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:
– What balanced time management looks like so your family gets your full attention
– 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
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
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.
Ryan Finley
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, they end up having a family, and usually the spouse stays home, raises the kids, and they’re they’re 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 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, communication, though. So,
Scott Ritzheimer
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?
Ryan Finley
Well, I want to, 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, the 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, 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,
Scott Ritzheimer
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.
Ryan Finley
Yeah, in, you know, it gets complicated, you’re right, and a lot of times when I get brought in, you know, first of all, if the business was started during the marriage, it becomes a marital asset, you know it could be 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 at it on small businesses, where it gets even more complicated is 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.
Scott Ritzheimer
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?
Ryan Finley
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.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah,
Ryan Finley
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
Scott Ritzheimer
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. New,
Ryan Finley
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 is, 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, and, 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 he’s 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 expenses. 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 a monthly basis.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, espe cially 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 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?
Ryan Finley
Well, thank you. Thank you. The best way to reach me is probably through my website, which is www dot freedom fsg.com.com and that’s short for Freedom Financial Services Group. So, Freedomfsg.com My email is [email protected] 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
Scott Ritzheimer
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.
Scott Ritzheimer
Hey everyone, Scott Ritzheimer here. Thank you so much for listening to the Start Scale and Succeed podcast. I hope this episode gave you exactly what you need for the level you’re in right now. If you want to discover what level you’re in, take our 10 question founders evolution quiz for free at foundersquiz.com, that’s foundersquiz.com. It’ll pinpoint exactly where you are and give you tailored tips to move forward and reach that next level in your journey as a founder. If you got something out of today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, or review it helps us reach more founders like you, and let’s be honest, it means a ton to me, my team, and all our incredible guests. So, keep starting, scaling, and succeeding, and I’ll see you in the next episode.
Contact Ryan Finley
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 through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanfinley/
Email Ryan Finley at [email protected] and his phone number is 941-315-5535