2172 - Parenting and Productivity: Why Your Family Life Matters in the Workplace with Victorius Family's Terence Chatmon

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1:05With us right now, it's Terrence Chapman. Terrence, you are the founder and CEO of Victorious Family. You're found on the web at victoriousfamily.org. Terrence, it's great to have you. Hey, Josh, it's great to have you, my friend. I hear you in one of my favorite places, Orlando, Florida, man. I can relate with that. It's a great place to be. And we moved here back when my youngest was two years old. He is now 18. So we've been here for a little while. And, yeah, if you want to live someplace where there's a lot of fun things to do, Orlando's a great place. And you live outside of Atlanta, up in Alpharetta, which is a gorgeous part of town.

1:46We went up there not too long ago. My wife and I, we rented bikes, and we had some really nice bike trails, great shopping. We had some really beautiful shopping centers. But, you know, I think the biggest thing that we noticed in Alpharetta is just, man, it's southern hospitality. There's just good people there. You know, it really is. I remember 30-some years ago when we moved here, we were calling up 400 for those who know Georgia. I tell you, once you get past 285, you kind of leave Atlanta metro. And as we were driving out, back then, it was nothing but farmland. I was thinking, like, are we still in Georgia, guys?

2:22I mean, it's going to be booming out here. It's going to be amazing. And, of course, they were right. I mean, it's just a wonderful place to live. just enjoy get a chance to go into the city back then I can get into the city in 25 minutes now it takes me about an hour and a half depending on traffic but so it's the fun of it all but hey that's called urban progress that's right Terrence what are you doing for fun lately you know I'm doing a lot of things I love to travel and one of the things you know I love I've been to 39 countries around the world my wife and I we just love to travel some of our best places are places like Italy and of course, and Singapore.

3:00And yeah, I've been on five continents and I just love to travel. And in fact, I just came back from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Just a wonderful place. The weather is beautiful and just hanging out with family. I really enjoy it. Yeah. Well, sounds gorgeous. Terrence, tell me about the work that you do with Victoria's family. You know, Victoria's family, we, you know, coming from the executive positions myself, many are really challenged with how do I balance kind of just work, family, life, and things of that nature. So what we do is help executives with not only thinking about how to build their business, which they, you know, that's their baby.

3:40That's what's something they're invested in. We also help them how to strengthen their families. Because as you think about it, the reason we work, one of the reasons we work, of course, is shareholder value. But most importantly, one of the reasons we work is so that our families can flourish. Our families can be strong and healthy. And so we help those executives what we call chart out a plan for their family to flourish as well as their business to flourish. And a family, we should point out, is not necessarily, you know, the old school 1950s nuclear family. Families can look all kinds of different ways.

4:15You know, a family could be, you know, someone and their roommates and their dog and their cat or whatever. But we all have this personal life that involves other people. But yet we all have to come together if we're working at a location. And so what are some steps, Terrence, that we can do as leaders to better support, you know, folks within our organizations? And, you know, we want, obviously, to get, you know, to have a great work culture and one that's supportive, that allows us to create amazing things and, you know, accomplish big things and big goals and, you know, maximize productivity in a way that, you know, ensures a well-being for everybody at the same time.

4:57But what would you say are kind of the major kind of tentpole, like your big principles here that all leaders should think about as they're, you know, considering how they can better support their team members' personal and family lives? Well, you know, anyone that's been in business understands that as the employee's home life is impacted, their productivity at work is also impacted. How they approach work, their attitude, their position, their dismeanor. I take a quote from Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett had a very famous quote. They asked him, how would you define success? Now, he's talking about one of the richest men in the world.

5:39He could have said a lot of things. But the one thing he said is that at the end of my life, if the people I love love me in return, I've had a successful life. And so he understands very clearly that it's not about the money that we put in our bank accounts. it's really about the lives that we influence the lives that we touch and and what greater place to start than at home as a caregiver whoever you may be you may be a single parent a grandparent or what have you you have signed up you have been given out or the awesome what i call privilege and honor to raise children or to connect with family members in a way that helps them to flourish And so what better job is that, right?

