The Cost of Pretending You Have It Together

The line was buried in the contract where lawyers stop reading carefully. It said the exit payout would be a percentage of profit. Two years of profit. Which meant his mentor had two years to make sure that number stayed at zero.

By the time Matt did the math, every dollar the company earned had been reinvested into scaling the company he no longer owned. The money he thought was his future had been spent on someone else’s growth.

That was 2018. The year his exit destroyed him.

Here’s the part that ruined him, though. Not the money. The silence.

He didn’t tell people. A lot of them assumed the exit had gone well. He posted on social media like nothing had happened. He showed up Monday nights to his softball league and high-fived guys after base hits and talked about the Cubs. He had a mentor at the time, a real one, not a guru, someone who could have helped him see straight or maybe even claw something back. And Matt didn’t pick up the phone. He was too embarrassed to admit what had happened. Too proud to look weak in front of a man whose entire job was to keep him from making the kind of mistakes he had just made.

That’s what I keep coming back to in his story. Not the contract. Not the loss. The decision to carry it alone.

The High-Achiever’s Tax

He built something. He won at something. He’s been winning since he was a kid, since the sports field or the classroom or the first sales job. And somewhere along the way he picked up a rule that was never written down anywhere but enforced everywhere. *Don’t look weak. Don’t ask for help. Don’t say the thing.*

So when the marriage starts cracking, he doesn’t tell anyone. When the business loses a six-figure client, he doesn’t tell anyone. When his dad dies or his kid gets diagnosed or he hasn’t slept right in eight months, he doesn’t tell anyone. He shows up to the softball game. He posts the wins. He says fine when his wife asks how he is. And nobody finds out anything is wrong until the divorce papers hit, and then everyone says the same sentence in the same tone, *wait, what happened?*

This is the tax on being the strong one. You pay it in private, by yourself, until you can’t.

I’ve paid it. I paid it during my divorce, when the marriage I had publicly anchored my life to was falling apart in slow motion, and I was still smiling for cameras and producing content and telling myself God had me. He did. But God was not the same thing as a friend at three in the morning, and I didn’t have one of those. I had a brand to maintain.

The Math we Never Run

Here’s what Matt said that I haven’t been able to put down.

We treat our businesses like systems. We track leads and conversion rates and profit margin and pipeline velocity. We can tell you, to the dollar, what one new client is worth to us. We have dashboards. We have KPIs. We have operating systems for every function of the company.

And then we go home and just wing the marriage.

We wing being a father. We wing being a husband. We wing being a son and a friend and a man of faith. We use language for our businesses we would never use for our families, *systems, intentionality, structure*, and the second the work day ends, we put it down and walk into the most important room of our lives without a single metric to tell us whether we’re winning.

Then ten years pass and the kids don’t call and the wife is checked out and we can’t figure out where it went sideways, when actually we know exactly where it went sideways. It went sideways at the same place every relationship goes sideways. We stopped paying attention. Because we never built a system to make sure we kept paying attention.

The Operating System

Here is what Matt and his wife do. I’m writing this down because I want to do it.

Once a quarter, they meet for one hour. They call it a family meeting. They go through the finances together, the kids’ schedules, the upcoming sports seasons, who they are dating each other on which weekends, what trips they’re planning, what is and isn’t working. He gives her a quick report on the businesses. She doesn’t want to drill into the numbers anymore, but she wants to know they’re stable. She wants to know the marriage is moving in a direction. The meeting is one hour. They’ve done nine of them. She thought he was insane the first two times. She can’t wait for the tenth.

Twice a month, they do a three-hour date night. No kids, no phones. Sometimes a movie. Sometimes a meal. Sometimes nothing impressive at all. The point isn’t the activity. The point is that it’s on the calendar and that nothing moves it. If a client wants a call during date night, the client doesn’t get the call. Matt will lose the sale before he loses the marriage. He has decided this in advance, which is the only time a decision like that can actually hold.

Every night, the phone goes in a different room for thirty minutes. Different room. Not face-down on the counter. Not in a pocket on silent. *In a different room.* And during those thirty minutes, he’s with his kids. They talk. They tell him about the day. He lets them lead. Thirty minutes a day, every day, no exceptions. It’s so small it sounds embarrassing, until you ask yourself the last time you went thirty consecutive minutes with your kids without your phone in your peripheral vision.

