what it is, and then you have to

go through and look, look at it on small businesses, where it

gets even more complicated, as if they're running personal

expenses through there. If there's a car, or groceries, or

vacations, or gasoline, or thing, trips, or things like

that, then you have to pull those back and add those back

as, as

non-operating expenses, and so it gets complicated that way,

but it does get messy, it gets very messy, because then you

have to look at, you know, again, division of assets and

how that's going to happen, and each person has a, has a

objective to get to, where I come in a lot of times

either as litigation support for one spouse or the other, just to

try to justify, you know, why that valuation is accurate or

why this one is not accurate. You know, I get brought in a lot

of times for litigation support to say, okay, have you

considered this, this is their appraisal. This is your

appraisal. Here's where I see the differences, and here's

where I see the reconciliation should be somewhere in the

middle, or somewhere what's what I think's accurate, what I think

is inaccurate, or what I think might be jaded a little bit

towards that side.

Yeah, well, I've never walked through this with one.

Of my clients, or at this, it's not what I do, but even at the

same time, as they were going through this, a friend of mine

did, who was a business owner, and ended up

at the end of it being co-owners with his wife in the business

that he ran, and because it was a small business, wasn't really

capitalized, neither one could buy the other out, and they

ended up having to work together, both of them in the

business. After their, they actually worked together more

after the divorce than they did before the divorce,

and it was really bad. I mean, it was really bad and really

hard, and I don't think a lot of folks expect that's even a

possible outcome, and,

and so, yeah, it really struck me as odd. So, there is

something that I have

had clients go through, and I want to see if it's similar in

this respect, because you talk about keeping the patient alive.

So, I've, I've walked with clients through seasons where

they were also dealing with litigation, to various, some

big, some small, and one of the things we had discussed is how

do you sandbox the time that you give that thing, because it's,

it's not going to make your organization, but it might break

it, and for founders in particular, I've found that that

weights like that are much heavier, because they're so

personal, and I can only imagine that, that would be 1020 100

times more in a divorce situation. So, for a founder

who's going through that and has all the emotional and time and

financial struggle,

how do they walk that road of keeping the business on its best

foot?

It's hard, it's really hard, especially if, if it's a small

business, if that, if the person going through divorce is the

main cog in the wheel, you know, if you have other, if it's a

bigger company and you have other officers and people making

decisions, it's not as, not as bad, but a lot of my clients are

small businesses, and that's the main person driving the

business, and it does, the business suffers in most cases.

It does it because

you know it's not getting the full attention that it should

ordinarily get,

and the thing that's

bad about it, or extremely bad about it,

is instead of just doing business, there's an emotional

component of this too, so you know it's,

it's, it's kind of a double whammy, you know. Not only do I

have to make my business successful, but I've got to deal

with this emotional stress as well that's weighing heavy on

me, and you know that's may cause me not to be as clear

thinking as normally I would be. Yeah,

but you know, I see that happening a lot. The situation

you brought up, I don't see that very often, where they, where

they share a business because of what you just described, because

it's so difficult, and you know, these people are going through

divorce, and they're suing each other, and it's, you know, it's

usually there's something that happened to bring into that, and

so to be able to see each other on a daily basis and manage the

business on a daily basis, I could see that being extremely

difficult, especially if there's if one of those former spouses

become involved in another personal relationship, then you

know, then it's right in your face, so

yeah, yeah, it was, it was very hard season for both of them.

Ryan, there's a question that I ask all my guests, and I'm

genuinely fascinated to see what you'd have to say to this, but

the question is this: What would you say is the biggest secret

that you wish wasn't a secret at all? What's that one thing you

wish every founder watching or listening today. Knew,

I think the biggest secret that I see would be

share your financial situation with your spouse,

you know, because I think

then maybe

they understand a little better, you know, what your situation in

the pressures you're going through, you know, and then that

in turn should be, you know,

how that affects home life. You know, here's what I'm bringing

in. Here's what our monthly expenses are. Here's how the

business is doing. Here's what I anticipate the business needs

are going forward. Here's what I anticipate our personal needs

are going forward. So I think a lot of that gets

pushed under the rug, or it's just like, well, he's taking

care of this, so I'm not going to worry about it. And then the

wedge gets a little bigger, and then they get down the road,

they're like, well, how much are we making, how much do we own,

how much, what, what is it called, what's my living

expenses? I think those are things that both spouses should

understand, and I don't think that they do. You know, I think

that that's she's busy taking care of the kids, or whatever,

he's busy taking care of the kids, whoever, whatever the

household looks like. And you know, they may not be interested

in that, but I would encourage them to have that communication

again. Here's our financial situation. Here's what our

living expense.

Are here's what our income is. Here's what you know.

Here's what we have as investments. So, I think that's

something that needs to be shared. It's something that I

think there would be fewer marriages that fail if that was

something that was implemented, or that happened on a daily

basis, or on a monthly basis.

Yeah, especially in the world of small business, it's so easy to

see how hard that is, because so often the answer is, I don't

know, you know, revenue - everyone's ridden the revenue

roller coaster if they've started something, and, and, and

again, it can create those emotions, and then you feel like

you're managing them for your spouse, and you're still

managing them for you, and it feels like it's easier to just

not do it right, but I think what you've so

wonderfully helped us understand is the cost of not doing it, as

hard as it might be in the moment, it's going to be so much

harder later. Well, Ryan, you know there's quite possibly

folks that are right in the middle of this

and could use some help from an objective source, someone who

understands the space and how to move forward. How can folks

reach out to you? Where can they find more out about the work

that you do? Well, thank you. Thank you. The best way to reach

me is probably through my website, which is www dot

freedom fsg.com

and that's short for Freedom Financial Services Group, so

Freedom fsg.com

My email is Ryan at Freedom fsg.com

and my phone number is 941-315-5535

and I'm glad we do,

someone can come to our website, fill out a

form to an inquiry form, and then we usually give them, you

know, the first meetings free, complimentary, and then just

kind of understand their situation, and then you know

tell them who we are, what we do, and you know, understand

their situation, how we can help them, so yeah, fantastic. Well,

Ryan, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your

wisdom experience with us. It was truly, truly remarkable.

And, yeah, it's an honor to have you here. For those of you

watching and listening, you know that your time and attention

mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this

conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you

next time. Take care.

Hey everyone, Scotty Timer here. Thank you so much for listening

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