You and Your Family Can Win at Home!

have spent the last eighteen years as the CEO of the company I co-founded out of my garage. I have built it into the category

leader in my industry and currently sell my products all over the world. I greatly enjoy the work that I do, and I have accomplished a lot in my business. As a professional speaker, I have delivered hundreds of speeches all over the world.

However, for most of my career I found that no matter how successful I was at business, I could not find that same success at home. I became frustrated by my inability to win at home like I win at work. Many times that frustration led me to travel more and work longer hours. I even used to joke with fellow business leaders that it was much easier to be the CEO of my business than it was to be the CEO of my family. When I left the office each day, I left a world of rules, strategies, and success and entered a world of chaos, drama, and raging hormones.

I found myself staying away from home, traveling more frequently—up to half the year—so I wouldn’t have to deal with my own sense of inadequacy. Even though I loved everyone at home, I lacked the clarity and confidence to be a successful parent.

YOU AND YOUR FAMILY CAN WIN AT HOME! 1MARK TIMM

5 Proven Practices to Be a More Confident Parent and Empower Your Family to Thrive

After several years of this crazy pattern, I knew I had to find a different way to manage our family. Our legacy was just too important to drift aimlessly. We needed a fresh approach our kids could embrace that made sense to my wife and me.

The solution hit me one weekend as the kids were discussing a class project where they had to learn how to start their own business. To help them better understand business concepts, I began comparing our family to a business. And it clicked—for both of us.

I wish I could tell you I figured out how to be a better parent all at once, as if an apple fell from a tree and knocked the idea into my head. The reality is that it started with a desire to prepare my kids for the future by using what I already knew how to do.

What happened next was nothing short of life-changing for every member of our family.

YOU AND YOUR FAMILY CAN WIN AT HOME! 2MARK TIMM

Good News!You already have the skills and knowledge to make it happen;

you just need to know how to apply them at home.

To better demonstrate business principles for our kids, I began thinking about our family as if it were a business—and it changed everything.

I discovered that what I already knew about succeeding in business worked just as well for succeeding at home. Our kids responded not only to the connection between business and family but to my renewed confidence level as a parent. As I began applying business lessons and practices I knew and used every day, I got more clarity and confidence in my parenting—and they knew it.

If you are a business leader struggling to be a better parent, there is good news for you. You are closer than you realize to the clarity and confidence you need to build a family that you are proud of every day. You already have the skills and knowledge to make it happen; you just need to know how to apply them at home.

YOU AND YOUR FAMILY CAN WIN AT HOME! 3MARK TIMM

•Both need intentional people development. Businesses depend on growing people. So do families. The good news is you already know how to develop people in your business.

•Both have stakeholders who must buy-in to the vision.Admittedly, kids can be a tougher crowd than employees, but you’ve got a lot more ways to invest in relationships with your family.

•Bothsucceedbestwhenfocusedonasharedgoal.Try succeeding at work when everyone is doing his or her own thing. Not happening! Why would we think that approach would work at home?

•Bothproducegrowthinpursuitofprofit.If your business isn’t growing, it’s dying. It’s no different in the family. It has to grow to stay alive as it pursues the bottom line—a stronger, happier, healthier family.

•Bothriseandfalloneffectiveleadership. It took me a while to realize I could make a difference at home by doing the same thing I did at work – step up and lead. When I didn’t lead, my family suffered for it.

•Both require systems to function at their best. You use systems to succeed at work every day. Why not apply the expertise you already have to develop better systems for your family?

•Both require communication protocols. My wife and I have developed protocols to govern scheduling, meetings, conflict resolution, use of technology—the list goes on. You would never try to run a business without clear-ly communicated protocols and procedures in place. Why would you think a family could succeed without them?

Out of this fresh understanding of the connection between business and family came renewed clarity and confidence for both my wife and me. Although our family is far from perfect, we began to see unprecedented success after we got intentional about our parenting strategy by applying this business paradigm.

Wehave employed5provenpractices that everybusinessleaderalreadyknowsanduses.This eBook is intended to be an introduction to these 5 proven practices to help you be a more confident parent and empower your family to thrive. The practices can be adjusted to work with children of any age.

Parents can leverage what works in business to win at home because, as I have discovered, businesses and families have a lot in common.

When we began to think of our

family as a business, we found

just the organizing framework

we needed. We chose to go all

in. We actually incorporated

our family as a business.

