In this concise interview, Professor Pete Alexander hosts Jonathan DeYoe, a writer, behavioral wealth manager, and founder of Dio Wealth Management and mindful.money. DeYoe explains his role as a family CFO, emphasizing the power of financial planning to create multigenerational wealth. He challenges conventional notions of work‑life balance, describing it instead as a matter of intentional priorities focused on impact, family, and mentorship. DeYoe recommends three fellow business leaders—Gary Ray, Sumil Amin, and Anthony Barr—as compelling podcast guests. He offers strategic advice for service‑based businesses, urging leaders to become indispensable by transforming customer experiences and to stay mindful, adopting a non‑judgmental stance toward successes and setbacks. The conversation concludes with a vivid recollection of DeYoe’s first job at Allied Van Lines, where he performed physically demanding labor from age 12 to fund his college education, and provides his contact information via his website and the book Mindful Money.
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This is Professor Pete Alexander with the Winning at Business and Life podcast, where business leaders share their insights. It is 6 questions in 7 minutes because successful business leaders are busy and rarely have more time to spare. So let's get to it. Question number 1: In a few sentences, tell me who you are and what you do.
So first, Pete, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. And I've joined a few of these watched a few of them. So I glad to be on here. My name is Jonathan Dio. I'm a writer and I'm a behavioral wealth manager. So a couple of interesting things about me is I've been in the financial services world for over 2 decades and I've been meditating. That's important, uh, for over 25 years. And I run 2 companies. The first company is Dio Wealth Management. Second company is mindful.money. And I'd say that, you know, Dio Wealth Management is what you might refer to as my traditional work. You know, my team has an ecosystem of advice where we work one-on-one with families to develop what we call a mindful wealth map. We build evidence-based risk-appropriate portfolios. We support excellent financial decision-making, especially when that's hard. Uh, we help clients manage taxes and educate their kids about money. We basically act as a, as a family CFO.
Wonderful. Jonathan, it's great to have you on the show. Question number 2, what's the best thing about working in your industry?
This is the easiest question I've ever been asked, because the best thing about working in our industry is our ability to impact families across generations. I mean, so if you're a— if you're the best doctor in the world, you're fighting an uphill battle. The human body runs down. Doctors cannot stop the inevitable. However, for us, if a family plans well, invests well, you know, conservatively, intelligently manages their taxes, builds up a knowledge base within their children, economic literacy, financial literacy, their money can last 3, 4 generations and beyond.
Wow. That's an impact if ever I heard one. Question number 3: I hear from other business leaders that staying in a good work-life balance for them and their team members is a challenge.
What are your thoughts? This, this one I struggled with because I hear it all the time. I don't know what it means. So does it mean equal time for work and for home? Does it mean equal energy spend? Now it's important to me that my team love their lives both at work and at home and that they feel good about their place in and their contribution to the world. But I'm not sure that balance is I'm not sure what it is and I'm not, I'm not sure if I want it. Now I can imagine, I can't imagine a universal idea of this balance that applies to everyone. My guess is that balance is one of those things that's in the eye of the beholder. So when I feel unbalanced, it means that something's not right. I'm not quite happy about it. So more out of balance means more unhappy with it. Now in my case, I don't think about balance. I want to have an impact. I want to raise great kids. I want to change the conversation we have about money. I want to be a great partner. I want to be a mentor to, um, you know, kids coming up in my industry and just in the community. Uh, for me, it's not a question of balance. It's more of a question of intentional priority. Don't get me wrong. I love my family. I love my vacations. I love a nice glass of wine. I love good food, but it's, it's more of an intentional priority than it is. Okay. How do I make this stuff balance out?
That's very sound advice because having the right priorities in place is so critical. Question number 4: What other successful business leaders like yourself should be on my podcast?
