Managing Family Time as an Entrepreneur

Business Brain, episode 540 for Casual Friday, April 12, National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day 2024. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take a few ideas, we dissect them, we analyze them, we use them to tune our business brains, and every single time we get together. And Happy Friday here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.

Yeah, Happy Friday. I'm out here in Lafayette, California. I still think it's in California. I'm Shannon Jean. Happy to be here.

You have to pay those taxes still, right?

We're not going there.

Okay.

Talked about the IRS show. I refuse to.

After we talked about, you know, one of my kids having to pay taxes, you know, and he'll go through all that. Um, we obviously talked about it in our family group and, and somebody sent a TikTok that showed a similarly aged, you know, 20 something woman sort of say, you know, showing the screenshot of her TurboTax screen being like, oh my gosh, I have to pay my taxes, like I need to live on Ramen now or whatever, you know, whatever. And I looked at the screenshot and she was paying $1,200 to the IRS and $2,400 to the state of California. And it was like, that sounds kind of weird, dude. Like, you gotta move. What's going on over there?

The highest tax rate here is a little over 13%.

Okay.

Income tax, but.

Income tax. Yeah.

What they don't have in California is there's no capital gains tax rate. You pay it on as income. As regular income. Yeah, it's very bad. It's very bad.

Oh, that's going to be really bad for a business partner of mine. We're in the process of selling some stock in one of our businesses. I don't think I've really talked about this. I did talk about for the last couple of years we've had this company that we had on the block, took it off the block, put it back on the block. It's back on and actually it's off the block again because we're in the process of due diligence and things like that. But it's not going to be an asset sale if, if this happens, we're going to actually sell stock in the company and.

And you're going to stay involved or correct?

We're going to stay involved. Yeah.

Great.

Yeah. But it's interesting, but it will be a capital gain. You know, the stock that, that we each sell, you know, as partners in it. And one, potentially one or more. I don't know.

Yeah.

Of my partners, lives in. In California. And so he will. He will be paying local capital gains taxes.

This is why you must have, as you build your businesses over time, depreciable assets, whether you invest that, you know, in real estate. And, you know, I've actually been reading a lot about musicians that. I don't know if you told me.

This or somebody, but it was me that told you. Yeah.

About the. Selling their catalogs, because that is a capital gain versus generating income from it. I mean, an annual basis. I think Kiss just sold their catalog and likeness for 300 million or something like that.

That's a whole other thing selling, like thinking about, like, there's a lot of bands that are. The. The members of the bands are either retiring or passing away or both, and the bands continue with less and less original members.

Yep.

And there are a few bands out there that are playing with no original members, I think. Leonard Skynyrd.

Leonard Skynyrd, yeah.

Yeah. They don't have any original members anymore. I mean, they. They've replaced people over time because Ronnie Van Zandt, all that stuff passed away, but. And actually more than Ronnie, guitar player Steven. All those guys passed away in the plane crash. But. So they've. They got an unfortunate jumpstart on this. But now that Gary Rossington passed. Yeah. I don't think there's any original members in Leonard Skynyrd, but they are out there as Leonard Skynyrd. And who owns that name and brand and likeness and all that. Kiss is a really interesting band because they all played characters from day one.

Yeah.

So it's really. It's. It's cool. It's an interesting thing. Yeah.

The guy. The company that I guess bought them was one of the founding members from abba. Is it abba?

Oh, is that right?

Yeah.

They also seem old to be acquiring assets like that.

Well, his. It's a. He's part of this company. And ABBA did the same. Same thing. They sold their lice, the music licenses and their likeness. And I guess they've done some concerts with some sort of avatar.

That's true.

Or, you know, whatever they call that, where they put the person out on the stage. That's not real. I can't think of that term. But yeah, it's a fascinating.

But just. Just to. To. To sort of put a button on the. The part about the people selling their catalogs. When you are earning royalties from your catalog on an ongoing basis, the IRS treats that as regular income. Whereas when you sell future rights to your catalog or the rights to your catalog, which therefore comes with future royalties, that is treated as a capital gain. And that's why a lot of artists are doing this now. There's. There's some. There's some large companies that are seeing this as a great asset to have on their books because it's a guaranteed, all but guaranteed sort of recurring revenue. Recurring revenue because the copyrights are good for decades. And, you know, a catalog like Bruce Springsteen's or something is. It's just going to pay for a while.

Yeah.

