Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
Family First: The Millionaire Dad Who Built Legacy Around His Kids | Mike McCarthy
Most entrepreneurs say they’re building for their family… but their calendar tells a different story.
In this episode, Brian sits down with Mike McCarthy—real estate entrepreneur, co-founder of GoBundance, and creator of FAMBUNDANCE, a mastermind for entrepreneurial families. Together, they dive into what it truly means to design your life around your values, not your workload.
Mike shares how he stepped away from the hustle culture and chose a path centered on intentional leadership, present parenting, and lasting legacy. He introduces the concept of the "enough number," helping high-achievers define how much is actually enough to live well without burning out.
This episode isn’t just about productivity. It’s about reclaiming your time, protecting what matters, and building a life that works for your whole family.
You’ll learn:
- How to calculate your “enough” number and create true work-life alignment
- Why mentorship that stings a little can lead to your biggest breakthroughs
- How FAMBUNDANCE helps families grow together through shared values
- What a purpose-driven calendar really looks like
Plus, Mike shares the best thing he’s done recently with his son, and why choosing experiences over excess may be the smartest business decision you make.
Want to learn more about Mike and his work?
📲 Instagram: @gomikemccarthy
🌐 GoBundance: gobundance.com
🌐 FAMBUNDANCE: fambundance.com
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
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Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
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How much of the work that I'm doing is for other people and for my own ego and how much of it is because I need to put food on the table and I need to pay my bills and I need to take care of my family, because we all have to work, generally to some level of affluence or income, in order to take care of our family. But we see entrepreneurs in GoBundance who have enough money to last them 10 lifetimes, but they're still working like they're going to lose it all. And they're working to do it for the family to your point, but at some point they're not doing it for the family anymore. Or 20 years and you have young kids, you could argue, hey, you have enough, you're really just doing this for yourself. So don't use the family as the excuse and say, hey, I'm doing this for my family. Be honest and say I love working.
Speaker 2:Hey, friends welcome back to Life Beyond the Briefs. Today's guest is someone who might just challenge everything you think you know about work, wealth and family. I'm talking with Mike McCarthy, a real estate entrepreneur, co-founder of GoBundance and the heartbeat behind Fambundance, the family-first mastermind helping parents build legacy without burnout. In this episode, mike shares how he restructured his entire life so business could serve his family, not steal from it. We dive into his powerful concept of the enough number, why mentorship should feel a little uncomfortable and how to stop scheduling your life around your work and start doing the reverse. If you've ever said I'm doing this for my family, but you barely see them, this episode is for you. Let's get into it.
Speaker 2:Hey guys, welcome back to the show Today. I have a real treat for you First time in a while that we're talking to somebody who has just no connection to legal whatsoever. In these episodes, I think for a show for law firm owners and for young lawyers can tend to be really the most interesting, because it's not messages that you will have heard before. And I will introduce our guest, mike McCarthy, by his accolades in just a minute. But, mike, how do you introduce yourself when you're meeting new people now? What do you say about yourself?
Speaker 1:I mean, I guess I usually just focus on being the leader of Fambundance and a father to two amazing children and a husband to Lindsay and I try to focus on the work that I do with respect to leaving a legacy, and that comes in many forms. Go Abundance, the mastermind group that I do with respect to leaving a legacy, and that comes in many forms. Gobundance, the mastermind group that I helped co-found, is certainly a place where we help a lot of entrepreneurs make big leaps and transformations in their life. So you know, including my family within that and launching the family division of GoBundance called Fambundance is really like the sweet spot of my personal mission and an organization and also my own family legacy all kind of wrapped into one. But that's mostly what I focus on. But I'm a real estate guy originally and have moved more towards doing transformational work, whether that's through individual work or through families.
Speaker 2:So I joined GoBundance in late 2021 and longtime listeners of this show will have heard me talk about it kind of off and on since then. You know, depending on who you, who you talk to, it's described as a tribe of healthy, wealthy, generous men who choose to live epic lives, or a bunch of badass millionaires. How do you describe it to people who you, who you're meeting for the first time?
Speaker 1:I mean usually, you know it'd be dependent on who I was talking to It'd be the first thing.
