Welcome back to The Dads Spotlight, where we share with you great information to help you be the best dad possible. This week we bring you Mark Timm who is not only the CEO of a company but even more important he is the CEO of his family. Yes, he has actually incorporated his family and doing this transformed the way that he, his wife and his kids looked at the family and it drew them all closer together.

While Mark has a number of tips that he shares in his great FREE e-book: You and Your Family Can Win at Home, this week we spent the most time talking about one of the most important parts of his five steps, which is having the family meeting.

 

About Mark Timm

Mark Timm is the CEO of the most valuable business in the world – My Family.  He is also the President and CEO of the company he co-founded 15 years ago, Cottage Garden, Inc. This company is the #1 supplier of musical gift products in North America.

For years, Mark Timm has been experimenting with innovative ways to leverage my business success to win at home.  It all fell into place a few years ago when he incorporated his family into a business and began thinking of his family as the most valuable business in the world. Since that point the results have been nothing less than staggering for him and for his family. Mark Timm shares this journey with others at www.marktimm.com.

Mark Timm took some time and told us that he incorporated his family. He told us that he was doing very well in his business, but he was finding that he was not successful at home. He felt respected at work, but not at home. He found himself in the situation that he was spending more time at work and less at home because he was struggling to find his place at home. This was not a place where he felt satisfied, he knew that he could achieve just as much at home as he was at work.

The idea of incorporating his family came from a conversation with his kids about himself being an entrepreneur. In talking to them about what he did, he connected with them and that night he went to his wife and he explained his idea about incorporating the family into a business. He took everything that he knew and put it into the context of his family and things started to change.

To get people on board one of the things that was most important was the family meeting. While Mark Timm had great intentions in starting this, he found that the first meeting was not successful because he was trying to run it like he ran it at work. To change this, he ended up bribing the kids with making the meeting fun. He did this through having a sundae bar and having the kids describe what they created and why. Soon after having this meeting the meetings started to evolve to now being something where everyone in the family takes an active role.

Mark Timm said that the idea of incorporating the family and running it like a business is not a gender specific idea. He said that there are some kids that are more entrepreneurial in general. He talked about the fact that he has one daughter that was inspired through the process of creating a family business into creating her own business: Gliding Light, a business that breeds sugar gliders.

Mark Timm said even the kids that did not connect with the initial concept of the family business, they now love the fact that they now have an equal voice in the family business.

When it comes to the family meeting Mark Timm said there are three essential things that you can do to have an effective family meeting.

* The meeting has to be fun

* The meeting needs to be consistent on a regular time and day of the week (make it part of the routine...