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The Revolutionary Man Podcast
The Revolutionary Man Podcast is for high-performing husbands and fathers ready to lead with purpose. Hosted by Alain Dumonceaux, this show equips men with the tools to reclaim their masculine identity, master work-life balance, and strengthen mental health. Featuring expert interviews and raw solo episodes, each week brings insights to help men lead their families, grow their businesses, and build a lasting legacy. It’s time to stop settling and start rising.
The Revolutionary Man Podcast
The Importance of Men Investing In Their Families Beyond Financial Provision with Aaron Shelley
Let me know your thoughts on the show and what topic you would like me to discuss next.
Have you ever wondered how your family dynamics affect your business tactics? Let's get into it! Join me in a thought-provoking chat with Aaron Shelley as he shares his unique journey from mechanical engineering to business consulting and the lessons he learned along the way. We'll reflect on our own childhoods, the high divorce rates in contemporary society, and the resulting issues that impact modern-day families. My own theory about managing businesses and families comes into play here, offering a fresh perspective on this complex issue.
As we delve deeper, Aaron opens up about his personal struggle of being jobless for 18 months and how this adversity forced him to internalize his problems. We'll draw attention to the significance of men investing in themselves to steer important conversations within their families. Our discussion takes a turn towards the complex dynamics within relationships, including cohabitation, blended families, and extended families. We strategize, plan, and discuss the importance of honest communication to truly understand and navigate these intricate relationships.
Building on this, we shed light on the importance of investing in family resources beyond just financial means. Drawing inspiration from the Gates family, we touch upon the impact of social and human resource investments. We explore how the role of men leading families has evolved over time, and how that ties into successful families and legacies. Wrapping up our stimulating chat, we reiterate the significance of families as pillars of society and call for a deeper investment in them beyond just financial means. If you're keen to redefine your role as a man in your family and align yourself for greatness, this episode is for you!
How to reach Aaron:
Web: https://thefamilyflywheel.com/
Free Resource: https://thefamilyflywheel.com/bookresources
FB: https://www.facebook.com/aaron.k.shelley
IG: https://www.instagram.com/aaronkshelley/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronshelley/
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And I actually think so many women that I've interviewed or talked with over the time, over the years. They're like I meet all these guys and they're going nowhere, because they don't say, like here's what I'm doing with my life, here's what I want to do. And I've seen it. Just recently my daughter talked to this guy. She's 18, she was talking to this guy and he's like here's what I want to do, here's the life. And she was like wow, that's so attractive. The big piece that I've seen is that, for whatever reason, a lot of men have stopped investing in their families the same way. They've invested for money. They're getting money and they'll work their butts off. You know, you see a lot of people who will go become a doctor and then they'll go and work and then their kids and family will hate them later. So men will keep. They've been investing so heavily in their family, and this is myself included, so I don't want to pretend like I'm better. This is some of the research. But then we didn't know what our impact was in the family.
Speaker 2:I want you to take a moment and think back on your childhood. Remember hanging out with your buddies. You know it didn't seem to matter which house you were at, right, whether you were always at somebody's mom's house and that would be. We'd get there and that's when they'd have something there for us to eat or, you know, take care of us, and it was actually really good and innocent times.
Speaker 2:But doesn't it fast forward when you think about how life begins to take a different shape for people in their lives. And you know, when post-secondary education comes on and careers, and we go out and we start families and soon you start to hear of some stories, about some failed relationships and marriages and maybe, even, maybe even had some convictions. Yeah, that was a story that I remember my neighbor son. I couldn't believe it when I heard that story that you know that he had in, that he had been convicted for for a first degree murder. But the question is that how can we come out of an environment like that, where there's solid families being units, being shown and we have high values, that at the end we still have such high divorce rates and we have other issues?
Speaker 2:Well, today my guest is going to unpack a theories about what he and he's developed about managing businesses and families. But before we get into all, I just want to remind you of your interest in raising your standards as a father, husband and entrepreneur that I'm going to encourage you to start your hero's quest. You know it's in this program where you're going to accomplish more, develop more and become more in the next 90 days and you ever have. You can get more information about this at our Wakenman training academy at membersthewakenmannet. And with that, let's get on with today's episode.
Speaker 3:It's time to align yourself for greatness. It's time to become a revolutionary man. Stay strong, my brother.
Speaker 2:Welcome everyone to the revolutionary man podcast. I'm the founder of the Wakenman movement and your host, alan DeBoncell. Before we get started, let me ask you a couple of questions. Think back to your childhood. Who did you spend the most time with? Who do you remember from school? Now, looking at them today, were there any surprises for how their life turned out, and how about for you?
Speaker 2:Many of us consider our personal and business lives to be separate entities and for the most part they kind of are. But look at any bookshelf and you're going to find countless business books and how to take you from your business from good to great to built to last. But can you find similar ideas and strategies for your family? Not so much. That is until today. See, my guest is the author of the family flywheel and today shares with us how we can use business tactics and strategies to create a family business model.