And once a quarter, each kid gets a date with him. Just them. He doesn’t plan it, they do, and he goes wherever they want to go. His seven-year-old daughter wanted Topgolf, so they went to Topgolf. She came down the stairs in a dress she picked out herself. He hadn’t asked her to. She just wanted to dress up because she was going on a date with her dad.

That’s the kind of detail that breaks me a little.

The ROI of Joy

If you are a high-achiever reading this, you have already done the math in your head and decided this sounds like a lot of time. Two date nights a month. A quarterly family meeting. Thirty minutes a night. Plus the individual kid dates. Plus the trip a year. You are running the same calculation on his life that he used to run on his.

Here is the calculation Matt runs now. The ROI of all of this is joy. And on the way to joy, your wife gets clearer, your kids behave better, your house gets quieter, your sleep improves, your stress drops, and your business makes more money because you are not carrying around a sack of unprocessed personal failure into every sales call. The man who has his house in order sells differently than the man who is hiding from his house at work.

This is the part that high-achievers miss. Time you put into your family is not subtracted from your business. It is invested into the conditions that make your business possible. The man with a calm home builds a calmer company. The man whose marriage is solid takes the bold swing because there is somewhere to come home to when it doesn’t land.

What it Actually Costs to Stay Invisible

Matt has one fear, he said. One. He has been through business failure, financial loss, a marriage that almost ended, the kind of public exit that should have humiliated him.

One fear remains. That his kids won’t want to spend time with him when they don’t have to.

That is the fear under the fear, for most of us. Not the business one. Not the money one. The slow one. The one where you wake up at sixty-five and your son lives across the country and calls twice a year and you can’t quite remember when that started happening.

That fear is what the operating system protects against. Not in a guaranteed way, nothing is guaranteed, but in the only way that matters. By forcing the question of *am I showing up?* into the calendar, where it can be answered yes or no on a Tuesday in November, and not deferred to some imagined future where you’ll get to it after this next quarter, this next launch, this next thing.

The whole point of brotherhood, Matt’s whole point about the whole thing, is that no man builds this alone. You don’t decide to put the phone in a different room and then keep doing it for eleven years on willpower. You decide once, and then you have three other men who ask you about it on Tuesdays, and that’s the only reason you actually do it.

The brotherhood exists because the system exists because the silence is what’s killing us.

You Were Made for This

Most men reading this won’t make a single change. They’ll feel the pull and put the phone back in their pocket and the calendar will stay the same and the kid will keep asking when they’re going to do something together and the answer will keep being soon.

A few will.

A few will book the quarterly meeting. Schedule the date night. Put the phone in a different room tonight, just to see what happens. Text three guys and say, hey, I want to start meeting. I don’t know what we’d call it. I just want to stop pretending I have this all figured out.

If that’s you, you already know which one you are. The cost of staying invisible has already gone up enough that you can feel it. The question now isn’t whether you build the system. It’s whether you build it before or after the thing you’re avoiding finally arrives.

Build it before.

The world is waiting. Create your art.

#createyourart

If this resonated, you can hear more conversations like this every week on the Create Your Art Podcast. Listen here or follow along at 1898creative.com.

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Full Transcript:

Matt: Frankly, I didn’t really even tell people that the business didn’t go well. A lot of people assumed that it did. I’ll be honest with you, just like all men out there, high achievers, you don’t want to look weak. There’s not a one-size-fits-all place. It’s figuring out who do you connect with and where do you think you’re going to get the biggest growth. Some guys need to literally be kicked in the ass. I don’t have a lot of fears in life, but that’s one of my only fears. I want my kids to want to spend time with me when they don’t have to spend time with me.

Darren: Hey Matt, to get us started today, I would love for you to give us an understanding of the Lighthouse Brotherhood and why that’s important to you, and why helping high-achieving men find community and accountability and brotherhood is so important to you.

Matt: I appreciate you having me on, Darren. This is something that’s been on my heart and in spirit for the last decade. About eight years ago, I made an attempt at launching something similar to this. At the time I was bodybuilding. There was a huge health focus in the men’s group I was building back then. But I had a massive financial loss that kind of set that back. I’ll explain how God worked through that.

The Lighthouse Brotherhood itself, about a year and a half ago, I’m a pretty spiritual guy, I’m a Christian, and I had a message come to me that I’m supposed to help a lot of men specifically and bring the family unit back to the world.