So, like, why not give Bruce a nice payout so that he can, like, manage his wealth with his family and all that stuff, however he wants to do it, and then everybody else, you know, goes. So, speaking of musicians and wealth, we interviewed a guy on another podcast that I do called Gig Gab. It's a show for working musicians. We interviewed this guy, Matt Gibson. He has a band slash project that he calls Crimson Symphony, where we. It's the second time we've had him on. We had him on. We started that show nine years ago to the day. The same day that we started this one just happened to work out that way. We just launched the first episodes on the same day and we had him on. In the first year, he had amassed a million followers on Google.

Wow.

Yeah, it was really interesting. Obviously he doesn't have those million followers anymore because Google doesn't exist, but he retained a lot of the relationships that he made from that. And so we talked about that in this recent episode that we had him on last week, which I'll link in the show notes, but we also just talked about various other things in his career. And he's an interesting guy because as you might presume from knowing that he's someone who was able to amass a million followers on Google. He's a go getter. He is. We easily could have taken the interview that we did with him for Gigab and put it here on Business Brain. It's all about, you know, finding ways to profit and fuel your life with money and, you know, all of those things. And some musicians take pride in poverty. It's not something I understand. There's nothing wrong getting with getting paid for your.

Sounds terrible.

Your work and your art and all, like, you can do both. It's okay. Matt also is like us. He believes that you can make money from music and also while playing music and all are okay. But he said I needed cash to get my music career going. And like anything, he's like, I needed startup capital. I needed to Pay rent and all these things while I get music going and while I build this up. And he's like, so. But I also needed time, freedom. So that. Right. So that he could have time to work on his music at the times when he needed to. Not just time flexibility. Yeah, time flexibility maybe is a better way to say it. Yep. And so what he did was he said, look, I can go be a scavenger and find undervalued things and sell them for their appropriate value. He knows enough about books, especially antique books, to leverage that skill. But it could be clothes or furniture, anything that's undervalued.

I don't know anybody else who's ever done that. Right.

Yeah, that's right. Exactly. And he said, you know, he looks on TikTok, he looks on Craigslist free listings, he looks on ebay to see what things sell for there and finds the arbitrage gap. Right. Like, what can I pay for it? Or what does it take to go get it?

Yeah. What's the delta?

What's the delta?

Yeah, yeah. And that's a. You know, I post about auctions and stuff all the time, and I kind of thing. And one of the crucial parts of it is understanding that before you buy. Understanding what?

The market you buy before you buy.

So, you know, hey, I have this opportunity, but is it really an opportunity? I'm going to go research the market, come up with the data, not just some subjective thing like, wow, I saw that, you know, that that's worth X. Well, how do you know? And what people are really willing to pay for it? So.

Yes.

Cool.

Yeah, no, it's great. It's. And he's. He does it and he's able to make. He talks about the numbers and everything on the episode. So I'll link that.

Link it. Yeah.

It's gigab 423, but I think it's fantastic.

Well, I love his. I'm just a huge fan of ways to build unconventional wealth because I've done it so many different ways. And, you know, when I was younger, I wasn't sure I could do it. You have all these doubts of how. And then. And then once you do it once, of course, the next thing is, gosh, can I do it again? But once you do it 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 times, I feel like.

Once you've done it the second time, the confidence comes.

Yeah. You start. Okay, I understand this game and that delta is everything. And like, when I started that, that handbag business as an experiment, I spent a year dabbling, buying Little small, lots of things. Learning, meeting people, understanding how it worked before I really went all in and started spending a lot of money. And then, you know, that turned into a multi million dollar business. But I, and I don't know anything about fashion. If you're not watching the live stream, I'm wearing a camouflage jacket right now, obviously, but I understand the delta and that's, that's, that's the trick. So I commend that guy. That's great. I'm gonna go listen to that episode.

You'll love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean it. I think it's the first time on Gig Gab and again, we've been doing it nine years that, you know, we've had somebody mention Gary Vee and Grant Cardone and like, if, if it has happened before, it was episode 41, which is when Matt was on the first time. That's funny. That's great.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's cool. Well, so we, we talk about money, obviously. Profits, building wealth. We've talked about that forever and, but equally important, maybe more important, is time and the time you get to spend with your family. And I mentioned last episode, I'm involved with a group that's growing together, growing our businesses and things. And one of the things we talked about on our call today was, hey, one of the guys said, how do you, how are you guys managing and handling your time with family? When it's. I'm kind of, I'm an obsessive entrepreneur. I'm constant. Once the, whatever I'm working on starts to give energy back to me, I'm jacked in, man. I'm ready to go. And that can be a problem because, like, I could have my phone in front of my face all day, all day, all day. And I could take calls all day. All. I could be answering emails all night, you know, do this kind of thing. So. And with my wife, you know, I'm try to, we, we try to set boundaries of how you do it. And my kids are grown like yours are now.