Speaker 2:So allow me introduce my guest, aaron Shelley. Aaron has a BS in mechanical engineering and MBA. He has worked with small businesses and startups were developed. Unique systems perspective on business and family works in the academic and business worlds which have led him to understand how, how related our families and our dynamics business dynamics are, and his wife have run the largest Irish dance school in Utah. Hopefully we get into that today. For over 20 years and he's built multiple companies, consulted across multiple industries and it helped raise $54 million as the COO of a technology company. As I said, he lived in Utah with his wife and four children, so welcome to the show, aaron. How are things today?
Speaker 1:They're great, Alan. I'm looking forward to this talking to you about these, these fun issues and should be fun.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. You know, I wanted to always talk about, always talking our work here, about everyone being on their own heroes quest, and I just want you to tell us a little bit more about what inspired you to pursue the life that you're living today and how has that experience shaped you into the man that you are.
Speaker 1:Well, like you said, I was an engineer. You know I did that tactic and then I got frustrated as an engineer. So then I decided I'm going to go do the business thing and understand the business side of things, because the engineer side I couldn't control it. So then I go to the business side. I go okay, here's how the business questions work. And then I worked for some tech companies One ancestry, calm, if you're familiar with that we do genealogy, we did. I worked for them for five or six years and then I worked for a startup in genealogy. So I'm in the tech I was doing fairly well.
Speaker 1:Well, that start up failed. And then I had this opportunity because of certain things my wife had set up where I didn't need to work and keep this going. So my wife said what do you want to do? So there was this opportunity to help an academic on a book on business and entrepreneurship, because he was looking at why do certain families have more entrepreneurship levels or groups? So I researched that. In the course of researching that for him, I said hey, I think here's a better model than the one you're putting in the book. So I put it together, gave it to him and he said yeah, that's your book, not mine.
Speaker 1:So I didn't really want to write a book per se, but I just found that it was working and then that was in about 2018. And then, like you say, I kind of have been using those principles for the past five years helping people, consulting. I mean. I did this company when we took a company from 20 people to 180 and raised all that money, and then that's allowed me to step back and now I'm like well, what is the biggest problem that I think I can have impact with? So that's really been my metric when can I have the biggest impact? And I feel like it's in this book and the families.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and I actually you know that, opening monologue there and really setting the stage for the story. I was reading your, your profile and doing a little bit of work on getting ready for today and you had a similar experience as well about, you know, hanging out with family, with buddies and that, and you saw such a wide variety of challenges and what have you found is, in doing this work now and writing the book, what are you finding to be the common thread, or is there one or what was happening?
Speaker 1:Well, I think the big piece that I've seen is that, for whatever reason, a lot of men have stopped investing in their families the same way. They've invested for money, they're getting money and they'll work their butts off. You know, you see a lot of people who will go become a doctor and then they'll go and work and then their kids and family will hate them later. So men will keep. They've been investing so heavily in their family, and this is myself included. So I don't want to pretend like I'm better. This is some of the research. But then we didn't know what our impact was in the family.
Speaker 1:And one of the books that really in my research and some of the stuff from my readings was looking at was called the Boy Crisis. I don't know if you're familiar with that one with William Ferrell and John Gray, and they talk about there's like 50 different outcomes that are very negative if a child doesn't have a father in the home. And then there's about and that's for men and women, and the one that was most interesting for me because I'm I don't know I'm interested in the IQ. They said the IQ is 15 points lower if you don't have a father in the home. So there was a lot of points when I didn't realize the impact beyond. I just assumed my role was protector and provider and then I didn't understand all of the other impacts I was having on my kids.
Speaker 1:So I was over focusing on the financial. And that's where there's an author I can't remember her name off the top of my head but she says it takes men to raise men. And that's where I think we've lost this now, like we've kind of pushed that off in a lot of cases to our wives, to the school system, which is largely female. And it's not that the women are bad, it's just men and boys tend to have so much more energy. You know they get diagnosed with ADHD because they don't want to sit still and listen to stuff that they don't care about. So I think it's when men back off from their family and focus so much on the financial that that's been the biggest thing that I've seen where it causes disintegration of families because those wives like this isn't working and those type of things. So I think it's really this backing off of a lot of the roles we used to have or just the men not being present at all.
Speaker 2:Now that's such a great point. What I just was making is making a few notes there, one of the ones I wrote down. You talked about protecting and providing for our families and that seemed those two things are things that we really seem to be good at. But the last P on that that I hear a lot of time is the preside, and to me that's what you're talking about. What we're missing is that presiding, and presiding is being present and being there and working on it.
