Kalzumeus Podcast Episode 10: Putting the “Family” in Family Business

Keith and I are back with the 10th episode of the podcast.  This time we’re talking about our wives and kids, how much they mean to us (lots!), and how we try to fit being good husbands/fathers around our mutual desire to keep growing the businesses.

[Patrick notes: The transcript below has my commentary inserted like this, as usual.]

What you’ll learn in this podcast:

• What Keith has been up to with Summit Evergreen and what Patrick has been up to with Appointment Reminder.
• How having children changed how we run our businesses.
• How delegating tasks is key to making sure we can spend appropriate amounts of time/brainsweat on being good husbands and fathers, as opposed to optimizing Nginx config files.
• How Japan’s poor systematic answers to the question of work/life balance decreases the birth rate here.  (Who said this podcast wasn’t educational?)

Podcast: Putting the “Family” in Family Business

MP3 Download (~53 minutes, ~50 MB) : Right-click here and click Save As.

Podcast format: either subscribe to https://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed in your podcast reader of choice or you can search for Kalzumeus Podcast in the iTunes Store.

[powerpress]

Transcript: Putting the “Family” in Family Business

Patrick McKenzie:  Hi, everybody. Welcome to ‑‑ what is this? ‑‑ the 10th episode of the Kalzumeus Podcast. I’m Patrick McKenzie, better known as patio11 on the Internet. I’m here with my buddy, Keith.

Keith Perhac:  Hi, this is Keith. We are on the 10th episode, three and a half years in the making. Probably the slowest podcast ever. I know every time we say we’re going to make these a little bit faster and do this a little more regularly. Hopefully, in this new year, 2015, we’ll actually get that done. Here’s knocking on wood.

Patrick:  Knocking on wood. I think we ship products and children about as quickly as we ship podcasts.

Keith:  [laughs]

Patrick:  In fact, I think that’s almost literally true.

[crosstalk]

Patrick:  This segues nicely the topic for today. We’re going to be talking about what it’s like to run a business as two guys who are very committed to being family men. Not just to grinding away and burning the midnight oil and the work stuff, as we might have done in our younger and stupider years.

Keith:  [laughs] I don’t know. I still do that on occasion, but having a family has definitely changed it.

Patrick:  Yeah, so we are going to talk a little bit about family stuff in a few minutes, but we want to steal a [inaudible 01:06] from Rob Walling and Mike Taber at the “Startups for the Rest of Us” podcast, which is one of my personal favorites. They start off every episode with just a little update on what’s new and exciting in their businesses. I thought, “Hey that’s kind of interesting to pattern after.” We’ll try it and see if it looks it. Keith, we haven’t heard much about Summit Evergreen recently. Why don’t you start us off with that?

How’s...

For the full transcript see here.