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Build Family Assets, NOT Careers with Jeremy and Kristin Netting · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  People did not grow up and say, what do I want to be? Like, what kind of work do I want to do? Let me just check out different things. That's just not the way the world works. That is incredibly new and terribly destructive to the family. That entire idea.
• 0:18
  Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. I'm excited today to be joined by my friends Jeremy and Kristen Netting. Thank you guys so much for jumping on here today. Thank you for having us. They hail from Centerburg, Ohio, just north of Columbus. And I'm very excited to come visit your guys' amazing farm and homestead soon. We're trying to figure out a way to do that.
• 0:40
  The nettings have been great friends of ours. Jeremy's been on the podcast before talking about their kickball league, which has become fairly infamous in the family teams world. So go check out that podcast if you want to learn about how Jeremy designed an actual way of doing kickball with your family team against other family teams, which I think was a huge accomplishment.
• 1:03
  But that is not their only accomplishment besides that and having six boys. They also went through Family Inc. And Jeremy has an awesome business and it's been expanding. They build assets as a family. And this month in the accelerator, we are talking all about the idea of building family assets.
• 1:23
  And for so many people, this is a confusing topic because we have decided culturally that this whole work world is in the individual sphere. This is what individuals do. The individual father kind of morphs into a man and goes off to work.
• 1:41
  to pursue an identity in work or through work. The individual, the mother, becomes an individual woman. She might go off and pursue her individual identity through work. They will then raise the children to all figure out what their individual identities could be through work. Who do you want to be when you grow up? One of the most dangerous questions you could ever ask a child because it suggests that
• 2:03
  This thing called work or a career actually is fused with who they are. Who do you want to be when you grow up? It's their identity, their deepest identity. They're going to discover someday when they start a career. That is incredibly new and terribly destructive to the family, that entire idea. But we all have to live in the 21st century and we have to provide for our families.
• 2:27
  So how do we negotiate with this reality that is saying that, hey, we all got to develop these hyper individual workplace identities. What is the alternative to that if we want to provide for our families? And so what we want to present to you guys, and I think one of the one of the realities is maybe the right answer for you is to stay in your career, to provide well for your family, and then to really fight back against that identity based career. That's great. And we got lots and lots of people that are building family teams very successfully by doing that.
• 2:57
  A lot of us, though, have sort of said, hey, we want to push back against this entire thing through actually building businesses and assets as a family team. And a lot of that's going to still fall disproportionately on individuals within the family. I know, Jeremy, I'm sure you've done a lot more work in your business than anyone else in your family. Now that you've got sons that are coming up into the business, that's changing.
• 3:27
  of this integrated experience. And so what we're gonna do in this month at the accelerator is talk about assets. If you wanna get our free lead magnet on this, familyteams.com slash assets is a great tool. And basically what I'm gonna give you guys is here are 10 ideas, kind of beginner ideas for how families can start to think this way. So just our top 10, so a quick PDF, you guys can look at that. Or you can jump into the accelerator and we'll spend an entire month talking about this. So Jeremy and Kristen are our
• 3:55
  Um, they are our community coaches. And so they're going to do a call. Um, and week one of the accelerator, you'll get the playbook, which is our top three kind of ways of thinking about assets over careers or how to begin to build family assets. That is going to help you guys figure that out across these three plays. And so we're just kind of saying what, which ones are two or three of these things that
• 4:15
  is realistic for your family. So you'll get that PDF during week one. During week two, you'll get on a Zoom call with Jeremy and Kristen and just interact with various people within the Accelerator to talk about this topic of building family assets. Week three, you're going to get a tutorial from me or from me in April about how this works out in our family. And then week four is the town hall where April, me, a couple of our kiddos get on the Zoom call and talk to you guys about this and any other family-based topic you guys want to talk about. So...
• 4:44
  That is the accelerator. We encourage you guys to jump over there, especially this month, if you're interested in talking about this topic of what does it mean to build family assets? So I'm very interested to get to get an understanding from you guys, Jeremy and Kristen, about like, how did you begin to think about this topic for you? How do you have you thought about work, assets, career? I'm just curious how this sort of began and even maybe transitioned as you guys have thought more and more about this topic.