Speaker 2:Yet and yet we think of it we would think nothing of, as men, to go take a course on how to trade stocks, you know, on how to improve, you know how to maybe take Brazilian jujitsu or something like something to that we would feel that would help us, you know, oversee our families. Yet when it comes to actually doing some of the mental training, some of the softer skills, so to speak, and learning how to be, how we can raise our standards of showing up as father, and how to have that conversation, how to have the conversations, we just don't think of that as something to do, because I think for me, in doing some of the mental work we're doing, there's still this idea that, well, I must be broken or I must. There must be something wrong with me, and I don't know if you're finding this similar with your work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think a lot of men are very hard on themselves. I think we internalize all the problems. I mean, I had a case when I if we go to the Irish dance story which you talked about when I was I'd finished my MBA and most people when they get an MBA they go get a job at a company and then they move there. Right, I have money now I move there. Well, my wife and I with our Irish dance business it was about 50 people, so I had some money. But we decided, hey, we're going to do that and put a studio behind our house, well, and that generated some money.
Speaker 1:But at the time I had two kids and I had this mortgage and I'm investing in this building and had to remodel and do all these things and I was having trouble finding work. So for this, for the first three years, I was out of work for about 18 months, like half of it, and I just remembered, day in, day out, it was me and myself doubt, and me being like what else could I do? And, man, I suck as a husband and so much beating on me. And there was also there's some people close to me who actually told my wife that she should leave me. So you get into this scenario and there's so much like what did I do, why am I broken? And men tend to internalize the problems very heavily.
Speaker 2:We sure do.
Speaker 1:And it seems like for women, a lot of times they externalize them, but for us we're like I suck, I'm bad, I'm dumb. Well, my wife stayed with me and she was very encouraging. And then, like I said, I kind of got onto a trajectory with Ancestry and then we were doing super well, right. And then we're like, hey, now let's invest again. And I was like, hey, I'm going to do this. Well, that happened. I was investing in real estate in 2007.
Speaker 1:Then the whole market gets hit, and then I look at it and go, I just lost a quarter of a million dollars. I'm not providing for my family. It would have been better if I wasn't even here. I'm not protecting them. I put my whole family at risk. And so the psychological burden of that was just like what was I doing? And luckily I had my dad, who lives close by, and I had my wife again who was there, and my mom, but I think it was a lot of my dad and some of the other male friends who came together and were like you know, we'll get through that. And so I think there's these places where it's like we're so, we internalize so much and we need other men there, because there's times when it just feels like we have all the weight on our shoulders. So I think it's a lot about, if I look at thinking, if my dad wasn't there and if I didn't have some friends, I don't know, I don't think I would have made it. Frankly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. It's about community, right, about having that circle of community and having you know I? Just the other thing I just wrote down here is about mentorship, right, it's about being around other men that help us get through those times. And there are going to be those individuals who will you know, who may think that they're having their best, that putting our best in front of us by saying, you know, maybe you should leave him or maybe you should do make this decision, but they don't understand the full complexity about what's going on and what's really happy.
Speaker 2:What I'm really happy to hear about your story is that you talk about how you're able to lean on and you're with your father, who was around to help give you that guidance, and some other men to help provide get you through these, these instances.
Speaker 2:Because, let's face it, none of us wake up in the morning and say what's the best way for me to screw up my family's life today? We just don't do that. It's just life happens. We make decisions. We make decisions as a family to move forward and how we're doing things, and so when the family structure is solid and I think everything, then everything else can fall into place, and that's really what I believe that you're modeling, especially when we get and get into the book in a little bit. But one thing I want to talk about is that even before you get into the book, you also have some ideas and some strategies also about how it is that we can get so messed up in the dating world and how we can fix that. So I wanted to get your thoughts on that before we get totally into the, into the family unit.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. So this is where I think I desire like to take the ideas from business and move them. You know, if you play between business and family, it gives you a lot of clarity. So if you look at when you're, if you were you and I wanted to start a business and I said, hey, I want to be a lawyer, and you said, hey, I want to be an accountant, we would say, hey, we probably shouldn't go into business together. These are different businesses, right? Or if you said, hey, I want to be a Google and I want to do Walmart, you'd say we shouldn't go into business.
Speaker 1:And what's happened, I think, is we're not looking at the other of the partner, these women, and saying, well, what type of life are they trying to do, what kind of life am I trying to do? And then, more going through it, like, yes, if it was a job description, like if we're going to hire a wife to do work and she's going to hire a husband to do work, work, what are the things they're needing? Right? Like, my wife would have been a horrible wife, in my opinion, for Donald Trump because he needed someone who was, you know, out there, socialite, you know, not too much doing a lot of the work that I need done and that I want done and same with you know, there's some very attractive models who I would be a horrible husband for, right. So that's the thing.