I started with my network. I have some really high-achieving guys in my network. I built a group chat. I actually call it the stud muffin group chat. They’re great guys, I love them, they’re my boys. These are guys across my life that I’ve stayed friends with, which I know a lot of guys watching this, sometimes that’s difficult to do. The problem is, it just became a meme chat where we sent funny memes to each other. I was hoping that it became more of a mini brotherhood. Not paid or anything, just, hey, we’re going to come together. And it never really came to fruition.

So I started sitting down with the idea of, should I start a men’s group? I have a couple of other companies I run. One is a traditional roofing business. The other is business consulting. And in business consulting, 60% of my conversations are not around sales, marketing, how to grow their companies. They’re around limiting beliefs, family stuff, traumas they’re facing. These are high-achieving men who have built multimillion-dollar companies, but they’re still struggling with all of that.

So the goal is, myself included, not just, hey, I think I’m going to be the leader. It’s more, I was looking for a brother. I was looking for a brotherhood. And I’m like, well, why don’t I just build it? I brought on a partner named Ruslan, and he’s been awesome. We’re looking to help as many men as we can.

Darren: I love that. It’s been so cool to sit with you guys over the last few months as we’ve started to work together on your content and your podcast and all the things you’re doing. But just to hear the heartbeat behind this. You had that experience where you go, hey, I’m doing some things and I feel this call, this pull. I want to make impact that’s bigger than just my business. At this time, was business going well for you?

Matt: Right now, business is booming. We’re blessed and highly favored, that’s one of my statements. Both businesses are doing real well. We’re not perfect, we’re going through learning curves, we’re trying to scale. With our roofing business, we’re up 5X this year, which is God’s hand in the business. With the consulting business, over the last year and a half, we went from zero to just under about $1.5 million ARR for that company.

I got two amazing teams that we’ve built. But really what’s my passion, in my whole life I’m like, man, I really want a life coach. But in the world of coaching, there are so many different life coaches out there. What do we actually do, who do we serve, and what’s going to be the greatest impact? Yes, we want to help millions of men and families, that’s our goal. But for me, it’s those one-off touches. I can share some cool stories along the way that I feel like God put us together and we were able to help them change their life.

Darren: What I love is that you’re somebody who has two successful businesses, you have things working for you, blessed and highly favored as you said. And then there’s this thing underneath it that goes, I’ve got more to give. I have this calling, this thing. So can you take me to that moment? The moment you felt like you had this download, this Holy Spirit download. Take me to that moment where you’re going, I’ve got to do something more than just this. What was going on emotionally? What were you feeling at that time?

Matt: It hasn’t always been this way. Just like any entrepreneur, I’ve had massive failures. In 2018, I was about to exit my company, and I guess I’ll share it on this podcast. The exit happened, but it wasn’t pretty. I lost a significant amount of money that I thought was going to happen.

I had a mentor at the time, and in our exit contract there was one line that my lawyer didn’t catch. He basically took the next two years and used the entirety of the profits of the business to scale the company up. The business showed zero profit, which I had made a specific deal that I would take a percentage of profit. Anybody listening, if you exit a company, never do that. Always take a set number, take a set multiple. I was young at the time. And it put me back massively.

That year, while I was getting prepared to exit, I had started doing a ton of content. I made about 700 videos across different platforms. I was on a bunch of podcasts. I was going to create this group, a different group. But I think God, it was supposed to happen, because as everyone knows, when you look back, it all makes sense. When you’re in it, it sucks. But every time I look back at that moment, I realized one, I wasn’t mature enough at the time to handle the success that was coming. Two, my wife and I weren’t in a great position in our marriage. Honestly, we probably would have divorced each other.

It’s very interesting how that had to happen. Over the last seven, eight years, we rebuilt. Not only did we rebuild our financial situation, our marriage is stronger than ever. We have two young kids, nine and seven, and we’re blessed. The kids are amazing.

But along the way, one of the keys I saw was that I didn’t really have anywhere to go. Just like all men out there, high achievers, you don’t want to look weak. So frankly, I didn’t really even tell people that the exit didn’t go well. A lot of people assumed that it did. I put up a front and led through that world, which is not a great place to be. I had a phenomenal mentor at the time, and even with him, I was so weak that I didn’t want to share with him the situation. He could have helped me immensely.

For men listening to this podcast, the biggest thing is, it’s okay. You’re not weak. You need someone you can go to. That’s why we created the Lighthouse Brotherhood, because we want to have a group, selected or self-selected, where we’re talking about these things so we can help high-achieving men through some of the struggles they’re facing. Most of life, you’re not going to go to your church and tell all your buddies that your marriage is struggling. Instead, what’s going to happen is that divorce creeps up, and then everyone’s like, wait, what happened? How did that happen?

