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in: Career & Wealth, Podcast, Wealth

• Last updated: September 29, 2021

Podcast #232: Become the Chief Financial Officer of Family Inc.

When it comes to personal finance, most of the advice out there is geared towards goal setting, like save “X” amount for retirement or reduce discretionary spending by a certain percentage each month. Goal setting is helpful, but it often comes up short in giving you a big picture view of your financial situation so you can take appropriate, tactical steps to improve your wealth. 

My guest today on the show argues that in order to get this big picture view of your finances, you need to start looking at your family as a business and yourself as the Chief Financial Officer of Family Inc. His name is Doug McCormick and he’s a professional investor and the author of Family Inc.: Using Business Principles to Maximize Your Family’s Wealth

Today on the show, Doug and I discuss the two types of assets you’re managing as the CFO of your family, and the business principles you can apply in your family “enterprise” to help them grow. We also discuss the metrics that corporate CFOs use to determine the health of a company and how you can use the same ones to measure the health of your family’s finances.

Show Highlights

  • The two businesses that you own as CFO of your family finances
  • Why the way most people approach personal finance doesn’t allow them to maximize their financial success
  • What your goals should be as CFO of your family
  • How a Family Inc. CFO should measure net worth differently than the way most people do
  • Why you’re at your wealthiest when you’re young
  • Why taking the longview of your financial life will result in better financial decision making
  • How to invest in your labor asset
  • Why education debt is still a good investment despite its decreasing ROI
  • How you can insure your labor asset with disability and life insurance
  • How to maximize the growth of your capital asset while young
  • How your investment strategy should change as you get closer to retirement
  • How you can insure your retirement with annuities
  • The metrics a family CFO should look at to judge the health of Family Inc.
  • How to talk to your aging parents about their retirement plan
  • How to prepare your Family Inc. CFO succession plan through estate planning
  • What you should start doing today if your personal finances are a mess
  • And much more!

Resources/Studies/People Mentioned in Podcast

Family Inc.: Using Business Principles to Maximize Your Family’s Wealth book cover Douglas P. McCormick. 

If you’re looking to optimize your family finances, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Family Inc. Doug does a great job explaining how business principles can help you make wiser, more financially savvy decisions for your family. Be sure to check out his website as well for some great free tools and resources to help you become the CFO of your family.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When it comes to personal finance, most of the advice out there is geared towards goal setting, like saving X-amount of dollars for retirement, or reduce discretionary spending by a certain percentage each month, and goal setting is helpful. It often comes up short in giving you a big picture view of your financial situation so you could take appropriate tactical steps to improve your wealth.

My guest today in the show argues that in order to get this big picture view of your finances, you need to start looking at your family as a business and yourself as the chief financial officer of Family Inc. His name is Doug McCormick, and he’s a professional investor, and the author of Family Inc.: Using Business Principles to Maximize Your Family’s Wealth.

Today in the show, Doug and I discuss the two types of assets that you’re managing as a CFO of your family and the business principles you can apply in your family’s business to help grow.

We also discussed the metrics that corporate CFOs use to determine the health of a company and how you can use the same ones to measure the health of your family’s finances. Lots of great actionable advice in this podcast.

After the show if over, make sure to check out the show notes at aom.is/family inc for links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Doug McCormick, welcome to the show.

Doug McCormick: Hey, thanks very much. Glad to be here.

Brett McKay: You’re a professional investor, managing portfolios for institutions as well as for families. You got a new book out called Family Inc., and it’s all about treating your personal finances like you would a business, but being the chief financial officer.

Before we get in with that means, what that entails, let’s talk about the way most families manage their money. How do they management money, and why is shifting your mindset to treating your personal finances like a business a better approach?

Doug McCormick: I think the unfortunate reality is many of us allow life to manage us and the money is just a byproduct of working really hard and people pick their head up every couple of months, or every year and check in on their financial progress. They key premise of the book is that the family or individuals can view themselves as a business. We’re essentially all in a business of converting our labor to financial capital.

When you think about it that way, I think it brings a whole new discipline to how people can proactively manage their careers, manage the really important decisions in life that can help lead someone to financial security.

Brett McKay: Right. I’m sure there’s people out there who, they might own a business, and they’ve got that thing just tight as a ship. They run it perfectly, but then their personal finances are just like a mess. It’s just half-hazard.