• 5:13
  Yeah. So I have a commercial fire alarm business. And I thought in the beginning stages of it, it's like, this is great. It's providing for the family. Maybe one of my kids might want to take it over when they get older. And it was just kind of something I did. And then, but it was all the way from the family. And then,
• 5:34
  really just had that mindset of let my kids decide what they want to do and what they wanted to be when they grew up. And then we dove into this family teams world and kind of started learning about that. And then also stepped into Family Inc. And that really gave us a different mind shift of like integrating the family into different portions of our lives, training them in ways, um, and really changing our whole mindset to allow the kids to, um,
• 6:05
  be a part of what we're doing right now while limiting them, not limiting them, but knowing that it's not limiting them to direct them in a way that provides for the family as a whole. Yeah. I know that's a lot of people's questions. Oh, if I start a business that integrates my family, my kids, then am I already sort of precluding who they are going to be when they grow up? It's like,
• 6:28
  Again, when you look at it through that identity lens, it all gets a little fuzzy. But if you say, hey, this is an option, I'd love to be able to work with my kids or see, you know, my sons get involved in this business someday, in your guys's case, I think that's a really, it's a very different way to kind of frame up what it means to have a family business. Kristen, what about you? How have you thought about this topic?
• 6:50
  I mean, honestly, I have played the idea of standing on the precipice of adulting as our kids have grown. Our oldest son is now ready to turn 20 and they go down from there. But I keep thinking about when I was graduating high school.
• 7:15
  And the limitless possibilities, what I could be, what I was going to choose, and watching my children start getting to that place, I just keep thinking, like, what a crazy idea that the whole world is yours. Please go explore every corner until you find exactly the right thing you were meant to do. Um...
• 7:44
  It sounds just terrifying, honestly. Yeah. And so, you know, helping them and guiding them and in kindness limiting the exponential possibilities is really a gift that we can give to the kids. Yeah. Yeah.
• 8:03
  And we're not asking them to all look the same and do the same thing. We don't need our oldest does CAD drafting and computer aided design, which goes great with Jeremy's business. But he didn't necessarily get into that because it would benefit the family business. It just happened to work out that way. And we're so thankful. Like that is a true provision from the Lord.
• 8:28
  in this process because we were still learning about this mind shift when he had already started taking some college classes to become certified in that. So, um, um,
• 8:42
  It really has been a huge, huge mind shift. I think Jeremy was is probably more wired to think this way than I was about like legacy and longevity. And so he's had a longer time thinking about it. But I think it was like if we get lucky sort of thing. Some of these guys will join forces. Yeah.
• 9:07
  But in the meantime, since this has played out, it's just changed all of life. Yeah. In really great ways. Yeah. Another way to think about, I think the way you're describing this whole like category is why shouldn't it be who, you know, over what? So what basically we've said to kids is what matters is what you want to do or what you want to like, like what kind of work you want to get into.
• 9:34
  What's way down the list is who you get to do it with. But sometimes the who for a lot of us is more important. And what if you have, what if you raise your family with an incredibly high value for the who? Like, like, yeah, you could, there's lots of different things you can do, uh, to potentially, um, provide income to have gainful, uh, work, um, to create value in the economy. Yeah.
• 9:59
  But the who, like you're going to spend most of your like life working with and beside people like joining teams and doing things that are producing value in the world. And how many of us would say, hey, look, I would be happy for the range of things to shrink differently.
• 10:21
  If I got to do that with the people I love the most, the people that I'm going to be in long-term relationship with, I want to be on teams with people that I'm closest with. And that will allow me to live and experience this integrated lifestyle. And this might sound revolutionary to some of you guys, but this is the way the vast majority of human history worked. I mean, people did not...
• 10:46
  grow up and say, what do I want to be? Like, well, what kind of, you know, work do I want to do? The entire world is open to me. Let me just check out different things. And, you know, that's just not the way the world works. The reason why so many people's last names are associated with actual work, the Smiths, the Bakers, you know, the reason for that was because their families were committed and were known for certain kinds of work and within specific industries. Yeah.
• 11:15
  And there's lots of different gifts that you can bring to that. So your son might bring his ability to do computer-aided design into what Jeremy's doing. You could have other ones of your son's end up... They might bring something completely different into that. There's a range...
• 11:35
  Within most businesses, there's lots and lots of different potential gifts that can be actualized as well as saying, hey, there's really nothing for you here within with your particular skill set and my work. But let us then help you start something like, but let's again, that's still putting the who first if we're going to do that together versus, hey, why don't you move a thousand miles away and become a really, really good employee of another man's family family.
• 12:02
  Which again is an option that works, but I don't understand why it should be the default. That's really what we're going to challenge here this month. That there's another, probably for so many families, there's a better option than that, that they haven't even considered that would work better.