Speaker 1:But if I'm talking to somebody who has a fair amount of success professionally in their lives, whether it's, you know, leading teams and divisions on a W2 format, or whether they actually own their own business, their own practice, whatever it might be but if they fall in that category of being an entrepreneur and understanding the plight of what you go through when you're a leader and entrepreneur, I would describe it in a way that's really just about how we're a place where you can get the support you need when you've climbed to the top and you realize that you maybe left something along the way.
Speaker 1:Let something go along the way like your health or your relationships or having fun or giving back in your community, and so we're a tribe of lone wolves, if you will, guys and gals in the women's division who probably have outgrown some of their friendships and their personal network and they're probably the leader of their company or their team or their division, and so they understand that there's a certain amount of loneliness and isolation that comes along with that and inability to have the same conversations at a high level that you would have within GoBundance. Having those conversations in your regular day-to-day life might be really difficult or perhaps even impossible, because if you're worried about a multimillion dollar deal closing or how much how you overpaid in taxes the last year, if you're making a million dollars a year, most people are not going to think you have any problems. They're not going to.
Speaker 1:And if you share with them what your problems are, it might almost sound like you're not grateful for how successful you are. So we're an environment that helps you to reclaim the part of yourself that maybe you gave up as you were chasing success, but then to also do it in the comfort and the camaraderie of a brotherhood that will lift you up when you need it most. But also, if you're not showing up authentically, they'll call you out on that too. Sometimes we need friends who will tell us what we need to hear and not what we want to hear, and I think oftentimes GoBundance is a space where guys who normally get told yes to and mostly find people relatively agreeable around them because they're the leader of the pack, they need that space where it's more authentic and it's more geared towards them being able to share their challenges, no matter what level they're at.
Speaker 2:How far back does your involvement go? So I know former CEO, but when did you join?
Speaker 1:I mean I was on the original trips going with David, pat and Tim before we even called it GoBundance, so I've been with it the whole entire time. I've been an equity holder since the moment the organization was launched, albeit a much smaller equity piece when I started, and the reason I was CEO for the length of time I was was to earn more equity and also make sure that I could turn GoBundance into with the help of my partners, of course, but turn it into an organization that would be sustainable even if we weren't around, even if the elders were not here. How could we create something that's so organized and has such a deep culture that it would still be here after we all pass away?
Speaker 2:And you're somebody who could easily be described in the terms that you just used. You're also the regional owner of the Keller Williams Greater Pennsylvania area I've forgotten the term that you gave me franchises or area, depending on where you look 8,500 to 10,000 agents, I imagine. You got told yes, a lot, and so what is it that made you kind of seek out the accountability and the guidance from people that might not always tell you yes?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, one of my partners in GoBundance is a guy named David Osborne and you know he was introduced to me by my father as someone I should be a mentee of and should learn from. And you know I became friends with David and he helped me to really see a different pathway to being a wealthy man. I had always sort of had this image of like wearing a suit every day, not very nice to people, like kind of selfish, out for themselves and not fun Right. And so when I met David, he was all of the things that I thought you couldn't be. If you were, you were going to be wealthy. And I met him at a young age, like twenty one, twenty two, and he was 10 years ahead of me and had achieved a lot of success within Keller Williams and had done what I wanted to go do, so he was like the perfect mentor for me. I learned so much about how to do the job from David of regional director, which is selling franchises, launching franchises, helping bring together the initial group of agent owners that will be a part of that and casting the vision for it. And David taught me a ton about the processes and the sales pitch and how you pull that together.
Speaker 1:But what I didn't know was that he would teach me way more about life than he did business as my mentor and so, and that came through all of the times when he told me something that made me want to punch him in the face and I knew deep down inside that what he was saying was true. I just didn't want to face that reality. And then I would notice that once I faced that reality and once it was out in the open and I could accept the constructive criticism that when I implemented that into my life I got better, my business got better, my business got better, my relationships got better. Whatever it was that he was telling me that I didn't want to hear at the time, even though I, like I said I didn't like it at the moment and you know, maybe I jokingly said wanted to punch him in the face, but you know, just literally having reactions to what he's saying.
Speaker 1:But then over time, realizing there's two things on his advice was spot on. I just didn't want to see it. And two, his advice was always coming from a place of love, not a place of I want to criticize you or make you feel less than me or put you down. It was coming from a place of hey, I see greatness in you and I love you, so I'm going to tell you what maybe other people aren't willing to tell you about how you show up, and it was helpful. It was painful and it was also helpful. So he helped me to really realize the power in that.