Doug McCormick: Yeah. I see that a lot. I think just to be clear, what I’m proposing is not that you make all of your personal financial decisions like a business would, but that you use that framework to inform you about what the best business decision is, and then you overlay your values and your priorities on to that. I make bad financial decisions all the time, but I’d like to think I know it when I’m doing it.

Brett McKay: Got you. That makes sense. All right. Let’s talk about this mind shift change of things you were telling as the chief financial officer of your family business, or your family personal finances. What are the types of businesses that we’re managing with our personal finances as the chief financial officer of our family?

Doug McCormick: Yup. Essentially, the business is one where everybody is born with a certain amount of labor, and you can make decisions in life, like education and job choices that change the value of that labor. The name of the game for all of us is really about how do we convert that labor into social security benefits and financial capital such that when it comes time to retire, you’ve got those two assets, your social security and your financial capital to support your consumption throughout the rest of your life.

I think it’s a pretty powerful framework, because it allows people to connect all of their disparate decisions in a holistic fashion and gives you a north star, if you will. What I mean by that is what you find is your educational choices, or your career choices impact your investment choices, your insurance needs, your retirement choices.

This really, I think, provides a pretty holistic framework to allow people to identify what’s really important and understand the interconnections, if you will, between these different choices.

Brett McKay: We got the labor asset, and then the capital asset.

Doug McCormick: Yup. I think, essentially, social security is a mandatory purchase of an annuity. I think that becomes a very valuable asset for folks as they close to retirement as well.

Brett McKay: Okay. All right. CFOs of corporations, they have objectives or goals, big picture goals of what they’re trying to do. What are the three main objectives of the CFO of family? You talked about … I guess, one is converting labor assets, your work into capital assets, which is like retirement. What are some of the other objectives?

Doug McCormick: Yeah. I think you can break it down into three … And this is somewhat of almost a time horizon. I think the CFO focuses on the immediate term, and that is to ensure that he has the cash available to fund today’s consumption and avoiding financial distress today. Ensuring that your family has the basic needs.

I think the second element is the long term planning. How do you begin to invest today and prepare your assets to support your retirement needs? That’s a many year process.

I think the third major area that a CFO focuses on, or should focus on, is success planning. I think this is candidly the one that is most underserved. That’s really about teaching the next generation the skills and the values to be good stewards of the family assets when one generation passes.

Brett McKay: Okay. That’s great. We’ll get into this more specifically here in a bit. Let’s about net worth, because that’s something everyone knows they should be tracking in their personal finances. How should a CFO of Family Inc. measure their net worth differently than how most people will go about measuring their personal net worth?

Doug McCormick: Just for everybody’s benefit. First of all, net worth is simply something that you can determine when you look at your balance sheet. The balance sheet list all of your assets on one side and all of your liabilities on the other side. What’s left over, assets minus liabilities, is your net worth. Essentially, your savings.

You see a balance sheet in many business applications. It’s also very relevant in a personal finance environment. I think the difference in terms of the way I look at it or a family CFO should look at it is you shouldn’t just look at your financial assets when you look at your net worth. You should also take a bigger picture to think about the lifetime labor value that you have and the expected social security value that you have.

When you add those assets, it really results in some very interesting insights. For example, in many cases, you are most wealthiest when you’re young. You may not have a lot of financial assets, but you certainly have a lot of labor assets that are available to be converted into capital overtime. I think that holistic view is an important starting point as you think about the real drivers of wealth, key investment opportunities, things like asset allocation.

Brett McKay: The reason why you have a higher net worth, just to clarify, is because you’re young, you have time to, I guess, capitalize on your labor asset.

Doug McCormick: Exactly. Just to give people a little more perspective and to how I think about those values, your lifetime labor value is simply, “How old am I today? How old am I when I retire? What can I expect to earn over that interim period on an after tax basis?” And it’s essentially the sum of that.

What we can say for sure is you’re going to be wrong when you make that estimate. I think it’s a really important thought process because it forces people to think about the long game. We’re not focused on compensation today. We’re focused on maximizing lifetime compensation. I think it’s a better way to think about good investments in career, in education, and acknowledging that you have that significant asset on the balance sheet.

Brett McKay: This idea of thinking of your job as an asset is … When I read that, I was, “Wow! I never thought of it that way.” In the world of business, labor is an asset. They have that on the balance sheets. We’ve hit on a little bit of how viewing your labor as an asset can change how people approach their career. If labor is an asset, and you can invest in assets, what are some of the ways people can invest in their labor asset to get the most out of it?