Speaker 1:When you get onto these apps, the focus is like hot, hot, hot. You know, like what are you looking at? It's not looking at it and saying what is their culture, what is their structure, what are they trying to do in life? And then does it fit with mine? And that's so. And in some ways you could look at it in like kind of a business merger. Why do we have these two businesses and why would they come together? And if they're only coming together because they want to have sex, that's going to be a very bad merger. And then you'll look at it and go, wow, now the mergers f-ed up and we've screwed a lot of stuff up. Now we're getting divorced, now all this value's been destroyed. That's how we look at it in the business world. That's exactly how it is in the family world. We're not looking and saying is this a good culture fit? Is this a good structure fit and a strategy fit? We're just looking and saying, hot or not, really, yeah.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, because it's only looking at one aspect and it's a fleeting aspect.
Speaker 2:And yes, I've read stories and I've heard of you know the couples that have been married for 50 years and they still have this passion that they had in the early days.
Speaker 2:But the fact of the matter is that the passion changes over time and it becomes something much different, and it's the intimacy changes and evolves. And so because and it does so in those other relationships that are that are lasting, like my wife and I we were just talking about it the other day like we've been together for 26 years now and we both looked at each other, it's like wow, like where did the time fly? And because there is so much more than just the initial attraction, there's so much more that we've built that helps drive the relationship forward. And then and so I really like how you're combining this idea of business, the business model and the concept within business and putting it into relationship and the most, one of the most important ones we have in our life is is an emeritus and how we can make that have use those, those ideas and strategies to really solidify the whole structure.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, and I like, like, I like the term you used. Look what my wife and I built. This is a creative endeavor. It's building a business, it is building a family. This is not easy, this isn't trivial, and that's the thing is. You look at the building process.
Speaker 1:Again, going back to the business, if your wife is taking care of the health of the family you know all of those type of things and you're taking care of the finances, then you can both appreciate each other because, just like in a business, there's the sales team and the product team and you go, it's so good that the salespeople want to sell because the developers don't want to talk to people and the developers are like you know, the sales guys are like I don't want to learn that crap. So you have this great synergy and appreciation, and it's the same in a family. You develop so much appreciation if you're both going in the right direction. So that's where I think it's so important to go like what are we trying to do together? Yeah, because then you can go great. Let's split up the work and do it together and then we can appreciate the strengths of each other so much more.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. You know, and I and I purposely was using the, the two book titles and Jim Patterson, right Peterson, jim Peterson's two books, right Good to great, and Bill Thalass, and he taught would talk about. It's not just about having the getting the right people on the bus, it's about having them in the right seat. And now let's dovetail and have that on this family conversation. It's about what are the things that I'm good at and I like to do within the relationship and what are the things that my wife likes to do that she's good at. And then that's how we and that's how we divide the task. That's how we build the, build the structure. We don't have to.
Speaker 2:If I'm not somebody that wants to drive, dive into an Excel spreadsheet and look at the, at the monthly financial statements for the family, then why would I do that? It's not, it's never going to get done, and if it does get done, probably be done sloppily and it just causes more tension. And so it really comes down to looking at some values that we, that we share, what are the things that we're good at, and maybe at some point in time, you know, we may need to outsource different parts of it, you know. So now you're also talk about why marriage shouldn't be a 50, 50 proposition. So tell me a little bit more about that.
Speaker 1:Well. So I look at structurally, it's 50, 50, we both own 50% of it, right, but if you came in, let's go back to the business. If I said, hey, alan, you and I are going to start a business, you'll give 50% and I'll give 50%, we'd both be like what the crap are you talking about? I'm not going to go into business with someone who's given 50%. I want someone who's given 100% to their role. I'll give 100% to my role and then we'll be better off.
Speaker 1:So, and I've seen so many people who are like well, he needs to wash the dishes, he needs, she needs to do this. Why would you? You'd never do that in a business. When would you say, like the salespeople, they need to write code 50% of the time and the coders, they need to sell 50% of the time. It's so ludicrous in the business sense and yet for some reason we think it's functional in the family sense. There's there's definitely points when I'll pick up the slack if things need to happen. And I've changed diapers and I've, you know, bought food and made meals and done all that stuff, but that is not what I'm best at. And that's only when my wife is saying hey, I'm getting stressed because you know it's St Patrick's Day and I have all these shows. Okay, then I'll jump in and take it. So that's where I say it's. It's got to be 100% Like we're all in. What does the family need? Not? Well, that's not my job. Therefore, I'm not going to do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and I hear you know it's great that you bring that up, because I was just thinking of a couple that my wife and I were counseling for a little while ago, about a year ago, and that's exactly the kind of conversations they were having on, you know, on the coach with us, and you know it was about well, he doesn't do the dishes enough. Literally that's what it was he doesn't, and when he doesn't, when he doesn't do the dishes, the dishes aren't done properly. And and it was just constant berating and we just looked at at them and just said what would happen if, instead, that the dishes were done? However he chooses to do it, but he does it and you can be okay with it.