Speaker 1:And you know, I've been obviously learning from many GoBundance members now and we have a much bigger community than just Pat, tim and David and I. But you know, david remains one of my closest friends. He's like an older brother. He lives down the street from me. So I'm continually being mentored by David, even to this day, and it's something that my life would not be the same without having someone like that in my life. And I think we all can find mentors like that if we are purposeful about looking for them and asking for their help and then actually being willing to implement the things that they're saying.
Speaker 2:What would you say about the structure of that relationship between you and David early on? The reason I'm asking that question is, you know, in the law there's an absolute dearth of mentorship, or at least people say there is right. It's very hard to find a mentor, even at the firm where you are, sometimes because of politics or because they're your boss. And you know, I think there's sometimes a scarcity mindset from the boss that if my associate is doing better, I'm going to have to pay them better, or maybe they're going to get up and leave and go somewhere else. And then when somebody gives you advice that makes you want to punch them in the face many times, that's the end of that relationship. But you must have had some structure around the relationship, meeting schedule or trips together or a baseline friendship that sustained and then helped you listen to his advice when he was giving it to you. So what would you tell somebody you know, the 21-year-old, 22-year-old version of you about finding and then keeping a mentor in your life?
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I think David and I's relationship is rare because a lot of times mentors are not meant to be lifelong mentors. So I'll preface it with. You know that's a very unique thing. I haven't seen that very often. I don't think that David has had very many mentees that have stuck around and grown into partners and friends with either.
Speaker 1:But I mean, there's a couple of things when looking for a mentor. Is anyone who would discount wanting to serve others for the reasons you listed wouldn't make a great mentor anyways. So I would say, ask people that you feel would be a good fit. But if they're not willing to sign up for the job and you can even explain to them here's what I'm looking for. I'd like a mentor to meet with me once a month to spend an hour with me and answer my questions and help me through how to approach legal stuff or my law firm or just life in general. But just being very clear up front what you're looking for and also don't just come with your handout.
Speaker 1:What will you do in return for the mentorship that you're going to get? Is there some value add that you can bring to their life? Is there something you could take off their plate, is there an entry point into their heart? Because unless you really get inside of a mentor's heart and they care for you, they're not going to give you the best advice anyway. So what you have to do is first build a relationship with someone and feel a resonance with them, and then be upfront with them about what type of mentorship you're asking for, and then, what are you expecting in return? Now, that's all what I would do if I was younger and didn't have a mentor. Obviously, I was very fortunate that my dad introduced me to somebody who became one of my best friends partners and has been my greatest mentor in life. So, you know, I think there's the idea, too, of knowing that you're worthy of not just friendships and great people that you're surrounded by. So, even if it's not a mentor, mentee relationship, we should all be in an accountability relationship, like somebody who's a peer, who maybe can't give us all the answers, but who's trying to fight for the same thing that you are, and you work together and you're an ally with them.
Speaker 1:Now, and I think the more you can collect collaborators instead of competitors people you feel like I'm competing with you the more you'll lean into the energy of abundance. I think you know we as human beings weren't you know, the most successful, and those have achieved the most are probably pretty competitive. I bet you, though, that if you looked at it, it's those who are the most collaborative are probably even more successful than those who are more competitive, and I think that GoBundance has been a great example of. There's been probably 20 mastermind groups that have spun out of GoBundance Like.
Speaker 1:Guys came in, saw what we were doing.
Speaker 1:They're like if these guys can do it, anyone can do it.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to go do my own thing, and I think what they usually find is that it's a lot harder than they think it will be, but we've let them completely copy our whole business model and even told them here's how you do it and given them advice, and some of them were competitors usually not direct competitors and we never looked at them as competitors.
Speaker 1:We could have very easily been creating competitors by giving all of our IP away and telling them what we do and how we do it, and encouraging them even to go do their own thing, but I think we've grown more through the desire to collaborate than we have the fear of competing. I think that members have also felt that energy. It sets the tone for us being a place where we share everything, and we just want you to be at your best, whatever that looks like. If it means starting your own mastermind that competes with ours, then to a certain degree we'll help you do that too, and so I think leaning into that type of energy is really helpful, whether you're looking for a mentee, a mentor or even just the right group of people to get around and to surround yourself with through a mastermind or any other community.