Yeah.

But like in this group, these guys have young kids and I, My comment was, man, I don't know how you guys do it. So that, you know, I thought it'd be worth. We've had similar discussions, but I think it's valuable to talk about it again. How you manage the separation, how you turn off so you can focus on your spouse, on your kids, even on your friends. Right. Because if you're sitting there staring at your phone or you've got Your computer, whatever. It's. Number one, it's. It's rude. Number two, you're not present. You're.

Yeah, you're. You're somewhere else.

You're. You're gone.

Yeah, you're.

You're there, but you're. You're somewhere else. And so, you know, and I think the key part of it for me is, is communication, being able to talk to. And don't, don't get me wrong, I'm not very good at it. I often, especially right now, I'm into something new and I'm. I'm on it all the time.

Yeah, I know.

And so. But what I found is I'm trying to talk more to my wife about it and say, oh, this. This is why. This is what the future could look like. This is why I'm doing this. Or, you know, I need 15 minutes to do it.

Well, that's. That. Yes, the both of those conversations, types of conversations are valuable. The. Here's why I'm doing this crazy thing or this thing that seems crazy. And then also I need X and my wife just for the latter type of conversation. My wife recently, you know, we were doing. We were on the couch at night. We had. We had watched a show or something, and as the show finished, I grabbed my laptop and I, you know, but sometimes that's two minutes, and sometimes it's two hours. And about an hour went by and I put my laptop down and it's like, oh, hey, do you want to watch something else? And she's like. She's like, yeah, but we need to talk. And I'm like, okay. And she said, do you know when you pick up your laptop how long you're going to be? I'm like, sometimes. Like, yeah, sometimes. And she's like, did you happen to know tonight? I'm like, yeah, I kind of knew that I had some things that I wanted to sort of tug on the thread. She's like, okay, cool, tell me.

Yeah.

I'm like, right, yeah, of course I know how long I'm about to lose myself here, and I've already decided that it's going to happen. So, like, I didn't involve my wife in that part of it. Whether I quote, unquote, should have or not, that's a different conversation. Yeah, But I knew that I was going to be 30 to 60 minutes in a project. So she's like, when that happens, tell me so that I can manage my own expectations. Yeah. And it's like, oh, what a great idea. Like, of course. And I'M sorry, I haven't done that for 20 years.

I try to do it, and I've had that almost that exact same situation. And it's. I would say it's easier to manage it now when the requirements on my time are less for family because the kids are gone.

Right.

So, you know, but one of the.

And I actually think that those conversations didn't need to happen as much when the kids were in the house because we both knew what needed to be done with the kids. Whereas now things are a little more flexible. Yeah, they were more defined. More defined back then than they are now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I, you know, one of the things I try to do is, and I mentioned this on this call earlier today, is I always want more time to work. I'm just. Just the way I am.

Especially when I'm same.

When I'm just jacked up about something, I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's not really work to me. Right. Work is, is mixing concrete in a wheelbarrow. If you really want to know what work is, go do that and you. And then move that wheelbarrow up the side of a hill. That's work.

My brother had this idea called Log Camp. I can't. Does this, does this sound okay? I'm going to, I'm going to tell you what Log Camp was because he. He managed some people at a very large company, Fortune 5, perhaps, but certainly Fortune 100 yet. And he's like, some of these people, they just don't understand what real work is. Almost the exact same point. He said, so what I want to do is I want to send him off to Log Camp. And he's like, it doesn't exist. So this is going to be my business, and I'm going to farm it out to the Fortune, you know, 50 companies, and they're all going to send their people. It's like what you're going to do is you're going to show up at Log Camp, and on the first day, you wake up and there's a pile of logs on one side of a big, huge field. And what you do that day is you drag as many of those logs as you can to the other side of the field. Great. You're exhausted. You go to sleep. You wake up the next day, that day, you dig a ditch in the middle of the field. Yep. And then the third day, you wake up and they tell you, okay, well, by the end of the day tomorrow, you. You got to have all those logs back where they came from. So you better fill in that ditch today so that tomorrow you can drag all the logs back to reset for the next group of people that are going to come here. And so you do all this work and have at the end of it, absolutely nothing to show for it. It looks exactly the same as it did the day you arrived.

And you'll never complain about answering email again.

And that's what it was. That was his whole thing. It was brilliant. Yeah, Log camp.

But yeah, I like that. And like for me, I try to, like, we can time shift pretty good. So like every day at 4 o' clock, my wife and I, we go to the park.

Okay.

We take our dogs, we unplug.

Do you bring your phones? Yeah, that was.

Yeah, yeah. We unplug for about an hour.

Yep.