Speaker 2:Maybe, if the sink isn't, he's using the left sink instead of the right sink, and maybe he's he's not doing the exact same format, but is it about the task being done or is it really about the processes that it's being done? And it's interesting, when you start to speak with people that way, that they start to think a little bit differently about what's actually happening. Right, because there's more of a going on than just, especially with this couple of more going on than just the dishes. There was other stuff. That this dishes was just a symptom of what the other issues are in the in the relationship.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, and like you say that the whole 50 50 to usually is like a scorecard, well, wait. And then I'm like, well, okay, what do I get? When my roof was leaking and I'm up there in the middle of the rain, it's slip and I could slip and I could die. Do I get three dishes worth like what the heck? There's no comparison for this crap. And so you know, I'm mowing the lawn or I'm working on this, all these different problems, you're doing these different things, like you're birthing a child of what's that worth? And like there's so many, there's no constant here, so it's just like, well, you do 100 and I'll do 100. And we'll both push. But as soon as we get into this trying to scorekeep, it becomes such a caustic environment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally, it totally does. Now let's get into the book a little bit now and they, as I, was looking at some of the material for your book and that you really have an interesting concept and how you pulled business in here. So let's start off by talking a little bit about what are the different family structures and why are some of the more successful than others.
Speaker 1:Well. So if we look at structure I talked about, there's a business model and there's like a structure. So if you go, the structures are things like well, is it a single parent, is it two parent? Is it living with an extended family you know, your parents living with you, or you living with your parents, or is it a blended family? Is it like cohabitation? Like all of these models, are there the problem you end up with with some of them, like, for instance, cohabitation.
Speaker 1:If I say, hey, let's cohabit, what is that really saying? It's like, well, why don't we? You, we move in together, but I'm not sure if we're actually going to work. You know it'd be like if we said, hey, let's go into business together, but let's not actually sign anything, let's just kind of start doing some work, and you would go, wait a minute, what you? It doesn't seem like you're all in. You know, I'll keep my side, I'll keep my job, you keep your job, and then we'll kind of do something. Yes, what you know?
Speaker 1:So there's some of the structures where you go. There's inherent issues that need to get resolved in there, and then you're going to try to cohabit and it's like, well, resolve the issue and then worry about it. And I'm not saying you can't do it, it just saying there's an inherent. You know, if, if some very wealthy man walked up to most women and said, hey, you know, like Elon Musk, like, hey, let's get married, I don't think they'd be like, no, let's cohabit first, yeah, they'd be like, no, I know, you're got you got it done, you know. So that's the thing is, there's some underlying stuff that's going to be involved there. And then if you look at things like blended families, you're just adding in more people and more logistics. Right, right.
Speaker 1:So the more complicated same with extended family, you know, if you had your, your, your parents living with you, okay, well, whose rules get to be followed, whose culture is going to get followed? And you're going to be, you know, if it was your in laws, then you're like, oh, right, now I've got three against one. How's that going to work? Or vice versa, you know, then you end up with increase. So it's not that you can't do it, it just makes things more complicated, yeah, so it's really just being aware of the complications and going how's this going to complicate our marriage, like if you're, you know, if your, your father died and then your mother moved in with you.
Speaker 1:You're like things are going to get interesting and that's definitely what I've seen with my parents as they went through that transition and so you're like, how do those things play out? And we need to be aware of them. Otherwise we're like, well, now we have all these problems that we didn't think about, we didn't strategize beforehand and we didn't find solutions to, and all these extra jobs. So that's what I'm, that's what I look at like the structure. You can have a structure. You just have to any of those, but you have to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses, otherwise you're going to end up with problems.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and it's about having those conversations to really understand. I think, for a lot of times, you know, and our focus, our focus here is with is with men is that I think sometimes we would, we would rather jump off a bridge and have a hard conversation or a crucial conversation with our, our spouses, because there's so much that we feel that's at stake. But we need to have those, and all of those different, all those different family structures you talked about, require having a deeper conversation than just hey, we'll figure it out later, figuring it out later in the future.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, you go back to get in the business side. When you have someone move into your house, all of a sudden, you're like it would be like you and I in business. And then all of a sudden, hey, we're going to add a third partner in here. Wait a minute, are they a minority partner? How does this work? Do they have a say? Can we ignore them? What's the dynamic there? So that's really what you start to get into. It's like adding a partner and more another person and all of a sudden, the relationship where it had a dynamic, now you have a separate dynamic that you have to deal with.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Let's get into the family business model and are looking at your, at your family business model. You have this image of a pie and you've got it into three different sections. Talk a little bit about the business model, the family business model and what the sections are all about.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the business model, as I call it, it's kind of in the business world. The business model is how you're going to make money. What's your decision making process. So the main and I'll use Google and Walmart as kind of the examples so if you look at Google, they have a strategy, and their strategy involves the purpose and the mission of organizing the world's data.