• 12:18
  better for them, but it's just, they've, this isn't something that we really encourage. We don't talk to our kids through career counseling about the who is being the most important. That's not a part of the discussion. So that's, that's part of what we're stirring up here. Okay. So that's the first play that we're going to hit is, um, assets over careers. So we've kind of like, kind of teased that tension out.
• 12:43
  All right. I want to talk a little bit about like some of the specifics and get really practical. One of the things I love about the nettings is they they just dive in and do stuff. And so I wrote in this PDF that you guys can get, familyteams.com slash assets, my top 10 ideas for kind of beginner projects that you might want to think about trying to do. Pick one or two of these.
• 13:06
  And just experience what it's like to be a team doing productive work together. You know, can do it with little kids, can do it with teenagers, whatever sort of situation your family's in. You guys have done, so, you know, let me just read this list. I love this list. So Jeremy and Kristen came prepared. They read that play and then they made their own list.
• 13:25
  Summer suppers, which I'm definitely going to steal from you guys. The nettings as a team put on different suppers with their friends and neighbors. Cleaning zones and general tidiness. So how do you actually activate your kids to participate in cleaning, cutting firewood? Airbnb cleaning, acquiring more rental properties and doing the flips together. Camper rentals and cleaning and delivery and setup. Farm chores, mission trips. They went to Mexico to build a house.
• 13:53
  service nights in rhythm, loaning groups of kids to people who need help, prepping for home church, taking kids to township meetings, fireboard meetings, all the political stuff that Jeremy's going to take over there in Centerberg. Why not bring the kids along for that kind of stuff?
• 14:08
  So, uh, these are just examples of, Hey guys, let's just do this together. Like there's a lot you can do together. So when you hear that list, I just love for both Jeremy and then Kristen, you guys pick one of those things and kind of go one layer deeper. Why did you choose to do that, uh, with your family and how did that help you?
• 14:28
  you guys build, how did that build, build up your family as a team? Probably for me, it'd be the acquisition of rental properties and flipping them together. I think, cause for one, I'm being in commercial construction. It's hard for me to integrate the smaller kids. Um, I, the two older kids are working with me now and they can be on job sites, but like there's age limits and stuff that I can't bring my younger kids to work. Um, um,
• 14:52
  But the great thing is like they see the older kids coming and they're like, when do I get to go to work with you? And so we bought a rental property and being able to work on that together as a family from KO, who's six up to Chase, who was 18 at the time, really helped out and they all could participate. And there was all jobs for all of them to do. And
• 15:16
  so they got paid and we paid them to do it and so they was all encouraging and they leave them by your time clock yes where you put your slip and paper in and it's dancing yeah so it just seeing and then being able to see the fruit of that once we got it done and then we rented it out as an airbnb for a while and they could see see the benefits of their hard work mm-hmm
• 15:42
  So good. So yeah. So doing, imagine you guys, and this of course, again, this is not going to work for everybody, but there's different ways of playing this out. Like buying a property and seeing it in really rough shape. And then, you know, a lot of people watch, you know, these different shows because it's so fun to watch a house get flipped in 30 minutes. It doesn't actually happen that fast in real life. That's extremely exhausting. And yeah, a massive project.
• 16:12
  But it is amazing to get to do that together and then you slowly see the transformation and then you get to experience the celebration of what it means for us to like actually accomplish this massively difficult project. And wow, what a cool thing to get to do online.
• 16:27
  this is something that I, another thing that I, I dream about, I, you know, I'm not, not at all handy, but you know, all of my, my sons, you know, my two son-in-laws and my son, they're all much more construction, uh, have, you know, a plus years each of construction experience. So I'm like, okay guys, when are we going to be able to like, so we've done a lot of projects or seen those guys have done a ton of like, of startup and building together, but I would love to do a, like a, just a family home flip. Like you guys have done. It's amazing. Yeah.
• 16:57
  Okay. What, um, Kristen, why don't you grab another one of these and get, tease us, tease us a little bit. I think that the most foundational is the tidying of the home as a team. And obviously I'm in the home the most. So that fits my category better. Um,
• 17:15
  But in our house, no one rests until everyone can rest. And so if there's a job to do, we have trained the kids that everyone's on deck, everyone's helping, everyone has a part. Nobody's unloading the groceries by themselves. We're unloading them, we're putting them away together.
• 17:36
  And if we want to be able to host things and to have people over, which there's always tons of people at our house multiple times a week, not even to mention the teenagers that are just there constantly.
