David Henzel

Absolutely.

David Henzel

Thank you for having me on.

David Henzel

There are a lot of things that are important to being an entrepreneur.

David Henzel

Something that I struggled with was not the entrepreneurial side of things, but preferably having a balanced life, and having a private life aside from business.

I was always the guy that focused 120% on the business and hoped that the home life somehow magically works out. That’s something that comes to mind about entrepreneurship.

David Henzel

Sure. It’s a funny story how we came up with this.

One day, I came home after a long meeting about the roles and responsibilities in my business, and I was sitting on my couch at home, and my daughter needed a diaper change. I point this out to my wife saying, “Hey Honey, look. Emma needs a diaper change.” And my wife was upset that I pointed this out to her and didn’t do it myself, and I was pondering like, “Why are we fighting about this?”

David Henzel

My wife does it most of the time, changing the diapers, and I’m okay with doing it, but how should I know that it’s my turn at 8:30 PM on this Tuesday? And then, I realize that we never talked about the roles and responsibilities in our home life.

The very next morning, we sat down and split these roles and responsibilities out, and this took away 80% of all the friction we ever had in our relationship because all this unspoken expectation went away.

David Henzel

It was, so eye-opening that applying these simple business principles to our personal life was so impactful to have a balanced life that we started to do more of this. This had a crazy impact on our general happiness.

David Henzel

It changed my business life pretty drastically, but it’s maybe almost a different story.

My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer three and a half years ago. This was a pretty big wake up call for me given the fact that I also lost both parents through cancer. It was pretty extreme for me, and this made me think about me, laying on my deathbed and looking back in my life, and thinking, “Did I do what I was supposed to do? Did I have the impact that I want to have?” and “Will I die would regrets?”

I always knew that I want to have a significant impact on people’s lives, a positive impact of course. I was just kind of “living the American dream” of amassing as much stuff as possible, and making as much money as possible.

I realized my business was not having a significant impact on people’s lives. I was just having an impact in our employee’s lives, but none in the bigger picture. I wasn’t living a balanced life.

David Henzel

After this experience, I decided to make sense to sell my business even though it was thriving and to do something else that has a more significant impact. I decided to pick up this idea to teach this framework that my wife and I came up with applying business principles to our home life. I teach this to other people, and this is what I’ve been doing for a while now.

David Henzel

There are tons of stuff, and those are simple things once you think about the elements of a balanced life. If you would not do this in the business, how catastrophic this would be.

David Henzel

Those would be just having regular meetings, sitting down and planning, setting goals, budgeting. All this stuff you take for granted in the business, apply this to your home life.

A fundamental one that you usually do in the business is that you sit down and think about what’s your vision and mission of your business. What do you want to achieve with this business? What’s your goal? And what’s your ‘why’?

Most people have no clue what they want out of life. They just climb up the ladder of success in a frantic manner, without checking, is this ladder leaning against the right wall?

It’s a compelling experience to sit down with your spouse and to figure out what you want out of life.

David Henzel

A cool helper to do this is when you sit down and write down your bucket list. What kind of experience do you want in your life, and it’s an excellent tool to find out what you want, and you’ll learn a lot about your partner. It gives you a great list for future gifts for anniversaries.

David Henzel

You mean my bucket list or what I want to do with my life?

David Henzel

For my wife, she wants to live on a farm, have lots of animals, and be away from everything, and move closer back to our family because we’re originally from Germany, and we live in Los Angeles. We moved back to Europe. We live in Turkey now. And so, this was a big thing for my wife.

For me, was having an impact on people’s lives. This was the big thing for me, and I picked a few things and put them on my list, and managing happiness, the course was the first thing I tackled.

David Henzel

Yeah.

David Henzel

It’s something that I was wondering because I want to help people. I want to bring people together, but this could mean that I bring people apart because when you sit down and say “Hey, what do you want out of life?” and your partner wants five kids, and you don’t like kids, then this may be a deal breaker.

Many other things could lead to deal breakers, but I think it’s a good thing in case this happens because then, at least you know it now, and you can rip off the band-aid. It sounds a bit cruel, but I think it’s for the better if you’re not made for each other that you kind of find out earlier.

David Henzel

I sold my business early last year, and the most significant impact that I had was once I had the clear mission and vision statements, and knowing what I want out of life.

0Similar to your business, your vision statement is a filter to make better decisions because you have ideas all day long and you could go in ten different directions. But if you want to stay focused with your business, you just run these ideas through your vision and mission statement as a filter. Then, you can make the right decisions and stay on track.

David Henzel

I use it in the same manner in my personal life. When I have an opportunity to work or whatever it is, I run decisions through my filter, which is my mission, vision, and to my core values. Then, see if this is aligned with what I want to do or the person that I want to be or want to become.

It makes it easy to say ‘No’ and to have less fear of missing out some big things these days with social media and opportunity, and many things we can do to stay aligned and stay on track, and not get distracted.

David Henzel

The rules and responsibilities are pretty straightforward.

Usually, you’re together for a while, and when you live together, you have kind of a system like the things that you take care of the household and the things your partner takes care of the house.

David Henzel

You just list out the things where you have the most friction.

For my wife and I, it was mainly revolving around things with my daughter. Who puts her to the bed? Who picks her up? Who does X, Y, Z?

Sit down and talk about these friction points and negotiate out whose taking care of which part.

Then also, list out all the things that are already in the grooves that are on track.

For example, you go out shopping, and your partner does the cooking or whatever it is, and spell them out as well.

David Henzel

By doing this, you just set this framework. I don’t know if this is in your relationship, but we had this a lot like “I do everything. You do nothing,” arguments.

It’s straightforward. You just take out a list and say, “Hey, I would do this and this.” If you want to move something around, then you have a foundation to talk about it, and it’s not just an uncontrolled discussion.

David Henzel

One thing would be maybe how to solve problems in a relationship because usually, we only talk about the issues we have in our relationships when we fight. Then when we fight, we just want to win the argument. We don’t want to solve the issue. That doesn’t help in having a balanced life.

David Henzel

I was just thinking about this in the work scenario when your Vice President of Sales is not bringing in the sales you want, and you would not go there and yell at him. You would ask him like, “Hey, what’s the problem? Do you need more leads? Do you need more budget? What’s the issue?” You are solution oriented.

What works great is when you sit down once a week, and you have your family meeting, and you talk about the things that you were maybe fighting about, and you pick one. Then, you brainstorm about how you can make sure that this problem is not happening again in a solution-oriented manner. Not being emotionally involved into this.

It’s pretty miraculous what solutions and workarounds you can come up with and to remove these issues for good out of your life versus fixing stuff with duct tape.