Doug McCormick: I think just to highlight the big aha moment that I’d like people to think about is when you start looking at your labor as an asset, you begin not to think about this year, “What am I going to make this year?” You begin to think about the goal is to maximize the lifetime labor value. There’s a couple of ways you can do that. You do it by obviously earning more per year. You do it because you’ve got a skillset that is more employable, and so you’re less likely to have periods of unemployment. The last is you can do it by extending your career.

If you are fortunate enough to have a skillset that is not manual labor, in many cases, you can work later into your years because you’re selling your intellectual capital. There’s lots of different ways to maximize that value of your labor asset.

Some specifics are obviously education. It’s not only the amount of education, it’s the type of education. There’s very clear statistics that would suggest that people that focus on business or STEM related field, science and technology, earn substantially more than those that focus on liberal arts. In it’s the professional choices you make in terms of what industries you pursue. What functional areas within a career you pursue? Things like geography, the employment picture, and the compensation is very different in Silicon Valley than it is the mid-west. Your geographic preference and choice impacts your lifetime labor value.

I think the last one, which is perhaps one of the very most powerful is entrepreneurship. I’m a big fan of entrepreneurship as a way to dramatically increase the value of your labor asset.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about education, because a lot of our listeners are young guys, or they’re parents with kids about to go to college. Education is an investment in your labor asset, but it’s an investment you make using debt. It’s debt funded. Take out student loans. There’s been a lot of talk in the zeitgeist, closure zeitgeist, saying that college simply isn’t worth it anymore. Looking at this as a CFO, what’s your argument that education debt is still a good investment?

Doug McCormick: First of all, I would … Let me say a couple of things. First, I believe that the benefits of education may be decreasing relative to history, and that’s a product of the cost of education is going up. Candidly, in many cases, wage or compensation levels are not going up commensurately.

People made the argument that an education is a worst investment today than it was 10 years ago. I think there’s some merit to that. When you think about, “Is an education still a good investment?” I think the answer is a resounding yes when you think about a couple of things. The first is you’re not thinking about the return on that investment over a year, or five years. You’re thinking about it over a lifetime.

The second is it assumes that the student is making good choices in terms of what kind of career they intend to pursue and what kind of curriculum. I don’t think you can universally say that education is a good investment. I think education in skill sets that are in demand in the economy and that you intend to use is a very good investment.

I think there’s a real key element to not just the skills that you learn in college, but the skills that you must learn to maximize that value. Essentially, that’s about selling your labor in the market place. I think in many cases, we’re not doing a good job of teaching our young people, whether they’d be in high school, or college, about how to navigate these major decisions.

Arguably, an educational investment is certainly one of the very biggest investments that a person will make over a lifetime. If it’s not the biggest, it’s probably the most impactful. I think giving people the tools to evaluate not only what they have aptitudes for and what their passions are for, but what the economic consequences of those decisions, I think is a real key element of that thought process.

Brett McKay: Again, people have to look at the long term view on this to see the benefits of an education. It might not happen the first 10 years of your career. It will come 30, 40 years into your career.

Doug McCormick: That is, in today’s environment, millennials are likely to have 10 different jobs. Job mobility is substantially higher than it used to be. They’re likely to work substantially longer than previous generations. I think the good news is in a mobile environment, there’s lots of opportunity to be compensated for those skills you’ve developed, and you’ve got a lot longer period to recoup your investment if you will.

Brett McKay: Got you. To continue on this idea of treating your labor as an asset, people ensure valuable assets, like their home or car. If labor is an asset, and it’s incredibly valuable. This is going to fund your capital into retirement, and fund consumption while you’re still young. How can we ensure our labor asset?

Doug McCormick: I think, two things. First of all, probably the most neglected insurance of most individuals is disability insurance. From a financial perspective, this is almost the worst outcome possible, because not only have you lost your potential to earn if you have a significant disability event, but you also still have all the costs of required consumption.

I think insurance item number one that’s important is disability insurance in the unfortunate circumstance that you get injured and are not able to earn income. People dramatically underestimate there’s risk. If you look at statistics, something like 20% of Americans will experience a period of disability over a career.

I think the second element of insuring this big asset is life insurance. A couple of things there. Life insurance is most relevant once you’ve established a family and they’re depending on that income. I generally recommend that if folks are considering life insurance, they do so on a term basis. That’s generally the cheapest, and it insures the exact need you’re looking for, which is you end up dying prematurely and your family loses access to labor asset.

