Owning a Job vs Owning a Business – What Kimberly Fischer’s Energy Money Matrix Showed Me

I’ve owned a job while telling myself I owned a business. More than once. I said so to Kimberly Fischer on Unscripted Small Business: “there is a big difference between owning a business and owning your job,” and “it’s a trap that a lot of consultants like me have fallen into.” Then I admitted “I’ve fallen into and out of it and back and forth a couple different times as successes have waned or peaked.”

Kimberly climbed out with a chart. She’s a restaurant owner and the author of the coming book The Motipulation Method, and for years, she says, “I was sort of dabbling in being self-employed more than being an owner.” Her energy money matrix showed me where I’ve been hiding from that question, and I think you’ll find it does the same for you.

Watch the full episode on YouTube or listen on Castos.

The energy money matrix asks what my to-do list never does

A to-do list asks whether a thing is done. Kimberly’s chart asks whether it should be yours at all. You put energy down one side and money across the top, which gives you four boxes, and you sort everything you do in a day into them. Then you look at it and ask “how much of my day is in a box that doesn’t give me energy and isn’t making me money?”

That was her moment on the couch. She was working twelve to sixteen hour days, and she could see why she was miserable once she saw where those hours landed. Her goal now is the box that does both: “I feel like 80% of my day should be on that.”

When I try this on myself, the top box is easy to name. I told Alan Lazaros that I love building marketing systems and that I’m terrible at getting stuck in the weeds executing them, which he had a fair answer for in stop being the bottleneck. Building the system goes in the good box. Running it by hand, forever, is how a consultant turns into his own employee. Tom Malesic told me the smaller your business is, the less it runs without you, and I wrote up what that 30-year agency owner made me admit about my own consultancy.

The box you raid first is the one you can’t afford to lose

This is the part I didn’t see coming. You’d assume the first thing to go is the stuff that drains you. Kimberly found the opposite. “The things that don’t make me money, but they give me energy, that was the first thing that I gave up.” She sees it in her business owner friends too, and I’d bet you’ve raided that box this month.

Her fix was to stop treating it as optional. About 550 days ago she decided on the gym, every day, busy season or not. “It can never be sacrificed.” Her reason is the part I keep thinking about: it’s what lets her show up for the business. That box doesn’t make money on the chart, and it pays for the other three.

Your DIY hour is never as cheap as it looks

Consultants are terrible about this, and I’m one. We’re the ones who can figure anything out, so we do. Kimberly nailed the sentence we use: “I’ll get it done in an hour.” And she nailed the problem with it: “we don’t realize what that hour is actually costing us.”

She told me about a business owner who flips houses and got fed up with his contractor, so he spent three hours on a water heater himself. During those three hours, he missed a call about a house he could have made a hundred grand on. That’s his story, told by her, and it’s an extreme one. Most of your DIY hours won’t cost that. You also don’t get to see which ones did, because a missed call doesn’t send an invoice. (I have a water heater story of my own, but mine only cost me a cold house.)

Compare that with how she treats her housekeeper. Every time her housekeeper comes, she texts her to say thanks, and “because of her I can do what I do.” That’s somebody who has done the math on who makes the money possible.

AI is a way out of the job, unless it becomes your new boss

I use AI for a lot of my own escape. As I told Kimberly, you “give it the right context for processing a transcript and you end up with multiple articles.” So her warning hit me: “A lot of people utilize AI to help them, but actually they turn it into their boss.” You can leave a job you own and walk straight into one that a chatbot assigns you. Her test is one sentence. “I don’t say, how do I do this? I say, how can you do this without me?”

The handoff only holds if it’s written down. I told her about a conversation with the team at Oleno on shared SOPs, because the same prompt gets you different answers from one surface to the next and from one person to the next, and “you need some sort of shared workflow system.” If you’re solo, that’s still you, six months from now, trying to remember how you got a good result. And if you have a team, go read what Dr. Gleb Tsipursky told me about owner mindset vs paycheck mindset before you show them anything.

The hamburger buns test for whether you own a job

I asked Kimberly for the one thing she’d want owners to take away. “Audit your time and have a serious conversation with yourself about what you do with your time.” Then she told me why.

She was at a birthday dinner with her daughter and her family when the restaurant called. They’d run out of hamburger buns. She left to get them.

“I sacrificed time with my daughter for her birthday to go get hamburger buns.”

“Anybody could have done that. It didn’t have to be me.” That’s the test, and it’s better than the one I’ve been using. I’ve written about Brad Poulos’s Barbados test, where you don’t have a business until you can leave it. The beach is easy to shrug off. Everybody knows a beach is a long way from where they are. A phone call at dinner about something anybody could do is a lot closer to home.

Owning a job vs owning a business: what I’m auditing first

So here’s my list, and you can steal it:

1. Chart the week. Every task goes in one of the four boxes, including the ones I like to pretend aren’t work.
2. Ask her two questions. “Does this belong on my schedule? Can I find somebody else that can help me do this?”
3. Protect the energy box. Decide what can never be sacrificed before the calendar decides for me.
4. Price the hour. Before I say I’ll get it done in an hour, ask what else that hour could have answered.
5. Give AI the task, not the question. How can you do this without me?

Kimberly’s point is that this is fixable. “There is a possibility,” she told me, and the first step is auditing your time. She points to Dan Martell’s Buy Back Your Time, a book she has gone through five times. If you want the chart ready to print, we built one from her method as the Energy Money Matrix SOP. The full episode recap is Kimberly Fischer on the energy money matrix, AI and motipulation, and the marketing angle is on SEO Arcade: AI as a tool, not a boss. You can find Kimberly at kimberlyfischer.com, check out her Freedom Blueprint course, reserve a free copy of her coming book, and hear her on the Motipulation podcast.

Sponsor disclosure: uSERP, Oleno, ClearLead Digital and OppAlerts are paid sponsors of the Unscripted podcast network. Links to them are marked as sponsored.