Looking back now, with God working through this, relationships came out of nowhere, finances kicked back in. I’m a big believer in the eleventh-hour parable, where God will always give you back 10 to 100X what you lost. I think I had to go through that to get to where I’m at today, where I feel like a much more complete guy. Back then I was still insecure and I would have done stupid stuff with my money.

Darren: As you’re talking, I’m thinking of so many things in my life. I was one who went through divorce, lost everything that I thought was, and as a man of faith, I was like, oh, God’s got me the whole time. Like nothing’s going to happen. And all of a sudden it all falls apart and you go, what the heck? Your life gets flipped upside down. For me, it was a marriage, but for other guys out there, it might be business. Like that one line in the contract for you that literally uprooted everything you thought you had.

There are so many moments in our life that we think, oh, we got this, we’re good, everything’s solid. And when it flips upside down, it breaks apart everything we hold true. What I love about your story, Matt, is the breaking down, the replanting of who you were, was actually what allowed you to grow and become who you are today. And actually allowed you to become the artist that you’re starting to be today. Around here, art doesn’t mean just creativity and painting. It’s the art of your life and the things you’re getting to do now. The paintbrush strokes of your life now become so beautiful because of that breaking down.

Let’s talk a little bit about what you were saying about how men struggle so much to be honest in those moments. We might have a friend circle, we might have a church group, we might have those that we work with day in and day out, but we have a hard time looking at them and saying, I’m struggling, I’m hurting, I’m in pain. One, why do you think that is? And two, what do you think we should do about it?

Matt: I appreciate this question, and you nailed it. For high achievers specifically, most of our lives we’ve been this way. Whether it was through sports, school, and I’m not saying every high achiever was a high achiever as a kid, but oftentimes it’s the case. Our whole life, we’ve won in some capacity. We’ve also been told by coaches, sometimes by parents, fathers, hey, don’t be weak. Don’t cry. Boys don’t, hey listen, you’re a man, dude, man up. And we still see the memes out there.

There’s a good push right now for men specifically. But I also will say that for about a decade, men were looked at as toxic masculinity. From a perspective, yes, there are horrible people out there, there are bad guys doing bad things, but what ended up happening is traditional manhood got roped into the toxic word. Things like taking care of your family, being respectable in the community.

So in the stud muffin group chat, what kind of came up is, all the guys in that group, and every high-achieving man I’ve ever met, they have something. I know that’s part of our journey on earth. We’re supposed to go through some stuff so we can learn and we can go back to heaven, and it’s amazing. But from a male perspective, you don’t want to look weak. You don’t want to be the guy who can’t handle stuff.

All those groups you said. The softball league I’m in, I’m not going to show up on a Monday night and be like, hey guys, my wife and I had a fight last night. We’re high-fiving and hitting bases and chatting about the Chicago Cubs. It’s a surface-level scenario. I think we were just taught that way as men, just fight through it, put your head down, no one’s coming to save you. All these things we hear all the time. That’s a good message, but it’s also pretty faulty, because there are a lot of people who come to save us all the time, and people come out of nowhere. I’m sure you’ve had people pop up out of nowhere and help you through these challenges.

Darren: For sure. The biggest growth area in my life always stemmed from the ability to be vulnerable enough to reach across the table and say, I’m struggling or I need help. Those moments are the moments that change everything. So what would you say to a guy, high achiever out there doing his thing, struggling more than maybe what he wants to admit, listening to this conversation, and he’s like, man, I need to get some help. I need to do something. I need to find a quote-unquote brotherhood. But I don’t know what to do. What would be some practical steps, something he could do that would help today?

Matt: I have a book coming out in October. It’s going to be titled Becoming the Lighthouse, specifically for high-achieving men. We’re going to have a full chapter, step by step. This is not exact, but step one is the fact that the person has admitted it. That’s huge. I know that sounds interesting, but it’s like, this is the invisible wall I’m currently facing. If you’re listening to this, just know that thousands of people, maybe millions of people have gone through exactly what you’re going through right now. It’s not that you’re the only one. Things happen. Human life comes up. Financial loss, divorce, unfortunately a death in the family, a job loss, business failure, whatever has triggered you into where you’re at today.