Brett McKay: Got you. Disability insurance expensive, or is it relative inexpensive?

Doug McCormick: I’d say it this way, it’s probably inexpensive relative to the risk. There are ways to minimize the cost. My whole approach to insurance is I think it’s generally the loser’s gain. Meaning the expected return is going to be less than the cost to procure it, but you’ve insured a significant risk that’s a going out of business risk. It’s still a prune investment.

You can do things around disability insurance in terms of delaying how long you have to be unemployed before you begin to collect your benefit. For example, if you get injured, the first 30 days, you don’t collect anything. It’s only an injury that exist in excess of 30 days. That would be a cheaper policy than one that starts to payout immediately.

Brett McKay: Another insurance method you talked about in the book is self-insurance. Just having a safety net. What it’s called? An emergency fund for those instances where maybe you might be out of a job for a few months because you got laid off.

Doug McCormick: Yup. Two things. First of all, I think one of the highest financial priorities for anyone is establishing that rainy day fund, whether it’d be that you experience a car accident, a required repair at your house, or unemployment. To be able to ensure that you can not experience financial distress. That is one form of insurance.

It’s also possible that at some point you acquire enough wealth that you don’t need disability insurance, or you don’t need life insurance. The problem is most people … Very few people in our economy achieve that level of wealth, because that’s a significant asset. That’s a good investment if you have enough capital, or enough wealth. That’s not available to most folks, or is not prudent for most folks.

Brett McKay: Let’s shift over to this other business asset that we’re managing, our capital, which is there to fund retirement after we’ve depleted our labor asset. Let’s say, what’s the best investment strategy, say, for a young person who’s just starting out life, to ensure that their retirement fund can cover the time they’re not working?

Doug McCormick: I think the first thing that folks should think about taking advantage of is company sponsored retirement programs, like a 401 (k). These are really important for a couple of reasons. The first is they’re tax deferred. Essentially, what that means is you’re not paying tax on the income. It goes directly into your retirement account. That significant, it’s essentially like if you have an effective tax rate of 25%, it’s essentially 25 cents on every dollar you invest. That is free money working for you in your retirement account.

The second thing is many companies offer some kind of matching program. For every dollar you put in, they put in another 10 cents. I recommend to folks that you should be maxing out on those retirement accounts. The combination of tax deferral, combined with a matching program, ends up being very significant.

The second thing is you got to start early. Wealth is really created by compounding. It’s not the 2% of the 5% this year. It’s the five percent over 30 or 40 years that really drives wealth and that accumulation of assets.

The last thing I would say about this element of Family Inc. is these retirement assets are something that have a very long duration. What I mean by that is if you’re 25 or 30, you’re not going to retire until you’re 65 or 67, and then those assets are going to be used by you until you’re 85 or plus. You’ve got a great long term time horizon.

If you have that time horizon, you can afford year end and year out volatility, the market is up 10%, the market is down 20%, because you’re invested for the long term. My recommendation is that folks take significant equity exposure in these retirement accounts.

Brett McKay: You also recommend a passive investment strategy for.

Doug McCormick: Yeah. I think the goal here is to maximize after tax, after inflation, after fee returns. When you look at it that way, versus just nominal returns, generally, it’s very hard to beat passive investing. There’s less tax leakage. There’s less fees. Inflation, you’re going to experience regardless of your investment strategy.

Brett McKay: How should someone who’s getting close to retirement. How should their strategy towards retirement change?

Doug McCormick: As you approach retirement, essentially, you are losing one significant asset. That’s your labor asset. I think you have to essentially acknowledge that you’ve got less degrees of freedom. You’ve got a little bit less opportunity to assume risk. Fortunately, for most of us, we’ll have a social security program. That is a significant asset that will compensate us.

I think the key elements of approaching this part of the family life cycle are continue to stay reasonably invested in equities. Your time duration is relatively long. By the time you’re ready to retire, you have significant visibility on things. How much wealth you have. What your health is? You can begin to think about things like additional annuities, or additional insurances for health care liabilities.

Really, at the time of retirement, you’ve got a lot of unknowns that you’ve begun to answer, and it allows you to make a much more informed decision about your asset allocation.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about insuring your retirement asset, your capital asset. You mentioned annuities as a way. Can you talk a little deeper into that topic?