And we kind of talked about this earlier, but it's kind of a sneaky question and I appreciate it. So there's 3 people I'm going to recommend very quickly. One, his name is Gary Ray. Gary is a very close friend. We went to Buddhist study school together. He runs a retail game store in Concord, California. He's been fighting the good fight against Amazon for 12 years, and he's not winning the fight, but he's growing every single year. He wrote a book called Your Friendly Local Game Store: The 5-Year Path to Middle-Class Income. I think he'd be a great guest. He has a great following. He'd be a great guest. Second is a gentleman named Sumil Amin. He runs a CertiPro Painting Contractor. He's a CertaPro painting contracting company. CertaPro is a franchise. Not easy work, certainly not glamorous work, but it's great work, and he bends over backward for his employees. Him telling stories about how he's treated his staff and his employees is fantastic, and he does really well. And then finally, more close to my industry, there's a guy named Anthony Barr who runs a tax practice in Oakland, and it's the Henry C. Levy Group. And he's always been very impressive to me. Great.
Well, I'm going to reach out to all three of them. Thank you so much for those referrals.
I'll send an invite. Don't just reach out to them cold. I'll send an invite.
Perfect. That's even better. Question number 5: What insight or advice would you give to other business leaders?
I don't know if other people balk at this, you know. I don't know if I'm the right— I don't know if I'm an advice giver to business leaders. Uh, you know, I, I can't know how your listeners are going, what your listeners are going through, and I know that most of the things that affect small businesses and entrepreneurs are almost all in our head. They're deeply personal, that's what I'm saying. But I did listen to a few of your podcasts, and I would say that— and tell me if I'm wrong here— I would say that your audience is largely service businesses. Is that—
that'd be correct.
Okay, so then I have two general comments. The first, it's not about your product, okay? If they can't today, then your customers are soon going to be able to get whatever you offer through Amazon or through some other low-cost high-tech, low-touch vendor. So you as a business person have to connect. You have to actually improve people's lives. You have to make it an experience. To some extent, you have to work to transform the lives of your customers. You have to make them better people, help them become better people. One of my coaches refers to this as leading a profit. If you can do that, you're indispensable. If you can't do that, you are utterly replaceable. That's the first thing. Second thing, as best as you can, this is incredibly hard, stay mindful. And what I mean by that is the— it's in the non-judgmentally aware of the present moment. Now, why non-judgmentally? You can't tell when a win becomes a loss or when a loss becomes a win. In my own Last, the last 3 years for me, I have lost my biggest client, I lost my most important employee. And if you, if you talk to me 2 weeks after either one of those things happened, you know I'd be in tears, right? But 2020, best year I've ever had. Um, everything that I thought was horrible turns out to be great. You know, I was shocked and upset for 18 months, better than I've ever been. I couldn't have predicted it. So it's best to stay nonjudgmental of these things. Just let things happen, let things play out. You'll learn in the future how there's— why they are the way they are.
Very sage advice. And question number 6, tell me about your first job.
This is a little bit more embarrassing, but we'll share this. So when I was 12 years old, I started working for Doug Koppman at Allied Van Lines in Rapid City, South Dakota. So the first summer, I basically worked outdoors. I drove the tractor, mowed the grounds, picked the weeds. Painted the warehouse, you know, those kinds of things, kept it neat and clean so when people drove up it looked, it looked nice. The next summer I started, you know, packing up houses and I started loading trucks, unloading trucks, packing crates, these kinds of things. It's the hardest physical work I have ever done. I did it all the way through college and frankly it's the only way I could have afforded college. Like, I went through college, it is how I did it. I worked my my ass off. And I did it, you know, humping boxes up and down staircases from when I was 12 years old when I was probably 17.
Nothing to be embarrassed about that, Jonathan. We all have had those, those, those first jobs that really were a lot of hard work. So it's, you know, it's, it's great that you had one yourself to learn from. So, Jonathan, thank you for being on the show. How can people find you?
I'm on the web. I wrote a book. I'm mindful.money. The book's title is Mindful Money. And I'm obviously on the website and you know, you're going to link to everything for me. So that's great.
Perfect. Yep. This is Professor Pete Alexander with the Winning at Business and Life podcast. For more insights and ideas, please go to LinkedIn, YouTube, or Facebook and search for Winning at Business and Life podcast. Thanks for listening.