Speaker 2:But you're right that it's way harder to do than it looks. So we run Great Legal Marketing, we run two mastermind groups and we have a community group that doesn't meet in person and every once in a while there's a subset six or eight firms that'll then spin off and go. We're going to just self-organize. All right, good luck. Let me know where that is in a year, cause there's not somebody who puts the thing together and make sure that there's somebody interesting coming and speaking and that there's a unique experience, and those always kind of Peter out. But you do. You know the competitive advantage that you have now is you have a critical mass of 800 members, right, and most of the value of the membership and a mastermind group is actually coming from the membership and not from whoever the guru is at the front of the stage anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean we. Even even when I was leading GoBundance, I did a lot of training on how to facilitate groups and how to, how to do it in a way where they're self-organizing and they're member led, as opposed to one leader being the command and control style guru, if you will. And we often will say like I'd rather be the guide on the side than the sage on the stage. And you know, as a mastermind, owner and leader, our job is to unlock the collective wisdom of the group and then help them to find ways to exchange value amongst each other. And we do bring some of the value from the top, but the most powerful value is that that's created amongst members and happens even organically in a lot of ways. We have some ways to spur on organic, organic kind of coming together with pods or local chapters or micro tribes that meet on specific topics. But you know, but creating a platform and a system by which people can self-organize and exchange value on whatever it is that's most important to them.
Speaker 1:It's a fun game to play, but it's also I can't imagine having done this on my own. So having three partners that all think differently than me has been amazing. If I was just the guru. It'd be way more stressful and difficult, and less scalable too, to scale up the mastermind. If there's somebody who's looked at as the guru, then that person can generally only be spread so thin before. You can't sell a mastermind just on that guru and what?
Speaker 2:they bring? No exactly. All right, let's pivot a little bit and talk about family, which is why I think that's what we connected over to begin with. So you're the co-author of Miracle Morning for Parents and Children with Hal Elrod and you run Fambundance, which is the family-oriented chapter or organization GoBundance. So talk about kind of your evolution from like business leader if there was an evolution to from business leader if there was an evolution to. Family is actually really important.
Speaker 1:It's why we're doing all of this business building stuff anyway. Yeah, I mean, there was a time in 2015 when I was really thriving in life in multiple areas. My real estate company was crushing it. I had just replaced myself with an incredible team that made it so that I had a lot of freedom and we're actually on one of our GoBundance international trips and I decided that I would become the CEO of GoBundance and put myself you know, put my name in the hat, so to speak, of people who could lead for the next several years. And so, you know, I did that and I felt really great about it, but I had one reservation that kept nagging at me, which was that all of the time that I was going to put into GoBundance, I could have also put into my family, and so was I really going to go climb another mountain, even though I'd summited a pretty nice mountain in real estate already and I had a pretty good situation and lifestyle and plenty of time to spend with my younger kids, who are, I think, four and eight at the time.
Speaker 1:So I very quickly had to figure out how can I include my family in this decision and how can I actually make it so that, whatever work I'm doing within GoBundance is also going to serve my family, and so it became very natural to just start doing events where we would bring families together, and we held the first one in our backyard in Pennsylvania. We had 15 families come in and we laughed, we played, we had some keynote speakers, we had family exercises and it was a hit. All the kids loved it, all the adults loved it. All the families collectively were stronger when they left. So we knew we were on to something, and so during my time as CEO we did probably 30 or 40 of those events just bringing families together, whether they were at a local chapter level or our winter or summer retreats.
Speaker 1:We would usually do a bigger event, but it was really in an effort to make sure that all the time I was going to spend away from my family to build GoBundance would also in some way serve them.
Speaker 1:And the only way I could think to do that was to create a family division for all of our members' families, because I realized that they too might also feel the same way. They're off building these businesses, they're away from the family, and then we're creating this mastermind group where they travel away from their family even more, and so part of me was like man this is. We talk about having great relationships, but does our model actually serve that? And the only way that we could make sure it does is that we created a division for our teens and our kids and our wives and then a division for the families collectively so that they can lean in to GoBundance and get the same type of benefit. And then it's amazing what happens. When a family gets to experience what GoBundance is through a family event, then they're oftentimes much more supportive of the husband or the wife's involvement in GoBundance. They understand it a little bit more. It's not just this club that they're in where they talk about making more money. There's actual meat and potatoes behind it.