“

“

YOU AND YOUR FAMILY CAN WIN AT HOME! 4MARK TIMM

Practice One Incorporate Your Family as a Business

Practice Twocreate a family brand

Practice Threeconduct Family meetings

Practice FourEmploy Family Accountability

Practice Fivemaximize family resources

5 Proven PracticesTO BE A MORE CONFIDENT PARENT AND EMPOWER YOUR FAMILY TO THRIVE

YOU AND YOUR FAMILY CAN WIN AT HOME! 5MARK TIMM

PRACTICE 1

Incorporate Your Family as a Business

ur home used to be scattered and chaotic without any clearly defined purpose. No one knew who was supposed to

be doing what—or why. We all loved each other, but the Timm family simply did not function well. We just survived from day-to-day. Well, most days we survived.

I used to dread heading home from the office every day because it meant leaving a place where I felt in control and stepping into a place that seemed like total chaos to me. The worst part was that deep down I knew I was responsible for a lot more at home than just making widgets. The stakes were high and the impact long-lasting.

Whenwebegantothinkofourfamilyasabusiness,wefoundjusttheorganizingframeworkweneeded.Wechosetogoall in.Weactuallyincorporatedourfamilyasabusiness.

We formed a legal entity—2BTimms, LLC—to make it official. My wife, Ann, and I hold the majority of the voting shares, but we share the equity shares of the company equally with our children in the venture, giving everyone equal value ownership.

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YOU AND YOUR FAMILY CAN WIN AT HOME! 6MARK TIMM

• Wemakeaclearconnectionbetweenbusinessandfamily.Incorporating made it real for us in a way that couldn’t have happened with a conversation about the similarities.

• Wefocusourattentiononthebottomline.Every business has an objective —to increase the enterprise value and make a profit. Our family’s bottom line is a happy, healthy family. The Executive Team (Mom and Dad) guides the strategy to maximize the family profit in pursuit of that core objective.

• We thinkabout investingour resources for thegreatestreturn. A family is a dynamic, ever-changing entity whose most precious resource is time. Incorporating our family as a business helped us to get serious about where we invest that time to ensure the greatest return.

YOU AND YOUR FAMILY CAN WIN AT HOME! 7MARK TIMM

PRACTICE 1 | Incorporate Your Family as a Business

• We get vital family structure. Every business has an organizational chart to show roles and responsibilities. Our family now has clearly defined roles based on our various strengths and talents. The decision-making chaos is over!

• Weuseacommonlanguagetotalkaboutourfamily.Step into any office and you’ll hear people using words like profit, brand awareness, people development, account-ability, and contracts. You’ll hear the same words in our family now—yes, even contracts.

Incorporating your family–even informally–helps you apply your business know-how to the enterprise you care about most.

Here are a few of the benefits we received from incorporating our family:

click hereto learn the one thing you must have to make the valuable connection between business and family.

YOU AND YOUR FAMILY CAN WIN AT HOME! 8MARK TIMM

PRACTICE 2

create a family brand

efore we began thinking of our family as a business, we drifted from one crisis to the next. We let outside pressures

drive our hurried decisions instead of being pro-active about our direction.

We lacked a framework for answering the tough questions: What do we do? What do we not do? What do we stand for? How do we define value? What do we let go because it doesn’t fit our mission?

The irony is that I would never have tolerated such a shoddy approach to defining a brand and developing brand equity in my business—ever. Every businessperson knows that without clear direction and purpose, an organization will quickly descend into chaos and bankruptcy.

Once we had incorporated, we got intentional about creating our own family brand.

We began by simply talking in our family meetings about our family brand equity—what it means to be a Timm. We then distilled our conversations into a succinct motto we all embraced. It captures why we are here and what is important to us. Now we’re working on a family logo.

B

• Sharedequity. We talk to our kids about brand equity all the time. The truth is that our business grows as they grow. As shareholders in the family, they’re now actively involved in increasing the overall value of the brand. We use examples of companies they know—like Apple, for example — to dem-onstrate the value of brand awareness and reputation.

• Mission. The family motto is simply an abbreviated version of our shared mission statement about what we value. It keeps us focused on what it means to be a Timm.

• Priorities.When making decisions, we now look first to the family motto and brand identity to see what is most important. Our brand helps us keep first things first.

PRACTICE 2 | Create a family brand

YOU AND YOUR FAMILY CAN WIN AT HOME! 9MARK TIMM

Creating a family brand gave us clarity about our:

• Legacy.We talk with our children about how to increase the value of the family brand in the long-term. We focus on intentionally developing priceless values such as integrity and character rather than being consumed with short-term survival tactics.

