How to Live a Life of Meaning Right Now: Welcome to Life of Meaning Lodge

Why did you start your business?

Maybe it was because you saw a need in the world or experienced one firsthand. Perhaps you just found something you absolutely loved and people started paying you to do it.

Or maybe you inherited a business or grew up in a family business or bought a business because you love the process of growing and nurturing something.

Whatever the reason, at the end of the day, we’re all humans and we’re all trying to live lives that matter to us. We care about meaning making, and we want our lives to reflect our ideals, our beliefs and the things that bring us joy.

In this article, we’ll explore a little more about how to answer this question on a personal level but also how to take what you learn there and transfer it into your business.

Money is a Means to an End

This may seem like an odd springboard for a conversation about numbers, but everything about your business’ financial health, reality and future comes back to one question:

What does a life of meaning look like for you, specifically, and how does your business help or hinder that?

And, perhaps most importantly, we’ll talk about what it looks like to live a life of meaning right now – even before you’ve hit your biggest financial goals.

Because, while running a business can be the most direct path to some of your biggest meaning-making goals, it can also be the number one hindrance to experiencing them.

Welcome to Life of Meaning Lodge – the First Stop on Cash Flow Mountain

If you’re not yet familiar with Cash Flow Mountain, we invite you to take five minutes and check it out.

It’s a free and simple framework we’ve created to show how cash flows through your business like water running down a mountain.

This visualization of cash flow anchors some important conversations for leadership teams and lends clarity to some of the biggest questions business leaders face.

And the very first stop on this journey we always lead with is all the way down at the bottom at Life of Meaning Lodge. We love to lean heavily into a metaphor because, yes, it’s fun and playful, but also because it helps complex ideas stick in our brains.

So if you look at the bottom right of Cash Flow Mountain, we have this lovely little lodge nestled right on the shores of Opportunities Pond.

Cash Flow Mountain

Money is Always a Means to an End

Why start with the Lodge, you ask?

Well, for Visionaries who are working tirelessly to grow their business, Life of Meaning Lodge represents everything they’re striving for. It’s the “why” behind their business, the fruit of the labor or the goal at the end.

For businesses running on EOS®, this is usually represented by the revenue and profit goals listed on the V/TO®. But, again, we’re all human, so dollar amounts are only representative of opportunities to make meaning.

If you’re running a business and you have a projected revenue goal for this year, ask yourself:

How would my life look different if I hit this goal? How would it look the same?

Yes, there are some people out there who are just trying to get incredibly rich and amass wealth for the heck of it, but that’s not most of us.

No, most of us are looking to create margin for opportunities for ourselves and others.

Understanding Your Life of Meaning Lodge

So what is it for you?

For my wife (Brittany) and me, something that gives us meaning is time with our kids. It’s a limited resource and we won’t get it back, and we won’t be able to trade in dollars later in life to get more of it.

So, when we think about Life of Meaning Lodge, we think of:

Time with our kids
Some time every summer on a lake, if possible
The ability to be generous and hospitable with our income
The opportunity to provide for our team and the families who rely on them

Your life of meaning may overlap with ours, but it will also be specific to you. Maybe you love to travel or run marathons or maybe you have a particular nonprofit that you’d love to be able to support or build.

We’ve had clients who have shared dreams of wanting to open an Inn or wanting to provide low-income housing for families or parents wanting to scale back their hours to spend more time with their kids.

Translating Your Why Into a Dollar Amount

While money is never the end goal, it’s a great practice to be able to translate your biggest “why” into a dollar amount.

This is where financial forecasting really gets fun because it’s working to make meaning and open possibilities that may have seemed far off.

About a decade ago, my grad school had us walk through an exercise they called “The Number.”

In it, Brittany and I had to walk through the following exercise to find our “Number,” defined as “the amount of cash you need in the bank to live the life you want without any financial worries.”

1. Define your lifestyle

Estimate your monthly expenses (include everything: housing, food, travel, fun, future family plans).
Add +20% buffer for the things you missed.

2. Annualize it

Multiply monthly expenses by 12 → Annual Expenses

3. Account for taxes

Multiply annual expenses by 2 → Required Gross Income

4. Choose a return assumption

Conservative: 2%
Moderate: 3%
Optimistic: 6%

5. Calculate “Your Number”

Use this formula: (1 ÷ return rate) × gross income

6. Reality check

Write the number down.
Ask yourself:
- Does this feel higher or lower than expected?
- What kind of life does this actually represent?
- Is this what you’re building your business for?

Turning the Number Into Real-Life Decisions

Once you have your number, something shifts because now your business has context.

Instead of:

“We need to grow”
“We should probably hire”
“Let’s just push revenue”

You can start asking better questions like:

How much profit do we actually need each month to move toward this?
What would accelerate that timeline?
What’s slowing us down right now?

This is where forecasting becomes incredibly practical. Not spreadsheets for the sake of spreadsheets but a simple way to see:

“If we make this decision…what happens next?”

That’s where stress starts to drop and you get to sleep more at night, feeling the peace that your business is actually supporting the life you want and not just someone else’s metric of success.

How Cash Actually Turns Into Meaning

On Cash Flow Mountain, everything flows toward Opportunities Pond—right next to Life of Meaning Lodge.

This is the place where profit translates to meaning. Money becomes:

Time off
Team growth
Investments
Generosity
Margin

But here’s the catch: If profit never builds, those same opportunities never expand. This is why small improvements matter more than most people think.

Making a slight price increase or a more efficient process or cutting an unnecessary expense may seem like minor “financial tweaks,” but they actually translate into meaningful shifts.

This could be an extra week off with your family, better sleep at night or more freedom and flexibility on your calendar.

Again, money is never the end itself, but it can become the means to something good.

One More Thing to Consider (And This One Matters Most)

We’ve talked a lot about future goals – big numbers, long timelines, possibilities.

But let’s bring this back to today. There’s a sneaky lie in entrepreneurship that sounds something like this:

“Once I hit ___ …then I’ll finally live the life I want.”

Deep down, we all know this isn’t a great way to be thinking, but it’s hard to avoid when you’re planning for the future and dreaming for it as well.

So, here’s a better question for today:

What part of your Life of Meaning is already available to you right now?

Seriously.

Could you leave work 30 minutes earlier this week? Could you plan a simple version of that future trip? Could you be a little more present at dinner tonight?

Your business is meant to support your life, not delay it.

A Better Way Forward

You don’t need to love numbers to do this well.

You just need a clear picture of what matters to you, a rough idea of what it costs and a willingness to connect the dots.

When you do that, your business becomes less of a grind and starts feeling like a journey that is going somewhere but is also meaningful in and of itself.

If you’re feeling a little unsure where to start—that’s normal.

You’re not alone. We love to help.

And if you want help turning your numbers into something clear, simple and actually useful, we would love to walk that path with you.

We invite you to reach out.