Brian Thompson chats with Conrad Ruiz, the founder and CEO of Well Aware, a company dedicated to helping business owners reclaim their time. With a background in biomedical engineering and consulting, Conrad blends technical insight with an entrepreneurial spirit to help business owners simplify complex operations and master time management. He shares his personal journey into entrepreneurship, which started with a medical crisis, and offers practical advice on creating efficient systems and finding balance in business.

For Conrad, a mission-driven business emphasizes the "why" behind the work. Once a business has a clear sense of its “why,” it can use its resources — time, money, and systems — toward fulfilling that mission.

“Being a mission-driven business is recognizing wholeheartedly why you’re doing what you’re doing and what that impact is for,” Conrad said.

Conrad explained that having a clear “why” is like having a compass to direct a business’s decisions and actions. By staying focused on the mission, entrepreneurs can avoid distractions and stay aligned on their goals.

“The why is the compass north,” Conrad said. “If you find yourself going in a million different directions, you’re ultimately going nowhere.”

Conrad’s business, Well Aware, helps very busy people buy back their time. He encouraged business owners to invest in affordable solutions, such as virtual assistants or scalable systems, to free up time.

“We decide with them how they want to approach this mercantile equation of money versus time,” Conrad said. “Let’s go ahead and make the equations easy.”

One of Conrad’s key recommendations is to perform a time audit to identify where your time is truly spent. He suggests looking at three key initiatives: time spent marketing, time spent selling, and time spent delivering services. Once you see those three, then you can look at how finance (money) and administration (time) unpin them.

“I love auditing on the basis of time,” Conrad said. “There’s a three-legged stool of marketing, sales, and service delivery, and from there, the underpinnings are finance and administration.”

• Conrad Ruiz: LinkedIn

• Well Aware: Website, LinkedIn

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Brian Thompson, JD/CFP, is a tax attorney and Certified Financial Planner® who specializes in providing comprehensive financial planning to LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs who run mission-driven businesses. The Mission Driven Business podcast was born out of his passion for helping social entrepreneurs create businesses with purpose and profit.

On the podcast, Brian talks with diverse entrepreneurs and the people who support them. Listeners hear stories of experiences, strength, and hope and get practical advice to help them build businesses that might just change the world, too.