The Father-CEO
A model for fatherhood, economic growth, and asset building that will bless the future.
I was having a conversation with someone who is involved in a network I belong to recently. He's the former CEO of some startups (and current businesses) and aligned well with me regarding how we see the family and the home. Naturally, in a 30-minute chat, we discussed everything from ministry to business and family as guys like us often find ourselves doing. It was during this chat that he reminded me of a truth I deeply believe but desperately needed encouragement around on that particular day.
He said "Remember, you're the CEO of Cirullo Co. whenever you're involved in any venture, you're actually contracting out your time for the asset development and the cash flow health of Cirullo Co. The goal is to simply maximize the equation of how much time you're spending, with the amount of cash flow and asset growth you're generating as a return."
What he means is that whether I'm an employee at a job, building a family business, purchasing an investment property, or any other financial activity, I'm making a conscious choice as the CEO of Cirullo Co. to either enter into a contract or a process or new venture that aims to build the assets and the cash flow of our family enterprise.
Why is this CEO framework of thought important for every father, no matter their job status?
Let's start tracing back through time for a minute. The industrial revolution was one of the larger cultural shifts that helped put the nail in the coffin of what was previously a common perspective: family economies.
Prior to the industrial revolution, many families operated from this family-centered economic perspective. They saw the family as the primary entity they worked for, and the primary entity that they had responsibility for when it came to asset building. Many families were agrarian, raising and growing their own food, and finding ways to create an economic engine that centered around family production and the growth of family assets.
After the industrial revolution, the family began to outsource their fathers and the economic activity of the home.
Fathers began to trade time for just money, instead of both money & family asset growth. They often worked tirelessly in jobs that were building the family assets of wealthy individuals who had started successful businesses and were likely still stewarding their own family's multigenerational assets passed down.
Simply put, most fathers stopped focusing on their own family asset building and began building the assets of other families, for a usually small paycheck.
I realize in many cases, this was a necessity. I’m also not suggesting that we be idealistic in an effort to return to pre-industrialized eras.
On the contrary, I’m suggesting with this discussion that now that we live in an era with technology, the internet, smartphones, etc. every father can revisit the concepts of the past in a new and different way. We each now have access to build assets in much easier ways than ever before. The landscape is nearly endless. We must get back to building multi-generational family assets.
When most of a culture trades its mindset of responsibility to family asset building, for the mindset of simply making money and preparing for retirement, the creation of and multigenerational stewardship of small businesses will plummet.
Think of this state as the universally applied vocational equivalent to renting a home, which could be summed up as: you're investing your resources to use and grow someone else's assets.
When you simply work for a paycheck you're investing a nonrenewable resource (you and your family's time) to grow the assets of another family and not your own. You're making ends meet, but not furthering your family's wealth, freedom, or legacy.
On the other hand, a father who sees himself as the CEO of his family's economic engine will think differently about the utilization of resources. Much like a startup CEO, a father must make decisions (sometimes hard ones) that further increase the cash flow of the business and the value of the business's assets, while minimizing losses and making the business more efficient.
The goal is to over time increase the production of healthy cash flow and the value of the asset column while decreasing leverage and time spent.
The father who gets this will begin to think very differently about his time, home, his family's finances, and how he approaches the work that he does. He'll be thinking like a father-CEO.
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