For guys watching, hey, I’m struggling, who should I go to? A simple way, without joining the Lighthouse Brotherhood, that’s not the goal today, I would see if you have anyone in your current network. Most men do have someone they can reach out to and just say, hey man, I would love to grab a cup of coffee. I just need your perspective. It could maybe be a pastor at your church, your priest if you go down that path. It could be a friend, a dad, if you’re lucky, maybe an uncle. There are a lot of folks you can go to. So step one is think about in your network, who can you go to? It’s okay. I promise you, it’s going to feel awkward, it’s going to feel weird. But when you admit it to someone else, and hopefully this person you trust them, they can give you perspective. The perspective may not be what you want to hear. Anytime I’ve actually shared the situation, a couple of things happen. One is, it impacts people, because if you go through these challenges and come out on the other side, that’s a great story.

Number two is, see if you have someone in your network. Number three is, look for church groups, anything you could possibly find that’s free. I’m not the biggest fan of therapy, but you can obviously go that path as well. There’s no judgment to anyone who’s already done that. But I’ve done a ton of research on it and found for men specifically, it’s not as effective comparative to women. Oftentimes therapists are just a sounding board. They’re not actually helping solve the problem. They’re there to let you talk it out, which is very powerful.

Darren: What would you suggest then, battling against that. For men, what would be the solution?

Matt: If you have the ability to build a small group, get three guys, maybe four guys, and just tell them. Set the expectation. Hey, we’re going to be a brotherhood. We’re going to connect. We’re going to hold each other accountable. If you can’t do that, which sometimes happens, there are so many good men’s groups out there. I can name a handful right now. I don’t want to promote everybody, but I’ll mention a couple really good ones. Man on Fire. Wake Up Warrior. Rising Kings. There are some really great men’s groups out there already. Coming soon, the Lighthouse Brotherhood.

Darren: Coming soon, the Lighthouse Brotherhood. Come on now.

Matt: The cool part is, there’s not a one-size-fits-all place. It’s figuring out who you connect with, where do you think you’re going to get the biggest growth. Some guys need to literally be kicked in the ass, excuse my language. Other guys are like, I just need some tools and resources and support to get through this specific scenario.

That’s our challenge right now. We do so much as high achievers in business. We have metrics and KPIs and operating systems. And in our life, we don’t. We just wing it. We wing our marriages. We wing it as fathers. We wing it with our relationship with God. We’re like, yeah, we prayed today, but there’s no system behind it, no structure. That’s really what we’re going to bring to the table with the Lighthouse Brotherhood. We’re bringing the Lighthouse Operating System to the world. It’s going to be really cool because we’re going to give out step-by-step, and some of it’s going to be basic stuff. That’s what I’m most excited about, bringing that mentality to our lives in our different categories and being able to win in each category.

Darren: I love that, and I want to double-click on that, because you bring up something that, if I look at my life, I could easily say is true. A couple of things happen. One, I just kind of let it be what it is. My relationship with my kids will be what it is. My relationship with God or my wife will be kind of what it is. We’ll do the thing, oh yeah, we should do a date night tonight. Okay, let’s go do that. Or, I should hang out with my kids, yeah, we should do that now. That happens. But there’s also the other play of, with all the things swirling in our heads that we’re carrying, that we’re walking with, that we’re holding on our shoulders, it’s easy for us to numb out a little bit. To unplug because we don’t know what to do, or we’ve heard, Matt say we should do more of this. And it’s like, yeah, I know, but what?

What you’re saying is, creating a system, much like we would in our business to achieve the things and the KPIs we want to hit, you want to put an operating system in for those things in our life. Talk a little bit about that. What does that look like and how are you seeing success in doing that?

Matt: All my business partners who work with me, I’m more of what you’d consider a sales guy. I can take a business from the ground up and get it popping. And when it comes to dashboards and CRM systems, my brain, for some reason, I have to have someone set it up, and then I’m just like, hey, send me the report.

Darren: You and me both, buddy.

Matt: Hey, quick pause here. If you’re thinking about starting a podcast, or have already started one and it’s not driving business results like you would like it to, we would love to help. At 1898 Creative, we install a proven podcast system, a strategy that helps you leverage your message to attract premium clients without adding more to your plate. So if you’re ready to turn your podcast into an authority engine, book a call over at 1898creative.com and let’s build something awesome together. Now let’s get back to the conversation.

