We work to live. Not live to work. It doesn't always feel that way, with the pressure to build a business or get a promotion and "succeed". Chuck Blakeman has another way of looking at it - Freedom. Building a business should allow you to earn money, and have time to do the things you want to do.

"Freedom requires time and money. Until you have both, you don't have freedom." ~ Chuck Blakeman

Blakeman is the founder of Crankset Group, which helps business owners to be more productive, grow faster and reclaim the passion that inspired them from the beginning. Chuck has thirty years experience growing seven of his own businesses, and uses that background to advise other businesses.

In this week's interview, we discuss his philosophies along with his book, Making Money is Killing Your Business. Blakeman purports that there are few organizations out there that truly care about small businesses, even though they say that they do. He points out that much of what is taught about how to grow a businesses is wrong because it's been written by people who built giant businesses. That's not helpful when the majority of businesses that succeed in the world are smaller businesses, most of them with fewer than five hundred employees.

We must, Chuck Blakeman says, shake the concept that a small business is just a big business that hasn't grown up yet. Rather, "A big business is a T-rex and a small business is a gazelle and it's never going to be bigger. We address that 98% of small businesses that will never have more than 20 employees."

Reading about how someone built Starbucks or Google won't benefit the average small business owner. Small businesses need different rules. Want to know what they are? Listen Saturday at 10:00 AM on KNUS 710 – Please let us know what you think of our program, either by commenting here or on Facebook at Connect & Collaborate with ICOSA or join the discussion on Twitter @ICOSAMagazine.