6:26What if you're all successful in business and your family's falling apart? Is that success? You know, so Warren Buffett, I think, had it right. If the people that you love love you in return, at the end of the day, you've had an impactful life. So why not focus on the family? And so here's some things to think about. Your kids and your wife or your spouse or what have you, they not only want to know who you are. They want to know that you care about them. They want to know that you have a concern for their well-being, that you're there for them. I always say, are you committed to that relationship in a way that you're going to walk with them?

7:08You're going to serve with them? You're going to go to battle with them. Kids understand and appreciate, by the way, and especially in this generation, they understand relationship. They understand community. They understand that they want authenticity. They want transparency. They want you to be yourself and to connect with them in a way that maybe our parents didn't. Right. We just kind of had to understand that we were loved. you know yeah we just understood hey i hug you every five years that's good you know i love you but let me tell you about maybe maybe break it down this way when you think about age and stage of life a zero to six year old needs to know that they are loved they crave that uh from six to ten they need to know that they have purposes they have meaning uh that they need to be affirmed in their life.

8:06And from 11 to 15, although they're stretching out trying to be that independent person, which they're not yet, but what they're looking for is fun and community. They want to have friends and community and so forth. When they get a little older, you know, 16, 17, 18, 19, normally they want independence. They want to prove that they are their own Chevrolet, so to speak. They're their own person. And as a result of that, their behaviors start to shift in that kind of 13, 18, and people think, man, what has happened to my child? Well, nothing has happened. It's just normal phase of life. And each of those phases of life, we call them age and stage of life.

8:48Each of them are building blocks to one another. And let me just finally say, if a zero to five-year-old has missed that love and that compassion and so forth, they search for it for the rest of their life. They search for it for the rest of their life. If they haven't been affirmed, then they search for it for the rest of their life. And that's why we have these, you know, this high anxiety and depression and all these things. And so if we recognize that as a leader, not only do we send them to, you know, the best business training programs in the world, we also send them on the EQ side, we send them to things that deal with the family and more personal relationships.

9:31We call it relationship development in order to connect with one another in the marketplace. Yeah. Well, what do you do, Terrence? Terrence, the work that you do with your clients, like what does that look like? Yeah. So executive leaders, often we deal with executive leaders, you know, CEOs of companies, typically medium-sized companies. By the way, the majority of companies in America are what we call small to medium-sized companies. There's about 29, 30 million companies in the U.S. About 90-some percent of those are what we would consider small business, doing a billion dollars or less, have less than 50 employees, things like that.

10:13So when these employees call us, they're looking for their personal life to flourish. They've kind of nailed it on the business side. They've been doing that for many years, although we do talk about some business things. But they want to see how their family can flourish. How can they be better parents or better stewards at home? And so we begin to help them, for example, put together a life plan. What does a personal life plan look like for them? And then we start to go into a family life plan. What does that look like for you. You know, we are a nation of planners. Think about it. We have things like, you know, financial plans.

10:52We have educational plans. We have all types of estate planning, et cetera, et cetera. We even have vacation plans. So we plan. Okay. But yet less than 1 % really have a family development plan. And so we start to work with them. We develop that plan. For example, do you have a vision statement for your family? What's on the horizon? Where are you going? where you're taking them? Are you being intentional in that process? And then secondly, well, you know, with vision commission, and that's how you achieve the vision. So what does that look like? Do you have that defined in your family? And we start to walk these executive leaders or actually these people as well through this process.

11:32And then we also work with the employees, because if we can strengthen that relationship between the owner and the employees all the way down to the bottom line, we have a healthier, stronger organization. Yeah, I completely agree. And I love that idea of having a mission statement, obviously for the company, for ourselves, what is our personal mission? What do we stand for? What are our values? What do we want to create? And then for our family as well, the kids might roll their eyes depending on their age. that said uh you know i think that that's you know there's probably if we maybe ask more questions about that and co-create that together um you know and present it in a way do you mind maybe forgive me for jumping in here like how would you present this to a kid especially if you've got teenage kids that again might invoke a little bit eye-rolling if you suggest let's do a family mission statement.