Doug McCormick: Yeah. Essentially, an annuity is simply a contract. Basically, it’s where I, today, give the insurance company a lump sump of money, and in return they give me an annual payment for as long as I live. There’s all kinds of variations. It can be indexed to inflation. That payment can be something that happens for you and your wife, or just you. You can really structure it, commensurate with your unique needs.

I find that annuities are relevant for folks who have not saved a lot and don’t have a lot of room for error. It helps insure that you don’t run out of money because one of the big risks that we all face is we don’t know how long we’re going to live.

From a financial perspective, living long actually creates greater financial needs. It’s a great thing personally. From achieving financial independence, the longer you live, obviously, the more you’ve got to save, and the annuity can be a valuable tool to help bridge that gap as you take risk on how long you’re likely to live.

The problem with annuities is I view them as very expensive. In general, if you think about what the return on an annuity is, it’s low single digits. I think you’re likely to experience a better return in the equity markets, but the equity markets still come with substantially more risk.

Brett McKay: What point in someone’s life should they might consider annuities?

Doug McCormick: Yeah. As late as life as possible, because the purchase decision becomes a lot more informed when you have a better sense of the balance sheet, you have a better sense of your retirement benefits. You have a better sense of your health and how long your likely to live.

Brett McKay: Okay. Great. CFOs in a business use a variety of tools and metrics to measure the health of their business. What metrics should a family CFO look at?

Doug McCormick: If we go back to the analogy that every family is a business, I think many of the financial tools that CFOs use in a business context can be applied to the family. Obviously, the two most significant would be an income statement, which is essentially the same thing as a budget. It’s simply lists how much you bring in, minus all your expenses for the year. In a budget context, what’s left over is called savings. In an income statement, that’s called profit. Actually, the same thing. A balance sheet.

As we talked about before, a balance sheet simply lists all the assets, minus all the liabilities, and what’s left over is your savings, or your net worth.

I see a lot of people spend a lot of time creating very detailed budgets. I’m not a big fan of this, because what I find is people spend a lot of time tracking it and not a lot of time taking action to improve it. I think a high level income statement and a high level balance sheet, tell me all I need to know. In a given period, call it every quarter, if you looked at your income statement, you can determine how much you saved. If you compare those two balance sheets, you can determine how much your net worth or your wealth has grown. In my mind, those are the big indicators of progress.

Just one more thing on this topic. I do have a website, it’s called familyinc.com, and I actually provide a bunch of tools that allow someone to build their own income statement. Build their own balance sheet, and then provide some analytics around what that should tell you.

Brett McKay: Awesome. Yeah, we’ll link to that in the show notes for sure.

Doug McCormick: Great.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about this third objective you’ve mentioned earlier of a CFO, is planning for succession. Businesses have succession plans in the event the CEO or the CFO steps down. What succession plans should a Family Inc. CFO have in place?

Doug McCormick: Yeah. First of all, let me see. I think this is one of the most challenging areas of creating multi-generational financial security. I don’t know if it’s because people just have a hard time thinking about their own death, or it’s a product of delicate conversations. I find this to be very often neglected.

I think there are really three different levels of financial preparedness as it becomes to succession planning. The first, and a lot of people get this one right, is it’s the emergency stuff. What financial advisers does someone need to call when a family member has passed away to figure out where everything is located? Who helps them figure out what is available in the estate?

The second one, which I see less success with, is a clear communication of the intent. That addresses things like how does the deceased want their estate disposed of? How do they want their inheritance distributed? These are often really tough discussions, but my view is wouldn’t it be better to make this very clear when you can talk to folks about it and ensure they understand your rationale as supposed to having family members fight about it, or argue about it, or never really know what the intent was. I’ve seen a lot of hurt feelings and estranged relationships because people have failed on the second level of preparedness.

Lastly, the third one, which I think is probably the most important, but the hardest to achieve. It’s really the ability to impart skills and values into the next generation, so that they can be good stewards of the family. I see in many cases families work an entire lifetime to accumulate wealth. They turn it over to the next generation, and that next generation has not been prepared with the right skills. This is not only the skills to manage money, but it’s imparting the values that are consistent with the way you manage the money.

My only advice on this one is it takes a long time. It’s a product of a lot of failure. The best way to prepare is to start that conversation early with your kids and use real life opportunities as examples to allow them to learn and allow them to fail in controlled environments. Because I think we all have had many experiences where we failed with managing money, and I think there’s valuable learning that occurs when you do that, especially in a controlled environment, where it doesn’t cost you too much.