The big thing is, for me, I’m a very structured guy. When I did bodybuilding eight years ago, everything came down to it being very specific. I knew exactly what workout I was going to do. I knew what the negative was going to be on my bench press, in terms of how many seconds I needed to count while the weight came to my chest. I knew exactly how much protein I was going to eat. I knew exactly how many calories I had. I wore a ring at the time (I have a WHOOP on now), and it was very structured. I tracked my body fat percentage, which was the most important at the time.

When I look at the fitness side and then I look at our businesses, most successful business owners know how many leads they’re getting, how many sales they’re making, their conversion rate, how their funnel is working, what their profit margin is. There’s so much in the world of, let’s go do this. But when it comes to being a father, for example, there really isn’t a system out there. We’re just like, all right, we got kids now. I’m going to duplicate what my dad did, or I’m not going to duplicate it because he wasn’t a good father. And it’s like, well, how do we know if we’re winning in that category? It’s very challenging, because we don’t know until the kids are older.

But here’s what I’ve found. In the Lighthouse Father category, one of the things we’re big on, and I challenge every man with kids watching this podcast, just do this one simple thing. Simple doesn’t mean easy. Every single night, put your phone away for 30 minutes. I truly mean this. Lock it in a different room. Put it in a completely different spot in the house. And literally just be with your kids. Let them talk, let them share their day. Twenty, thirty minutes doesn’t sound like a lot, but I promise you, if you do this regularly and consistently, you’re going to have a much better connection with your kids. They’re going to listen more. It’s going to be very interesting. Just that simple metric, I can track that every day. I can say, I spent my 20 minutes. Now, if you have more time, go spend more time with your kids. But if you’re busy, I see a lot of guys, they numb out, like you said. They come home from work, come home from the office, come home from the business, and they put their feet up. They turn the game on (I’m a huge sports fan, so I watch sports all the time), but they put their feet up, crack a beer, and then the kids are just over there doing whatever. And then the kids grow up and they’re like, man, why don’t my kids want to hang out with me in their twenties and thirties?

For me, I don’t have a lot of fears in life, but that’s one of my only fears. I want my kids to want to spend time with me when they don’t have to spend time with me.

If we go into the specifics, Darren, I’ll use marriage as an example. You said something, date night. My wife and I now, this is a specific system we have. It’s not like I created this. I robbed and duplicated other people in it.

Darren: That’s all we, like an artist, like to say. Robbed and duplicated, like an artist. Come on now.

Matt: I’m not the creator of this, but it’s changed our entire marriage. We meet once a quarter, and we do what’s called a quarterly business meeting with my wife.

Darren: That’s awesome.

Matt: Do we call it a business meeting? No, we call it a family meeting. We actually go through our financials together. I report to her. She doesn’t like to get into the numbers anymore. She used to, but she just wants to know, hey, are we good? Are we good? I just give her a quick report. Here’s where we’re at, here’s what our investments are looking like, boom, boom, boom. Making sure she knows we’re stable, we’re good to go in our next quarter. We go through our kids’ schedules. We go through what sports they’re going to play. We get specific on our relationship with the kids. When are we going to do what we call (this is the Lighthouse Father side) date nights with our kids? We do them separate. I just had a daddy-daughter date here last Sunday. My son and I are going to do our, you can call it a daddy-Sunday, whatever. Some men are like, no, I’m going to call it something different. We call it that.

It’s treating the identity of the husband, the identity of the father, and every man that’s listening, this is different. You don’t have to be me. I’m a very involved dad. I love it. I’ve always wanted to be a dad. I coach all my kids’ sports teams. You don’t have to do that. You just need to know that those small little touches, where you’re actually present and intentional, will help you succeed.

This is a weird thing to say on a podcast like this, but my wife and I started scheduling our sex life. I know that sounds nuts for some people listening, but we have a nine and a seven-year-old. They still like the cuddling. We’re exhausted at the end of the day. Even if during the day the wife’s like, hey, she gives you the googly eyes, 99% of the time, we all know this, guys, by the time we get to the end of the night, one we’re toast. Two, she’s probably fallen asleep cuddling the kids. Then you’re like, well, I guess not happening again. So just be intentional, but also have a system and a process that you can actually say, cool, and put it on the calendar and schedule it out in advance and make it a non-negotiable. My date nights with my wife are non-negotiable. Nothing comes in the way of that. If a client calls, sorry, I’ll lose the sale over missing my wife’s. I’ll lose that sale if I have to, to make sure that I keep my marriage flowing and strong. Same thing with my kids.