Speaker 2:All it's really interesting because that's exactly what I thought it was when I joined. Like I'm going to go learn the secret a lawyer, going to go learn the secrets of real estate and all of a sudden I'm going to have horizontal income and then I'm not going to have to work anymore. And of course that was 2021 and everybody was horizontal income, everything right, all kinds of streams of income. It's a 2025 is a little bit different right now, but, but my wife, I think, would not let me quit now because of the things that I've learned. Like we spent more time talking about in my pod at least talking about wives and kids and family stuff than we do about how do you make more money or how do you invest in another thing. So thank you for that number one.
Speaker 2:But I think what you have hit on is the problem with a lot of lawyers and a lot of business owners in general, which is we tell ourselves that we're going to work really hard to build this thing for the family and all it does is detract from our time with the family, except for whatever vacation days and trips you're taking, but even the trips like the conferences and the mastermind events you're almost never taking your kids with you. And so how have you and Lindsay structured the building of your businesses and the building of your income around raising two kids who now must be what? 14 and 18? Yeah, 16 and 12. 16 and 12, okay. So then either I did the math wrong or you did it wrong earlier.
Speaker 2:But, how have you structured that around? Like the biggest time commitment that any of us have, which is raising teenagers.
Speaker 1:I mean. So there's. I think that there's a couple of ways to look at this. One is when you say, hey, I'm gonna work this many hours a week, is it because you have a boss, you have a certain client load? Is it there might be a certain reason why you have to work X hours a week? Let's say it's 50 hours a week.
Speaker 1:I would argue that beyond you know, 40 or 50 hours a week of grinding and working and really focusing in on accomplishing tasks, to me there's not much more that can get done. A lot of the work then becomes work that is maybe just glorifying. Working longer maybe, is setting the pace, because you want the associates at your office to see that you're in first and outlast. And there becomes this sort of competition for who can work the hardest, and it's based on the long number of hours that are worked. And I think what's most important is what are the quality of the hours that you're working? And are you actually doing dollar productive activities while you're working and when you're not? Are you carving that time out to build yourself, to learn, to grow or to spend with your family, and are you being purposeful with that? And I would say that it's more important that you carve out the time for your family and for yourself than it is that you carve out the time to work a certain number of hours. I would first carve out what do I need to be at my best? What does my family need me for and need collectively for us to be at my best? What does my family need me for and need collectively for us to be at our best? And now, how do I fit work around that? And I think most people plug in their work schedule and then they maybe put in their gym stuff and stuff to take care of themselves doctor's appointments and then they look at like, okay, now where am I going to spend time with the family? And it might be just on the weekend, or they just eat dinner together, which is great, or maybe they only go on vacation twice a year and otherwise they're absent.
Speaker 1:And what you have to ask yourself is how much of the work that I'm doing is for other people and for my own ego and how much of it is because I need to put food on the table and I need to pay my bills and I need to take care of my family, because we all have to work, generally to some level of affluence or income in order to take care of our family. But we see entrepreneurs and go abundance who have enough money to last them 10 lifetimes, but they're still working like they're going to lose it all. And they're working to do it for the family to your point, but at some point they're not doing it for the family anymore, because if you have enough money to make it the next 10 years or 20 years and you have young kids, you could argue, hey, you have enough. You're really just doing this for yourself. So don't use the family as the excuse and say, hey, I'm doing this for my family.
Speaker 1:Be honest and say I love working. It makes me feel like I'm a badass and I love outworking people and I love putting in the long hours because it makes me feel significant and I like solving clients' cases and figuring out how to defend or arbitrate or litigate someone through something. They might really love that and that's great. Spend as much time as you want doing that, but then flip it on its head again and say how can you, though, make sure that you're showing up with still quality time with your family? So when you do eat dinner with them?
