Small Business Revolution. Barry C. McCarthy

Work-Life Integration

Not long ago I was invited to speak to a community leadership class. It was associated with a social service agency and they were working hard to grow a group of community leaders who could then go out and be involved in nonprofit organizations like themselves. I could tell that the audience was filled with very motivated achievers in their 30s and 40s.

      One of the questions I got was: “I have a young family with kids. How can I get all this done and possibly achieve work/life balance?”

      I told the group that was the wrong paradigm. If you think of a balance beam or a kids' teeter-totter, almost all of the time one end is higher than the other. So, if we put work on one side and life on the other, how can you possibly achieve any significant height on one side without sacrificing the other side? It's the wrong imagery, the wrong paradigm. Successful businesspeople don't see work and life as two separate and competing activities.

      I'm not a gambling man, but I think a closer analogy to something physical is a deck of cards. Let's say that your work life consists of being dealt 15 cards, and your home life consists of another 15 cards that you're dealt. That's 30 cards. There are another 22 cards in that deck, and you can use them to balance out those hands. The extra 22 cards are how you use your time, and how creative you are. It is not a “zero-sum” game where one extra card on the work side means taking a card away from the life side.

      As CEO of Deluxe, I have a significant number of obligations to the company outside of regular business hours. I could tell my wife that “duty calls” and as a former divisional chief financial officer at General Electric in their glory days and a KPMG alum, she would fully understand the drill. Long ago, we decided to be far more creative and look at those obligations instead as opportunities for us to be together doing something interesting. We'll go to dinner before an event, or afterward we'll get a cocktail or dessert. In this way we are integrating our life, fulfilling meaningful obligations, and still enjoy being together. This is much better than pouting that we had lost our Saturday night.

Similarly, we often entertain business colleagues and customers in our home. During the pandemic, Deluxe broadcast our annual customer event, the Deluxe Exchange, from a studio close to our home. In the middle of the day, I asked my wife if we should invite the marketing team over for a casual dinner that same evening. She agreed and our whole family sprang into action. We arranged and served dinner for 15 guests a few hours later, and our kids were part of the evening too. The kids set the table, Jean Ann prepped the meal, and I ran the grill. That dinner wasn't about choosing either work or family; it was an example of life integration, including our kids and a boyfriend and girlfriend of two of our kids too.

      As a small-business owner, another brother-in-law and his wife do the same thing. They own two Ace Hardware stores in small towns in the Midwest. Keeping small businesses going in small towns is hard work, as we've plainly seen from SBR.

      Anyway, they constantly must be creative in order to integrate work with the rest of their lives. The Ace Hardware tag line is “Ace Is the Place with the Helpful Hardware Folks.” If one week they're short staffed in one of the stores, they don't have the luxury of simply hanging a sign on the door: “today we can't be the Helpful Hardware Folks.” Instead, they hold off on the administrative activities like paying bills and ordering inventory so everyone can be on the floor, helping customers. That means sometimes they get takeout dinner on Sunday night and spend a few hours together in the office, catching up on the back-office work. Yes, they are working on a Sunday night. Yes, they are working extra hours. And yes, they are enjoying being together enjoying nice takeout.

      Another brother-in-law founded a regional CPA practice in a Big 10 college town. He and his wife enjoy warm weather in the winter. They travel to Florida occasionally through the winter. He works there a few weeks at a time, getting to enjoy the sunshine, even in the middle of annual tax season.

      One of my sisters and her husband are well-known folk musicians and recording artists. My sister also writes haiku poems and has published several volumes complete with beautiful self-shot photography. In addition to now being a full-time development director for a major zoo, she has turned her passion into a part-time small business where she sells her art online. Rather than building a studio somewhere else, she set up an area at in her basement where she can invest available pockets of time to write and record. She and her husband integrate their passion into their regular lives, rather than it being a scheduled, separate part of their lives.

Another sister is a trial lawyer who, along with other partners, left a large law firm to form a more nimble, complex litigation boutique firm. The move gave her greater flexibility, including the opportunity to take an international sabbatical in support of nonprofits. By choosing to live in the city she had easy access to amenities and avoided a long commute. She filled her need for the outdoors on weekends at state parks. All of this in combination created an integrated whole life, not an “either-or” life.

      Life integration is about making choices, and simply deciding, not letting circumstances decide for you. Choosing to make a decision is very empowering, and very critical. Any time you avoid making a decision, you have made a decision. Choose an integrated life.

      All of us have now experienced some of this integration, having survived COVID with kids at home from school, dogs barking on Zoom calls, and the unexpected kid walking through your WebEx interview. When you think about life integration, instead of the impossible teeter-totter, you really can find a happy balance of what is important to you.

Put Your Mask on First

      There is one other decision you must make. As I've already mentioned, it's been very common for business owners we feature on SBR to not be taking a salary. That fact emerges after a painful discussion of the financials. But usually there's more pain to be seen in the episodes, in the form of a candid review of what options are open to the owner in order to be able to draw a salary from the business.

      You can see their reluctance to charge more. It's like they're willing to continue to endure the long days and short bank balances. After all, many customers are friends, and they're often doing financially worse than the owner. The Deluxe team frequently needs to drive home the point that this “business flight” is airborne and about to run out of gas, due either to no funds, no life integration, ruined health, or some combination of these.

      That's where the business owner needs to remember the safety briefing we've all heard a hundred times on airplanes. You need to put your mask on first, before helping loved ones. Why? To be selfish? No, it's so you'll be able to help others, not be slumped unconscious in your seat.

Your customers will understand if you need to put your mask on first and charge an extra dollar for that food item or service. A few won't get it, of course. But all of your customers will be worse off if the “Closed” sign on your front door one day never gets moved to “Open.”

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      In the next chapter, we talk about critical numbers and financials.