• Reputation.A healthy brand awareness is something every business leader wants for his or her company. However, families have a reputation, as well. By creating a family brand, we found we can talk with our children about how we want to be known in our community. And we can and should be intentional about sharing our brand, letting others know about it as an extra layer of accountability for us to be true to what we value.

click hereto discover our family motto and how it brings

clarity and focus to our lives.

YOU AND YOUR FAMILY CAN WIN AT HOME!

PRACTICE 3

conduct Family meetingss a blended family (or family merger, as we call it), we faced even more challenges than most to get on the same page.

We were seldom in agreement. The kids found cracks between Ann and me that they could exploit. We often didn’t have a clue what was going on from day-to-day. We had a long list of family items we needed to address, but no means with which to do so.

As a business person, the very first thing I do at my company to ensure we’re advancing the mission and achieving the results we need is to conduct regular team meetings. The very first thing I would do at work turned out to be the very best thing we could do as a family to deal with the chaos and lack of communication that was driving us crazy.

We started to conduct weekly family business meetings. We scheduled them to happen at the same time each week for consistency. Although we didn’t have buy-in from everyone at first, we learned a lot about how to conduct the meetings to move the family business forward. Family meetings are now the hub at the center of our family, the most critical practice in which we engage. When we don’t have it, we can all tell the difference.

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PRACTICE 3 | Conduct family meetings

• We execute on the familymission. The weekly meeting is where we turn our vision into reality by deciding how exactly we will execute to achieve our goals.

• Wegetridofsurprises.By conducting our family meetings on Sunday evening, we create an easy but critical win by getting clear on everyone’s schedules for the coming week. If they don’t tell us about it, we’re not accountable to them.

• Weenjoyaforumforsharing.Sometimes kids just want to be heard so they can request agenda time with new business. This way they don’t have to fight for a chance to communicate.

• Welaughatourselves.Our meetings offer a chance for us as parents to be vulnerable with our children. We laugh at ourselves and give them a chance to take some shots at us in a good-natured way. We try to achieve the right blend of formality and informality, so we can have fun while maintaining focus.

YOU AND YOUR FAMILY CAN WIN AT HOME! 11MARK TIMM

Here are a few benefits we experience as a result of having regular family meetings:

• Weseekconsensusonkeydecisions. As voting members of our business, everyone votes. As majority shareholders, Mom and Dad have veto power, but we try to give the kids as much freedom as possible to direct the course of our family, while staying consistent with our family brand.

• Wespotlightandrewardgoodbehavior.A critical piece of every meeting at work is celebrating success. We do the same in our family business by bragging on members who are advancing the mission. And we incentivize our children to do the same to one another by employing a family currency.

click hereto discover how we got buy-in from the entire

family for regular meetings.

YOU AND YOUR FAMILY CAN WIN AT HOME! 12MARK TIMM

PRACTICE 4

Employ Family Accountability

hat business wouldn’t put procedures in place to ensure things get done the way they are supposed to be

done? None that last for long, and certainly none that thrive.

Our family used to struggle to stick to the plans we made. We would try our best to keep everyone happy, but there was just too much to remember—and not enough hours in the day to take care of all the demands on our time.

Worst of all, we ended up feeling as if we were saying “No” to our kids all the time. We didn’t have an issue with saying no, but in most cases what we were really saying is that we didn’t have time to hold them accountable if we said yes to their requests. We ended up with way too much drama and plenty of inconsistencies—which our children readily pointed out.

I would never dream of running my business without account-ability, and yet here I was, just winging it as we tried to keep all the plates spinning by ourselves.

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PRACTICE 4 | employ family accountability

• Parentshavetobethebrand. As the CEO of my family, I am ultimately responsible for the health of the brand. And if I don’t live out what we value, no one else will. My wife, Ann, functions as the CFO, COO, and countless other titles in our family business. But if we don’t practice what we preach, we’ll never get our team members to value the brand.

• Parents need to transfer responsibility for the brand totheir children. For far too long, we thought we had to personally ensure brand compliance. So we followed the kids around cleaning up after them, hovering over them, and basi-cally micro-managing their lives. That practice only exhausted us and left them indifferent to the family brand equity.

We learned that parents should not assume all responsibility for whether their kids behave properly, especially as they get older. Busy parents tend to spend their time being accountable for their kids instead of helping their kids take responsibility for themselves.