Darren: That was a master class right there in understanding that stuff. Growing up, I was never an operations-type-minded person. I’m creative, I’m visionary. I’m kind of here, there, new shiny object. Let’s try this, let’s go there. In the last handful of years, as the business has started to get the operations piece, like you were talking about, you’re seeing the KPIs put together, you’re seeing this is the process we do for this, the process we do for that. Shout out to Dustin if you’ve watched this podcast, he’s really helped me on the operations side of things from my business standpoint.

What I love what you’re saying is this idea of creating that within your personal life. I’ve seen it where I’ve taken a few of those things from what I’ve learned from a business standpoint and tried to apply it. We’re going to have on the calendar certain things. This is when this meeting happens, this is when that meeting happens. But it’s easy for me to kind of just go, ah, it’s no big deal. I’m not going to do it. It’s just my family, it’s just my kids’ time. You can easily skip over it. But what I’m hearing you say is, man, to get intentional, to be specific with these things. If the goal for your life is to have a good relationship with your wife or your kids or your family in some way, you’ve got to be intentional with it and put strategic pieces in place that actually make it happen. Just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s actually very complex.

Matt: Just to jump in real quick. For the guys out there right now, they’re like, okay, what’s the ROI? That’s how a lot of us think as high achievers. Well, Matt, you’re saying you’re going to lose a sale, lose revenue, lose income over a date night? Like, what the heck, man? Here’s the deal. The ROI is joy. When you actually schedule this out, you’re going to realize pretty quickly it’s actually not as intense as it sounds. We do two date nights a month that we schedule out for three hours. They’re phenomenal. Twice a month, my wife and I, no kids, no phones. We can go out to dinner, do an activity. This weekend, I know some of you guys are going to make fun of me, I’m a huge movie guy, but my wife wants to see The Devil Wears Prada sequel. And I’m like, what? Let’s go. We’re not going to do a lot of connection there in terms of talking, but we’re going to just enjoy each other’s presence and be together and enjoy an activity.

It sounds intense, but if you really do the math, the return on investment of just the time is insane. A couple of things. One, it’s going to keep you connected to your significant other. It’s going to keep you connected to your kids. You’re going to feel more joy. You’re going to feel more love. Then one of the biggest things for the ROI perspective for me personally is, you’re going to make more money in your business. The reason is, you’re going to have more stability in your household. Your kids in general are going to behave better, so you’re not going to be dealing with a bunch of the crap and stress that comes from all that.

For the guys who are like, Matt, I get it, I want to be a better dad, I want to be a better husband, but man, this sounds like an intense schedule. It’s not too crazy when you actually schedule it out. Don’t try to go implement this whole thing tomorrow. You’re going to be like going into the gym and trying to lift seven days a week if you haven’t been doing it. That’s what can break you. Just start with something small. Like I said, 20 minutes, 30 minutes a night, phone-free with the kid. Once a week with your wife, literally an hour, just go sit with her on the couch, cuddle. Do something simple and start working your way into it. Over time you can implement it.

When I started doing quarterly meetings with my wife, the first two, she thought we were crazy. She didn’t want to do the first one. She was like, why do we need a business meeting? What are you talking about, Matt? We’ve done nine now total over the last two and a half years. We have our tenth coming up here shortly, and she can’t wait for it. It gives us clarity. It allows for us to move into the next quarter. We feel so connected. My business, she’s not in my companies. She’s a powerful engineer. She’s leaving her corporate job here in a couple of months, which is exciting. We feel more connected than ever before. We feel like we’re on the same page and we’re running the same direction.

We make it super fun. We only meet for one hour for all the legalized stuff. The rest of it, if you can’t afford this, you can do this at your house, you don’t need to go crazy, but what we do is we get a nice hotel down in downtown Chicago. We do a nice dinner. She loves Starbucks. There’s a Starbucks Reserve downtown. We go there, we actually do our business meeting there because she loves it. We wrap it around a special date night that she’s pumped for, because now we get crystal clear on where we’re headed. It’s changed our entire life. Just these quarterly meetings have changed how we feel together, our intimacy, everything. It’s insane.

That’s why we’re creating this brotherhood. We’re creating a brotherhood for community and strong men to come together. But we also want to give these tools and resources that can set people up for success in their different categories of their life. I promise you this, if you’re winning at home, you’re going to win in business. There’s a direct correlation.

Darren: Matt, that is so good and such a strong challenge. If you’re going to do one thing, implement this quarterly family business meeting, or implement your date nights with the kids and your wife in a strategic and set-up way. If somebody simply did that today, it might change everything for them.