12:36No, it's funny. And that's a great question. I remember when we first did ours and I was thinking the same thing. Oh boy, this is really going to go over big. Hey guys, I got a vision statement for you. Let's map that out and value. Here's our values and here's our goals. They probably would have said, Hey pops, you know, thanks so much. We'll, we'll like to go down and get some ice cream, but here's how we did it. Right. So I made a great weekend of it. And, and so I had initiated the vision statement. Here's what I wanted to accomplished with my family, along with my wife. And then we went off to a trip.

13:08We went up to Lake Lanier, which is just north here of Georgia. We got a cabin and we just, you know, we kind of created a weekend of it. And we had great fun, great food, great fellowship, you know, some great putt-putt golf. And by the way, I digress. I kept the scorecard. I did win at the putt-putt golf. They finally let me win something. But, you know, we just went out and we had a conversation. We just talk, right? Because how many times do we sit around the dining room table today and just talk, right? And I began to just tell them a little bit about where they came from. I told them about, you know, their great, great, great grandmother and grandfather and so forth.

13:48We just kind of share kind of our genealogy, so to speak, as a family. And that was fascinating. and then we just start talking about us and in our life and what we what we desire for them and how much we love them and care for them and as a result of that we wanted to sit down and just kind of discuss some of our wishes and some of our thoughts and what we've been building on for the at that time they were around 10 15 years of age and where we're going and and so they began to listen and and chime in and have a conversation right you want a conversation uh you don't want a monologue. And as we did that, 10 years of age, they were very much prepared to do that.

14:30And as we did that and started laying that out, started telling our story, our life story, they were fascinated to hear your story. Now, here's what's so important. They began to share with us their story, their journey. They had told us things that we never knew, we never heard about. We didn't know, but yet we opened up the door for conversation, for community. And from there, you know, we were able to just map that out together. Hey, what do we truly value? Not what the world tells us to value. What do we truly value? And why do we value these things? For example, education. Why do we value education?

15:13Well, I had a great story to tell around my grandfather. My grandfather was one of the top officials, engineers for United Airlines at that time was the largest airline in the country. And they were head of Delta at that time. And my grandfather had to, he was a sharecropper. He was a farmer. His father was a farmer. And he had to leave school because his father passed away. He had to leave school in the second grade. and worked afar. But he decided to come up to Chicago, Illinois, where I was born, and get in for work. He wanted to find work, and he found work at United Airlines. Now, here's a man who didn't have a, let alone a high school diploma, he didn't have an eighth grade education.

16:05He had a second grade education. He was great with his hands, and so he could fix anything. but it was always holding him back that he didn't have a degree he didn't have a high school degree and so my grandfather took a sole purpose instead of taking a ged and passing it and getting a high school diploma he didn't do that he decided in some way to accelerate his learning and he set in the third grade the fourth grade the fifth grade the sixth grade on an accelerated basis until he got to high school and he graduated from high school and he walked across that stage He walked across that stage and I said, Pops, why did you ever do this?

16:44I mean, why did you just take the GED? He says, this degree is not for me. This degree is for every generation that follow me to know the importance of education in our life. And as a result of that, he says, this is something no one can ever take away. Here it is, a second grade student completes high school. Now get this, here's the beauty of the story. he became the chief engineer for united airlines technically with a second grade education obviously he got a high school diploma because he had to check the box to have a high school diploma if i'm sitting here telling that story to my kids and i'm talking about the value of education it hits home versus me just saying we value education yeah terrence chapman wonderful conversation.

17:37You are the founder and CEO of Victorious Family. Your website is victoriousfamily.org. From there, you can see, obviously, Terrence, the work that you do in companies, the work you do with individuals, leaders. Thank you so much for your impact. Thank you so much for advocating for families of all types. I appreciate you. It's been a great conversation. Thank you so much, Josh. Enjoyed it.

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