Speaker 1:Are you still on your phone checking work? Are you still checked out mentally and thinking about work? Are you fully present, asking questions about their lives and what's important to them and who they are as growing human beings? But I think we just get it backwards. We schedule the least important things first and we put more time and energy into our businesses than we do our families, and I think that that's okay to a certain degree. But you have to kind of know what's your number like, what are you willing to give up? Because at some point, if you have to kind of know what's your number Like, what are you willing to give up? Because at some point, if you have enough, you're working for no reason other than your internal drive to keep making money.
Speaker 2:I'm glad you came back to that, because I saw a clip of you either on another podcast or on Instagram talking about the enough number and you mentioned it twice in about three minutes. So I'm going to ask you about that when you're constructing constructing reverse engineering, back to like, what do I actually need? So many people in the lawyer community have never given any thought to that. So can you walk through how you would if you were doing this for the first time, how you would figure out what's my enough and when am I good?
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, one way to look at it is that if you know what your expenses are to live and you have saved enough capital to invest it wisely, then you're definitely at the enough level. If your investment income is paying your expenses and you're what we call 100 percenter meaning 100 percent of your expenses or more are covered by your passive income investing and so I look at it more as a cash flow issue than a net worth issue. It's nice to have a net worth that, hey, I can make it this long on this amount of money and there's a certain amount of runway and cushion that that gives. But if you want to know what my lifestyle is and maintain it and keep that lifestyle indefinitely and not have to worry about working any amount of hours, then it's just a function of understanding my expenses versus my effectiveness as an investor.
Speaker 1:And if you own your own law firm just because I know that might be a good chunk of your audience, then you also have to take into account are you the only lawyer that can run your law firm? Are you the best person for it? Even it might be that you have built such a great law firm and brand and name that you actually don't have to work anymore. And what if all you did was create the business and the structures and handled all the logistics behind it and had a great model where the attorneys that work for you can make great money and you just sit back and have a manager that runs all that? Now you own a law firm and you do zero work, so now, all of a sudden, your income as a lawyer, as someone who owns a practice, becomes passive. As long as you're working in the business and you're grinding it out and taking clients on, then it's not really a business that you own, it's a job.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean so. So many lawyers are, are, um, I analogize a lot between lawyers and real estate agents. Right, because because the it's like if I'm not working, I'm not making any income. Right, and so we build these practices and these that are around our names in the same way that many real estate agents have built practices around their names without any help. And then you have nowhere to back off to. Right, because all of your income is tied exactly to your dollar productive activities and none of it is tied to your scale.
Speaker 2:And this is the big challenge for small law firm owners in the age of AI and a little bit of venture capital money coming into the space, depending on which state you're in and whether your state ethics rules permit for that. But everybody kind of wants to get everybody who's thinking about this at all has in their mind getting to the space where I can do nothing and it'll just be my firm because I will have created all of these great rules and structures and procedures and hired great people and I'll just sit on a beach and collect a paycheck. I think you'd actually be bored with that. Most, most people who who've risen to the level where you can create a company that where you could do that, I think would probably be bored with that, and so the better question is I can confirm that.
Speaker 2:So the better question is all right. If you've got 40 hours a week, 35 hours a week that you're going to devote to working, what are the problems that you actually want to be solving in the company? So you can confirm that, what did you quit doing and then get bored with?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, when I stepped out of the CEO role of GoBundance and someone else stepped in at the beginning of 2020, now I had GoBundance was doing its thing, it didn't need me anymore and my real estate company was still thriving and I hadn't been working in it for the previous five years, and then COVID hit, and so there was this period of time where I really enjoyed getting to do nothing for about two or three weeks, yeah, for a long vacation, yeah. And then I just realized that, man, I was really bored and I started to feel less and less fulfilled every day, and so it came to a head, though my father got really sick, he passed away and the family went through some grieving with that, and obviously, you know, he was my business partner. So there were some things to wind down. But when we got on the other side of that, you know, I'd been like three or four years since I really like grinded on something and really put my full energy, and so that's actually when I decided to step back in this last year in the fall, to take back over the fan abundance portion of GoBundance and start curating those events again and build it back up, because it had kind of dwindled down to just being like one event a year. That was a great event, but it was fan abundance, was kind of a shell of what it had used to be.