YOU AND YOUR FAMILY CAN WIN AT HOME! 13MARK TIMM

We realized two key truths about the value of family accountability:

One key way we employ family accountability is by using a common business tool — contracts. They have taken the heartache out of our implementing accountability. We go over terms in advance, including discipline or consequences. Best of all, we don’t have to repeat ourselves when everything is clearly written down and agreed to in advance.

We use contracts when our children want to:• Take a significant step of responsibility. • Get or do something that requires time or money from the rest

of the family.

Here are a few examples of circumstances in which contracts can be helpful: athletic teams, school clubs, mobile phone use, social media access, music and media, driver’s license, tasks outside the home, babysitting, etc.

click hereto find out how contracts have turned battles

of the will into teachable moments

YOU AND YOUR FAMILY CAN WIN AT HOME! 14MARK TIMM

PRACTICE 5

maximize family resources

ime and money—the two most valuable resources every business must maximize to achieve success. Every family

faces the same challenge: they can choose to intentionally invest the time and money they have or let it slip away amidst the chaos of life.

At work, every business leader knows the value of time. We go to great lengths to ensure time is invested where it will create the greatest return. But at home, we’re not sure where to deploy resources to get the greatest return if we lack clarity about our family purpose.

For many years, the Timm family wasn’t focused either. We let ourselves get spread too thin without a framework for evaluating the best use of our time.

By thinking of our family as a business, however, we very naturally began evaluating how we could maximize our time to advance our family mission. Rather than signing up our children for travel soccer—because everyone else was doing it—we discussed it within the framework of our family goals and values. We chose instead to make Sunday lunch with my parents a priority, in order to invest in the legacy of being a Timm.

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PRACTICE 5 | maximize family reources

YOU AND YOUR FAMILY CAN WIN AT HOME! 15MARK TIMM

Instead of turning on an episode of Modern Family and letting it teach my children about life, we chose to do activities with our children and talk about the lessons they need to know to succeed.

We had the same challenge with money. In most families, money seems to be a taboo conversation. Yet every business person deals with it every day. And none of our children can function in the world without it.

We discovered that our children had very little appreciation for the value of money. They often didn’t connect the sacrifices we made as parents with the financial needs of the family. In fact, they had no idea how much money was needed to keep the household functioning.

We not only began sharing more of our family financial situation with them, we created a family currency by which they could earn money and yet not have to worry about misplacing it. Instead of dollars, we use marbles, and we don’t do allowances.

Our currency system is simple: Each household task to be completed pays a certain amount of marbles. If the task is completed well and with a good attitude, we pay the full amount. If not, the payment is stepped-down or eliminated altogether. Each marble translates into fifty cents, although the amount can vary depending on a family’s budget.

When a child wants to buy something, we simply ask if they have enough marbles. If they do, it’s up to them (within reason). If not, they can’t. We’re no longer the bad guys for saying no, and they are in control of how much they earn.

We find that we actually spend less on their wants using this system than we did before.

click hereto find out more about how our family currency system works.

Imagine a family that functions smoothly and truly wants to hang out together. Imagine a family where conflict gets resolved peacefully, a family you can’t wait to come home to every day.

Imagine how your family might be different if you employed these 5 proven practices that have been at the core of our family transformation:

1. IncorporateYourFamilyasaBusiness— Give your family the organizing framework it needs to apply your business know-how to the enterprise you care about most—your family.

2. CreateYourFamilyBrand — Get intentional about asking the right questions to produce the clarity and focus you crave.

3. ConductRegularFamilyMeetings — Make meetings the hub at the center of your week to eliminate the chaos and lack of communication.

4. EmployFamilyAccountability — Don’t just wing it. Put procedures in place to ensure things get done the way they are supposed to be done.

5. MaximizeFamilyResources — Choose to intentionally invest the time and money you have to produce the greatest return for your family.

YOU AND YOUR FAMILY CAN WIN AT HOME! 16MARK TIMM

You don't have to imagine a happier,

healthier family experience, my friend.

You can live it. And you don't have to do it alone.

It would be my privilege to help you apply what you already know as a successful business leader to become a more confident parent. Andnowyoucanhelpmetohelpyoubycompletingabriefsurvey.I could use your input on how best to share our approach to parenting and what resources you would find most helpful.

Think of it as being on the ground floor—shaping our efforts to help as many parents as possible to be more confident and empower their families to thrive.

YOU AND YOUR FAMILY CAN WIN AT HOME! 17MARK TIMM

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