And talk. What's going on? We talk with other people that go there every day. It's kind of just downtime and we come back and then, you know, we hang out for a little bit, we probably make some dinner. But then, well, I want to go back to work because it's not really work. I'm not moving logs.

There's no log camp at your house. That's right.

Hey, so. But what I try to do is say, what's your plan now? Let's say it's 6 or 6:30. What do you, what do you have going on? And I, I got, I, it sounds like I'm good at that, but I'm, you know, I'm okay at it. You're working at it, but I'm working at it. So what I'm hoping to hear is have her say, oh, I've got X, Y and Z to do because then I can go. Me too.

Yeah, same. Yeah, same.

I'm out. So then I walk back up the hill behind our house to where my office is and I can work again for another hour and a half, two hours. So 8 o' clock. And then we kind of have this about 8 o' clock, we roll down to the house. Hey, how's it going? Like you said, relax. And we watch, you know, watch, whatever. Yeah. Chill out, play game if we're having somebody, my mom over or something like that. So being flexible and I referenced it this on this call this morning with giving something up to get something else.

Yes.

And asking your spouse or maybe it's your kids. Like if your kids have after school sports, maybe it's, oh, I'm going to leave the office. I'm going to this, there's, there's practice and then I'm going To go back to work later. Like when my kids are little and I've written about this extensively, you know, I worked from 10 to midnight after they went to bed and then I got my wife to work with me and then Dave and I started the business from 10 to midnight and we prepared, you know, and that business paid for most of my kids school over time. So shifting time around and, and you know, maybe you can't sit down on the couch in the evening anymore while your kids are young for a little while. But you say, well I can get an extra hour here, but from three to four or four to five, I'm with them.

I get to go, yeah, I get to go to their, their hockey game or whatever.

And when you're with them, you're not with them on your phone. You're, you know, put it on D and D and be with them.

I have, I, I have a couple of tips here regarding your put your phone on D and D. I have created using Apple's Focus mode, I created one called Nuclear. I think I've mentioned on this show it's not nuclear. Like there's a bomb. Yeah, it's nuclear family. The only people that can get through to me in that mode with notifications are my nuclear family. And it's awesome. So if we are out and about somewhere and we split up, I don't have to, they can, yeah, we can all get each. Or they can get me. I don't, I don't care what they do with their phones. You know, as long as everybody's present, doesn't matter. You know, if they're better at managing notifications of me, that's fine, sure. But yeah, I set it on nuclear. And then it's like, oh yeah, I hear from them. Obviously if I want to go and look at the other text messages I got, I can. It's not like my phone hides those from me. The other thing is we put a hot tub in about two years ago in our house and we use it almost, almost every day all year round. More, arguably more so in the colder weather than the hot weather for potentially obvious reasons. But we try to use it almost every day. And what's really nice is we don't bring our devices to the hot tub. Right. Well, you know, our phones are waterproof. We could, but we don't. It is like we put our phones down, we get into the hot tub. Sometimes I'll bring. We have like a little Sonos Roam, which is a little smart speaker. It's got the A lady, you know Amazon a lady built into it. So I can ask it like, oh, what's the weather tomorrow? Like if we, if Lisa and I are talking and it's like, oh, what's it going to be like this weekend? You know, I have that. I can set a timer on it if I know. And we can also listen to music. But that's the, that's our connection to the world. But I don't get notifications through that. I can't ask it about my calendar. You know, my calendar is not linked to it. And so like having that hour a day that we're in the hot tub, big deal. Awesome. Because we, we just talk.

Yeah.

Like we communicate with each other. It's awesome.

And I, I would say that the more you can get that one on one time and that communication separate, the more flexible the rest of the time is going to be.

Yes.

But if one person is feeling like you're not connected, I don't get a solid conversation with you or you're not paying attention, you know, because you're distracted.

Yeah.

That going on all day long is, is miserable.

Yeah. No, you need to communicate about it. And I think you're, I like your idea. You're right. That if you have dedicated time together, then the time where you're not together doesn't feel strained. No. And the communication, like you said, you know, nobody's wondering what's going on, so.

That's right. Yeah. So we, we need to know what you think and what your tactics for dealing. And I don't want to say dealing because that's kind of negative.

Addressing.

How do you address it? How do you manage time with family when you're really jacked into your business and you're obsessing over it, which often is required to succeed?

Yeah.

Feedbackusinessbrain show. Share it. Tell us what you do so we can all learn together and we'll talk about it on the next show.

Absolutely. That's feedback. Yeah. Feedbackusbrain show. Let us know and keep living that charmed life. Have a fantastic weekend. Take some time with your family, huh? Later.