Speaker 1:And so during that time though I just, you know, idle hands are the devil's play workshop, I think is the quote but you just, you know, you, my habits just weren't getting better because I had less to do. Actually, they were getting worse. I wasn't eating as good, I was drinking more, I was um, I stopped running and I wasn't being quite as um fit as I as I was. And you would think, oh, I had all this extra, I had more time, I should have put more energy into that stuff. But it's actually. I was missing this sort of main driving force. And now I just try to make sure that I work at those things at a reasonable pace, like I used to. If I was going to start a project, I would do everything I could every single day to move that project forward. Over time, I realized only about 80% of the shit I was doing even mattered.
Speaker 1:And as I've gotten older and wiser, I've been able to now take on projects but work through a team and also not force it. So my old self would have wanted Fambundance restored to its original glory, like this year, and have everything up and running and have multiple events and have it be this thriving, family-driven community all in a year. But now I understand that things take time, so I can operate on like a two or three year time horizon and plan two or three years in advance for what I want to have happen and then let the pieces fall in place, as opposed to me trying to force them into place every step of the way. So there's a different approach that I have now where I'm not getting obsessed or carried away with working long hours, but I am obsessed with making sure that I do the right things at the right time to be most effective as the leader of Fambundance, and it's less about the amount of time and more about the effectiveness of the time I do spend on that project. So it's a learning curve and it's a switch that I think you should learn how to turn off at some point, because you might really love business and being a lawyer.
Speaker 1:But there's a whole world out there too of possibilities, especially if you have a family, to go explore and enjoy your life, because life is short. So you have to ask yourself well, I have wanted to take one more case and one more client, or a hundred more, or would I have rather gone on these epic memory making vacations with my family? Like what, what's more important? You have to just make a decision. It's a and it's personal. There's no right or wrong, but there's a trade-off to what you focus on. You have to not focus on other stuff.
Speaker 2:We are going in, probably about the time that this episode will come out. We're going for three weeks to Italy with the family and we're taking my wife's parents and her brothers and we're going to Florence and Tuscany and Sorrento and Rome, and part of me is a little bit nervous about it's three weeks out of the office. I trusted the office would be okay. I'm worried that I'll be a little bit bored by the middle of that. But I think so many people get through their entire career, like longing for retirement, and then they get to retirement and they three weeks in, like now what do I do? Right? And so having these many not many vacations but extended breaks in between, we're just going to start experimenting with and see. Start seeing the world and seeing what it's like, see if we enjoy being out of the office for three weeks or if that's too long or not long enough or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, it's a good, good thing to experiment with and good for you to trust that you know that it might be worthwhile and that things will maybe be even more improved when you come back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what would that be like?
Speaker 1:I mean, it's a blow. Actually, it's worth stating that, if you do this right, it's a big blow to your ego, because oh, I know- what happens if you go away and everything gets better?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it will.
Speaker 1:If you hired the right people, it will actually. And if you're a true business owner, you'll return and it'll be better than how it was when you left it. And even in Kiyosaki's books, like the Cashflow Quadrant, that's how he defines a true business owner is that you could leave the business for six months and come back and it would be stronger than when you left. But that's just one of those things where you have to get really good at hiring people, and also it's very painful because the first few people you hire are probably not going to be the right people. It's like one of those things where you have to push through.
Speaker 1:A lot of people hire someone that doesn't work, they hire another person that doesn't work and they sort of give up on the dream Like I'm the best. No one could do this better than me. But if you get really clear on the fact that there's a junior associate or agent or whatever business you're in, who's hungry, who's willing to work 60 hours a week and who might actually be better if you taught them everything that you know might actually be better than you, and if you partner with that person and you don't have to work anymore and they're crushing it and then your clients are like oh, so-and-so is amazing, like we love working with them. It could be a blow to your ego.
Speaker 1:Your employees are like oh, ever since you turned the reins over to uh, to Brian, every everything has been way better. This is awesome, and they think they're giving you a compliment. But you're really like that's great. I'm so happy that everything's better now that I'm not here, but I would trade that all day long Like I don't. My ego doesn't need to hear that I'm the best. What I want is to create opportunity for others to grow and be leaders and to shine, and for me to be able to spend my time doing whatever it is that I want to do, like that's more important to me than than the thrill I get from working long hours or outworking or hustling culture, that type of thing.
Speaker 2:So all right, great place maybe to wrap this up. What's your perfect 40-hour week?