• 17:53
  If we want to be able to do those things and they love those things, we have to be kind of always on the verge of tidy and guest ready. And so our daily work of cleaning zones is,
• 18:10
  who's zone two, the kitchen needs swept, that sort of thing is foundational. Then there's no overwhelm. There's no, we're not entertaining. We're showing hospitality because infused in our everyday life,
• 18:26
  is the preparation for what's coming later in the evening or it's just what we do anyhow. And so then using our house as an asset, as a kingdom outpost is so much easier. It's already pretty much ready to go. We can carry off the summer suppers and,
• 18:47
  can have up to 80 people there on every Thursday through the summer. And so we can carry those off. Everyone has a job, whether it's setting up tables, setting out...
• 18:58
  plates, whatever it is, everything's divvied up. So we can do that. It's an hour. It's an hour's work, maybe. And then we get to hang out with all of our best friends and anybody who wants to come for the whole evening and have a blast. So...
• 19:17
  Awesome. So good, you guys. Yeah, I feel like the thing that kind of the paradigm shift you're sharing, Kristen, is for every family who's listening to this thinking, you know, there's just too much work to do. There's too much physical work. I'm just exhausted all the time. Those challenges of being a family, they're also massive, massive opportunities for team building. Right. Obviously, when the kids are really little, that's that's difficult. There's sometimes you are just trapped in a lot of physical work and not getting a lot of help.
• 19:44
  But as you train your kids as early as you can to be a fully participating member of the family team, the more physical work there is to do, the more opportunity there is for that kind of team building, for that experience of like, let's do this together. Let's pull this off. And, you know, we found the same thing that when you if you want to see your house become that outpost of the kingdom.
• 20:04
  then it's a fully integrated experience for the whole family. Because when you clean the house, cook the meal, invite your friends over, have the experience, really minister to other people in your community and get to experience that, it's totally integrated as a part of the family. And everyone in the family can feel what it's like to contribute to something like that. And so, man, it's a really cool experience. So, yeah, I think that...
• 20:31
  I think sometimes we overemphasize the challenge of like having lots of littles. And I know that for a lot of people, when they're in that phase, it can feel like it's forever. But man, there's a lot more to family life after that. So you guys are kind of in the thick of like having all these, you know, kind of around teenaged boys, you know, some that are a little bit older, a little bit younger. But just like that's the bulk that you have like an army now that you can like...
• 20:55
  throw it at anything. Their house of reference a lot. They've all been grown up, so they all know, like, hey, we got this to get done. Let's just get it done. That's so awesome. Man, that's such a cool experience to have. Obviously, it takes a lot of training. It takes a lot of team building. But that's part of what is really, really, really,
• 21:16
  what we we're all about doing as families anyway so all right the last play is um how every family can build legacy assets so one of the things that we're really big into is the understanding that okay we can talk about you know the challenges when their kids are really little and sometimes we talk a lot about that because a lot of people feel stuck in that phase and they're challenged there then there's this amazing phase that you can move into if you're really training your kids and building a team which is the feeling of what it's like and
• 21:42
  to actually accomplish big things together, doing hard things and, and, and, and feeling the strength of the family team growing and growing and growing. And then your kids grow up, they get married. And what happens next? Like, is there, is this like an inevitability of this whole thing starting over? Well, one of the values of, um,
• 22:01
  Having this experience of working together and getting all the muscle memory, what it means to start businesses and build assets, is it creates this enormous gravity towards a location in the future as your kids are becoming adults, getting married, and thinking about the future.
• 22:16
  And so we always want to signal to families, hey, there's a massive opportunity coming down the road, which is that if you start building legacy assets in a location, then the likelihood that you're going to experience sort of this multi-generational family legacy where your kids, you know, maybe they'll spend a season at other places, but a large number, percentage of your kids will end up really settling and working together together.
• 22:46
  into their adulthood, you can make that a much more likely possibility for you and for them. It's again, you're not we're not chaining our kids to a location. But for many people, it's just not it's not a very realistic or exciting option for them to to be a part of the family's like longer legacy because there's just nothing there to help them.
• 23:07
  But man, if you're helping them with getting a job, helping them with raising their kids, helping them with just a sense of culture and in community, there's a lot of, you know, in-laws and kids and then your future grandkids that will just be super attracted to that. Right. So we're in the thick of that. But I feel like what a lot of people don't understand is there's a really foundational element to doing this sort of economic activity.