Speaker 1:And then they have a structure, and that structure is actually a fairly flat organization. They don't try to have too many levels of those type of things. They're not a lot of managers that you have to get approval from, because they want a lot of flexibility for their people. And then their culture is all about being productive and creative. So if you do your best work at 4am, great, do your best work at 4am. No one's going to get on your case. But if we contrast that to a Walmart, their strategy is to provide goods to families across the world at reasonable prices. Well, their structure is based around their distribution centers and their stores, and then they have a hierarchy within their stores. If someone says absent, how does it work? And so they have a very strong structure for that, and their culture is not one of creativity. We don't need you to create. We need you to do a specific job, follow directions, do exactly, come in on time, or you're fired, stay the whole time or you're fired that type of stuff. So you can see, both of those are very successful companies, yet they have a very different strategy, structure and culture. And you couldn't take Walmart's culture and put it in Google. If you did that, all the engineers would be like screw this, we're done, we quit. And if you took Google's company over to Walmart, we'd be going in and being like, hey, there's nothing on the shelves. This doesn't work. So the culture, strategy and structures have to be aligned with each other, otherwise you have massive friction, and that's when you'll have failure.
Speaker 1:So now, if we jump back to family, the family's the same thing. What is the purpose of your family? What is the mission that you too, you and your wife, are working towards? And if you're like, well, I want to move to Florida, and she's like, but I want to stay in Winnipeg my whole life, oh great, like you're going to have. You got to get those things aligned.
Speaker 1:And then you have careers as part of that strategy. What career are you going to pursue? What's she going to pursue. And then you have the structure. Well, how are we going to structure jobs like we talked about, is it? Who's in charge of the finances? Who's in charge of the house cleaning? Who's in charge of the children? Who's in charge of those things? That's the roles.
Speaker 1:And then you also end up with the culture. You know, if you're big in an entrepreneur, you need to have a culture of flexibility, constant learning. If you're a blue collar worker, you need more of a culture of hard work, determination, sticking with things regardless of the weather, right, regardless of how hard it is. So that's the thing where you're looking at your family. You yourself need to have a cohesive business model, your wife needs to have one, and then together you need to have one that makes sense, right? And so that's where you look at these things going.
Speaker 1:That business model is the engine that produces the different resources that then we can use to then do more and more. And this is the flywheel effect, where it builds on itself. And this is where we say in the business world you know, and I think it was 1999, google was worth a million dollars. Now it's worth 1.5 trillion. Microsoft or not Microsoft, walmart it took 20 years to build 1000 stores and then, between the years of 2011 and 2012, they built 1100 stores. So you see this flywheel effect of when you have good processes and you have good structure and then you give the resources to it, then all of a sudden you can do so much more.
Speaker 2:No kidding, and what I really appreciate while you're doing this work is as I was looking through your material as well is that not only are you talking about vision and mission and getting that on the same place, but you also take families through an even deeper process. Right, you're even getting into their values and their beliefs and their core beliefs and core values and all of that aspect, and so how does that, is that lead towards creating a culture of success, or are there other parts that you're also doing?
Speaker 1:I mean, those are really the core things. If you get a business model, I mean, if you said I don't want to work and your wife says I don't want to work, okay, where's the money coming from? Right? There's always that question in business. But once you have a revenue stream, then there's well, what's our culture going to be for each other? You know, am I the big boopa and I can treat you like crap, or are we equals? This is some of the cultural elements. And then, if you look at from an entrepreneur's perspective, you need to learn a lot. You need to best idea needs to win. In those circumstances, it can't be a no, no, no, I'm the man and I said this. Therefore, that's how we're doing it. Yeah, I mean, this is where I go to the business, to the business world as well.
Speaker 1:If you're a CEO and you treat your subordinates like crap, they'll either leave or you'll get fired, right. And if you treat the board of directors like crap, they'll either they'll, they can fire you too. So the whole thing of leadership is not dictatorship. It is around leading and putting things together and making a compelling vision and getting people on board, and you should be doing that with your spouse and, I actually think, so many women that I've interviewed or talked with over the time, over the years. They're like I meet all these guys and they're going nowhere, cause they don't say like here's what I'm doing with my life, here's what I want to do, and I've I've seen it. Just recently my daughter talked to this guy. She's 18. She was talking to this guy and he's like here's what I want to do, here's the life. And she was like wow, that's so attractive. So there's that side of if you're not going somewhere, why would anyone want to go with you?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. If you don't have your own, you don't have your own affairs in order.
Speaker 2:How can we expect to have anybody have trust and faith in what we bring to the table?
Speaker 2:And again, that goes back to you know, and some of the work that we do here with the Awakened man is really we really dive in and working with the guys that have been at that point in their career when or their lives, I should say where maybe the career hasn't turned out the way they wanted it to be, their relationship and their marriage has totally fallen apart and their, their personal life is just really on life support.