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, I would probably spend, you know, work-wise, I would spend probably 10 of those 40 hours looking at and reviewing current or future investments. I'd spend 10 of those hours working directly with the teams that lead my businesses and then I would spend probably about 10 hours just driving the ball forward on intellectual property and concepts that will deliver through Fambundance.
Speaker 2:I probably wouldn't work 40 hours, to honest yeah, so I I think I asked that question wrong or because I used 40 hours. There's an assumption that it was about work, but what's like? What's your perfect week, right? So I mean it's gonna be background, for that is like you know this the whole point is to do the stuff that don't that you want to do, right, and so you got your perfect week to design what. What are you doing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I'm going to you know, in a given week I'm going to have dinner with the family at least four or five times and we'll all ask questions. We'll have a family meeting where we all come together and talk about our goals and what's been happening that we're excited about and what our values are, how we've been living them, what the schedule looks like and what's coming up. We'll have a family game night on Monday night. So last night was family game night. We try to have a family movie night, which is a moving target a little bit. Usually we'll have a date night, my wife and I, either Wednesday or Thursday nights.
Speaker 1:Thursdays I do yoga with my wife, so we have an alignment meeting and breakfast that day as well, where we kind of get on the same page. So we're not trying to do that on our date nights. We have a separate space for that. And then you know, I'm usually doing like sauna, cold plunge, meditation, breath work, like first thing in the morning every morning, and then I'm hitting a workout of some sort, usually strength training, monday, wednesday, friday, and then yoga and a run on Tuesday, thursdays, and then I'll have like one or two podcast interviews a week, just like we're doing right here.
Speaker 1:And then I lead a couple of calls for GoBundance generally, you know one a week or so, although I cram them in usually into one week, and then I probably have like two or three hours every week of just people saying, hey, I saw you on Instagram, I want to connect, maybe we have some synergy or so-and-so said, we should meet. So I probably meet like three or four new people a week just that are coming into my inbox saying, hey, I saw this or can you help with that. So trying to look at future partnerships, building relationships, and a lot of those calls too are like serving GoBundance members who are just wanting to meet one of the elders, one of the founders, and pick their brain or ask them questions. So, yeah, so it'd be like a combination of taking care of myself, doing team meetings and one on ones and then spending a little bit of time just focusing on like moving the ball forward on the strategic side of fan fund and specifically, and then my estate plan right now has been taking a lot of time.
Speaker 2:If you're an estate planning lawyer, that's like a left turn from where we were. I imagine you're working on a. Is this like the legal part of it is taking a long time, or your legacy planning is taking a long time for you?
Speaker 1:Both Like first I had to figure out what I wanted to do and then, like, get my head wrapped around it and make sure that what I was thinking was accurate, cause I mean, I love what my lawyers came up with to begin with. It's not far from what I ended up arriving at, but I had to do a lot of work on who my trustees were going to be, and I just elected to have a board of two advisors that make big decisions, along with the trustee, so there's three people that make the larger decisions collectively by unanimous vote. And then figuring out that structure right there. It took me a long time to figure out. That's how I wanted to do it, because I don't want just one trustee, and I also want, eventually, for my children to have a chance to be co-trustees and be voted on as trustees by the advisors.
Speaker 1:And and the part that has taken the longest is doing research on making sure that I'm doing it the right, the absolute right way, and then that I could get my head wrapped around it, because it's like a foreign language, it's so complicated and, as I've gone through the process, both my lawyers and I have learned a thing or two about it all. So I do a monthly call for GoBundance called Legacy, your Family Plan, and, selfishly, I've been doing it as my own research project every month, just learning and learning and learning. I finally know what I'm going to do now. That's creating a family constitution and then a legacy letter that goes along with the actual hard structures, and that part is also something we've been working on for quite a while, so we're trying to get it all done this year.
Speaker 2:Awesome, all right, that's a lofty goal. Get it all done in 2025. Mike McCarthy, thank you for coming on. Where do you want to direct people to find out more about you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, just follow me on Instagram, it's go. Mike McCarthy is the handle. And then, yeah, if you have interest in GoBundance, it's just GoBundancecom, and you can search FanBundancecom as well if you're interested in some of the family stuff that we do too.