Brett McKay: Right. My wife and I just finished our estate planning, and I’ve been putting it off for such a long time. Now that I have it done, it feels great. There’s that comfort that if I were to go, things would still transition smoothly.

Doug McCormick: Yeah. The reality is that … The unfortunate thing about the estate plan is the minute you do it and finish, it’s probably out of date. You’ve probably got a 95% solution today, and in the next three years, it will still be an 80% solution. It does require revisiting as your circumstances change, but you’ve certainly made it well down the path of laying out of broad strokes of how you think things need to happen.

Brett McKay: Right. Let’s talk about this, I’m sure there’s a lot of people listening. They got baby boomer parents who are getting up there, they’re retiring. They’re getting close to … You don’t want to think about, “My parents are about to die.” It’s on your mind as they get older.

How do you bring up this conversation about your parent’s personal finances? Is mom and dad going to have enough to support themselves in retirement? You read all the statistics where baby boomers don’t really have that much in savings in terms of retirement. How do you have those conversations with your parents? It could be touchy.

Doug McCormick: Yeah. I think they are touchy for starters. I don’t have any good recommendations on how to avoid the sensitivity. I think every relationship is different. I think two things that I have seen as important elements to a constructive conversation here. The first here is opportunity for two-way learning.

I think younger generations can go to older generations and say, “Hey, I’m trying to understand your financial situation because I’m trying to understand my own. You’ve had a lot more experience at it. You’ve had a lot more real world decisions to make, and so I would like to learn from you.”

Conversely, I think, in many cases, younger generation is realizing this is an increasingly important life skill and can bring to bear what they’ve learned. I think if you can structure this conversation in the context of how do we all learn from one another? I think that’s very valuable.

I think the second is … This one can be challenging. This is a conversation that’s best done outside of traditional family roles. When I’m talking to my father, for example, I try not to be coming at it in a father-son context, but more as two adults who are trying to think about a complicated issue and make sure that we’re making the best of our circumstances. That’s a hard one, but I think the key is try to get outside of your traditional communication patterns.

Brett McKay: Okay. That’s great advice. Doug, let’s say … We’ve hit on some really great ideas here, but let’s say there’s someone listening to the show right now whose finances are a mess. The value of their labor asset isn’t where they want it to be. They don’t have positive cash flow. The retirement asset is zilched. What are some things that people can start doing today to get going on the right path?

Doug McCormick: Yeah. The first thing I would say is focus on today first. A lot of us have tremendous anxiety about, “Am I going to safely retire? Can I accumulate enough wealth that I’ll feel secure?” That’s obviously a great long term goal, but you never get there if you experience financial distress today.

One of the most significant obstacles to overcome is something like financial distress where you’re forced to declare a bankruptcy. If you find yourself in that point where you’re really struggling, be clear on what the priority is. The priority is avoiding financial distress today.

In some cases, that creates some tough decisions. You mentioned someone that has negative cash flow. If you have negative cash flow, somehow you’ve got to stop the burn rate. Generally, the first and fastest way to do that is take a hard look at your expenses and figure out how to reduce anything that is not absolutely mandatory.

Once you’ve normalized your cash flow such that you’re not digging a bigger hole for yourself, I think that’s when you can begin to think about how you begin to accumulate wealth.

As we talked about earlier, by far and away for most families, your largest asset is your labor. It’s beginning to think about how you deploy that labor in a more effective way. That’s not just about working hard. It’s about working smarter. It’s not just about your compensation, what you made this week, or this month, but it’s about what skills you’re developing. What relationships you’re establishing that are going to allow you to grow that income overtime.

Brett McKay: Great. That was some great advice. Doug, this has been a great conversation. Where can people learn more about your book and your work?

Doug McCormick: First of all, thanks very much for having me. I’ve got a website, familyinc.com. You can see the tools there and a little bit more about the philosophy of the book. It’s obviously available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Brett McKay: Awesome. Doug McCormick, thanks so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Doug McCormick: Hey, I appreciate it. Have a great one.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Doug McCormick, he’s the author of the book Family Inc. It’s available on Amazon.com. You can also find out more information about is book at familyinc.com. Make sure to check out the show notes at aom.is/familyinc, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

That wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. If you enjoy the show and have gotten something out of it, I’d appreciate it if you give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher. It really helps us out a lot.

As always, I thank you for your continued support, and until next time. This is Brett McKay telling you to say manly.

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