Speaker 2:And part of that is because we've gotten away from, we've allowed I should say we've allowed our 20-something dreams to carry us, yet we haven't put in the work, the mental work, necessarily to continue to have it evolve and change, because our priorities have changed from the time that we were 20 to our 30s, to our 40s, to our 50s. And I think that's just such a huge challenge with families and with especially with men, is that women, I think, have this better lockdown, as you were saying earlier, because women, women will reach out and have the conversations and men tend to be a bit more, a lot more introspective and not share and get that, get that added help, and that's really the work that you're doing in building this family structure and helping them take something that we're actually pretty good at and that's being in business, because we can relate to that and applying it to something that's so, so important in our lives and that's and that's to have that connection with family and our spouses.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, and that's that's one of the things like. I just did a quarterly planning with my family, which is a little weird, and I did an annual planning in December and there was what do we do in those meetings? Same thing you do in a company let's reinforce our values, let's talk about our successes, let's talk about our failures. What are we trying to work on so we can support each other? And it was interesting.
Speaker 1:In the annual planning I put together this video that was just saying here's our five values in our family and just showing how our family lived those over the past year. And at the end of that I had a couple of my daughters were in tears, like that's something I want to be part of. Yeah Right, that shows it's so compelling and when you're part of something great and that's where I think for us as men to lead, it's not, it's this leading through example and it's leading through. I mean it's. It's kind of painful to do all the stuff that I've done with structure and putting together the planning, but then I'm like when I see that and I'm like, yeah, my kids feel more secure. They also feel like they're part of something great. They don't need to go look around in the world for who's going to validate what's the new thing that I need to adopt? Because they realize that we have stability and we have strength because we're united in our goals.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And the and the other takeaway I'm getting from this, aaron, is that you've also modeled for your daughters what a husband and a man looks like, how he shows up and how he takes care of his family, and so they have something now, such an important role model to measure the men that they will ultimately choose to be their husbands with, because they have something that very few children have in today's society, unfortunately.
Speaker 2:And it's because, I think, because we just had didn't as men, we just didn't know how to do that, to be, to be good fathers, we didn't have necessarily the great, the best teaching from our parents, and that's nothing to slight our parents, because they didn't get much better, much better education than they, than they had right. So, but we have today so much information if we just have an opportunity to put it into some form of a structure, and best thing about it is that we don't have to figure this out, stuff out on our own. They could just go out and buy your book and they can go and participate in one of your programs, which we'll get to, you know, by the hand of the show for sure, and I think there's just there's there's no reason today for for not to for us to have a solid family structures and having that be part of our lives. You're also you're also referenced about. You know what the Bill Gates parents did. That was said was essential for his success, so touch a little bit on that story as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so this is a story, I think, that illustrates all the different resources in a family. So Bill Gates dad he was a lawyer and then later started his own law firm, right, so there's a little bit of an entrepreneurial show from his dad. His mom was a teacher, mary Gates. She taught, and then she married and then she had three kids. Then she stopped working and then she spent her time with her kids and then at one point when she when our kids were older, then she decided I'm going to start serving in the community. So she served on the board of United or of the University of Washington and then the board of United Way, and then she connected with the CEO of IBM while she was serving on the board of United Way, and that was a key connection for Bill. That could have been 100, 250, whatever his whole company make. Maybe Microsoft doesn't exist without that connection. And so you look at this and going, if she could have just focused on the money okay, my kids are old enough, I'm going to go back to work but instead what she did was focused on building the social resources in her family by serving in the community, and then those social resources were able to be exploited by Bill to make this massive company. And so we'd look at this the social resources, which, in a company, we would call our brand. You know our sales team and our marketing team.
Speaker 1:It seems like now, for some reason, our society doesn't even recognize that we, our family, should have someone investing in the community and in our society. And so then no one does and then we go. Well, why do we have so many mental health issues? Well, because everyone feels alone. Why do we not have these? Why don't we not know why we're having problems getting jobs? Well, because the connectors are gone.
Speaker 1:And so that's where I think, in a family, you got to be connecting, you got to be investing not only in the financial resources, but also the social resources and those human resources of abilities and your health. And so if we don't focus holistically and we're just like I'm a man, I made the money look, I made five grand this month. Look at me, I'm the best. And wife, what did you do? Nothing, you just ate all the food Right?
Speaker 1:The reality is she was investing for social connections and she was investing in the health of the family and she was probably investing in your health. So if you want to act like a jerk, you can, but the reality is, just because you were investing in financial resources that made the family great, she was investing in social resources and human resources that made the family great. So that's where I think we can't get too often this like only financial focus Although I think for men it's great because there's a number and we love numbers but that's really where I think the reality is. We have to holistically focus on what is the whole. What is everyone doing in the family from an investment perspective, not just financial?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I completely agree, because there's so much more than just the financial. While that's extremely important, there are those other aspects and that and that's what we need to have a whole and solid family, family unit. You know, we've been talking a lot about. Really, we've been talking about is how do we build legacy? And so that's my next question for you, and what does that word mean to you? What does legacy mean to you?
Speaker 1:To me, legacy is the propagating of successful families, right? If I have successful kids and then they have kids and they all suck, okay, I wasn't able to propagate those values more than one generation. So for me it's like if you have this family business model and you've been successful, you're generating good amounts of money, you're generating good social connections, you're generating all these good resources, you have good health, well, you need to teach your kids that, more so than give them the money. Right, the resources are a byproduct of a successful business. They are not the thing you should focus on.
Speaker 1:Because, if you give, there's an example where I talked about in the book, where this girl at the age of 20, she was given her dad had died and he was a successful executive and she was given $20 million. All five of the kids were given 20 million a piece and the mom was given 100 million. Well, this girl she's on her fifth marriage, fourth or fifth marriage. Now she's bought and sold companies because she doesn't know what to do with them and destroyed a lot of value there. So the resources are not useful unless you have the business model that knows how to use them. That business model is the engine and all the resources are just fuel, and so if we focus on those resources, oh, I want to be rich, really I want to generate wealth. And it's a slightly different perspective, but it means something completely different.
Speaker 2:Yeah, completely Well, that talks really about generational piece. It's about making that last. You know. We've heard it's talked about how clear is that copy of ourselves? Is it clear enough for one copy? Remember the old carbon paper?
Speaker 2:Oh we would use right? We're old enough to know that the carbon paper, after a while that carbon paper doesn't leave a very good copy, but the best part about it is that it does last generational right. There's lots of work use out of it, and so how good is that copy that we're trying to produce? And you've given us a tool and a framework that we can do that. So everything that we go ahead, let's go ahead. Just on the copy thing.
Speaker 1:The danger with the copy is like well, my dad was a dentist, so I'm going to be a dentist, right, my dad and that's kind of the thing where it's like you haven't abstracted things out my great, my grandfather, was a farmer, but he had good values and hard work that passed to my mom, then she passed it on to me. So the values and culture and beliefs can be very important, but you constantly need to be updating those and so you're not trying to. Hey, I want my kids to be exactly like me. No, I want them to have values that create wealth. I want them to have the beliefs that will help them, because if they're trying to be an entrepreneur and they believe they're going to get it on the first time, good luck.
Speaker 1:Do you know what I mean? So it's like and if you believe failure is bad, like I've heard over in some of the Asian countries, if you start a business and fail, you get blackballed. But over here in the US it's like oh, you learned something, try again. So that's the thing is you're not trying to create a carbon copy. Like I look at my dad, I would call him a technologist. He learned new technology, he implemented that Right. So if you looked at it now, you know we have this AI revolution going on. If I'm a technologist, I got to learn how that works and that's where the copy would be a higher level copy rather than just a. I'm going to try to copy every single aspect because I have seen that and when people do that then it often fails because they missed out on one small piece and then the whole system broke or B that profession. You know, like my grandpa was a potato farmer.
Speaker 2:There's not a lot of those left, so yeah, hey, thank you so much for that clear point of clarity. Right, and while I was implicit in my mind about copy, it's not about making identical representations. That's what you're, that's the takeaway I'm getting. It's about making sure that we're emulating the core pieces that are, that are that make sense, the values, the belief structure, the things that are important, that are that past, generational, and not necessarily doing the same thing, exactly the same way, because things evolve and things change, and so thank you so much for for bringing that point of clarity. We really appreciated that. This is everything that we spoke about today, and maybe there's something we didn't get a chance to touch on, but we'll be the one takeaway you'd like our listeners to have.
Speaker 1:The biggest one would be do not focus just on financial resources or you will end up rich, sick and lonely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I completely agree with that. I just want to say thank you so much, aaron, for spending time with me today. You've been able to give us an idea of, and show us how, families can operate just like a business, and when we do that, we can make our life so much more successful, both at home and at work. Now, if men are interested in getting a whole of you and getting involved in your programs, what's the best way for them to do that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, they can go to my website, thefamilyflywheelcom. I have a lot of resources there. You can contact me on LinkedIn at Aaron K Shelley, you can, or Facebook, aaron K Shelley, or you can send me an email, aaron A-A-R-O-N at thefamilyflywheelcom as well. I'm really in this to try to help families. I think that families are the pillars of our society and they're holding up this great Coliseum and if we keep knocking them out, we're going to have a collapse, of which none of us want.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%, completely agree. I want to say once again, thanks, buddy, for being on the show. I really appreciated our conversation today.
Speaker 1:Yep, I appreciate it, it's been fun.