Matt: If you’re okay with me jumping in, I promise to the guys out there that want to be better dads, take your daughter, take your son on an individual date night, and they are jacked. We do them quarterly, once every quarter. It doesn’t have to be anything special. I let them plan with me. So I don’t plan it. I say, hey, let’s do it together. Here’s the fun part. My daughter, she’s seven, can she hit a golf ball? Sure. But she’s like, let’s go to Topgolf. And our whole entire date night was Topgolf. The fun part, she put on, it was the cutest thing in the world, she put on this beautiful dress, and I didn’t tell her to. She came down. I treat her just like I would if I was truly dating her. We went over, we had our date. I got to hit some golf balls. (That doesn’t always happen, doesn’t always happen that way.) We had some delicious food, and the way it lights her up, she was so lit up. That alone will give you that. Here’s what they’ve actually done with research with children. Kids don’t remember half. If I said, tell me about your childhood, you’re going to talk about experiences.

These are the things, even if you’re busy as heck and you can’t do the 20 minutes a night, if you do this alone, I promise you’re going to be way more connected with your kids. And guess what they’re going to remember when they get older? They’re going to remember those daddy-daughter dates. They’re going to remember the daddy-son get-togethers. My daughter’s like, all right, what are we going to do next time? I’m like, well, let’s put it on the calendar, you bring the ideas, and I’ll let you know if we can make it happen. I’m excited when they get a little bit older, we’ll start doing bigger stuff. I want to be cautious when I say this, do what’s best for your finances. You don’t even need to go to Topgolf. Do something where you go to a park and just spend the day with her. Eventually, one of our goals is to do one trip a year, with my wife taking my son and me taking my daughter, separating, and being able to give them that vacation, that one-off where we’re just together for a longer window.

Darren: So good. And Matt, that’s what I love. I’m sitting here almost getting emotional about it, just thinking, I took my son out to Topgolf last month, and he still talks about it. Hey, when are we going to go golfing again? Just how much fun he had in that moment.

I’m really challenged by this, Matt. I’m challenged in my own life to go, I’ve probably tried a few of these things, I’ve dabbled in these things a little bit, but to commit, to put them on the calendar, to say I’m not going to give up, I’m going to battle for this.

We had a men’s night at our church this last month that I went to, and it was called Battle Ready. The whole time he was like, it’s not about this battle that you’re going to go into, but it’s more of the mindset of going, if I don’t show up and do what you’ve outlined here, Matt, put the things on the calendar, move beyond the uncomfortable feeling of the first few times of doing it, to actually start to battle for your family in this way, you’re just going to shrink back. We’ll let school teach them. We’ll let this happen. The minute that we do that is the minute we lose. We’ve got to step up and battle for our families. What I’m hearing you say is, guys, come on, let’s level up. Let’s step into it. Let’s not shrink back. Let’s actually make this thing work. That’s going to change not only our lives, but also the lives of our kids and our wife and our families.

Matt: The world is shifting, which is exciting, but there’s been a huge push against the family unit. The studies are through the roof. I have to be cautious because I can’t quote it exactly. But like, if there’s a father involved in the household, it doesn’t have to be over the top. Millennial fathers like ourselves are more involved than ever before. The way the world has shifted. But being involved and intentional, your kids will have an 80 to 90% success rate. That doesn’t mean they’re going to be millionaires. It just means they’re going to be able to live a normal life without trauma and not have to struggle through all the crap some of us had to go through.

I was blessed. My dad is the man. We’ll talk about that, one of our five guys. I got lucky. My dad grew up horrible. He was in the foster care system, single mother, mom gave up, sent him into the care. He got lucky. He found who became my grandmother. But along the way, lots of abuse, physically, mentally. He became an alcoholic when he was in his early twenties. He stopped drinking before we were born. He could have been a horrible dad. He could have walked away. But he adopted my older brother as well, changed his whole entire life.

My dad, I love you, Dad, you’re not financially successful, but you are successful in the sense of love and being able to raise kids. I was blessed to have him. When I look back, I’m so grateful, because he stopped all the generational curses from coming to us. That’s what you can do out there. You can be like my dad. If you had a horrible childhood and you don’t know how to be a father, you’re crushed, maybe you’re crushing it in life right now, just know there are other men out there that will work with you and help you. There are other good leaders out there.

In my book, my number one goal, it made me cry the other day. It’s funny because it made me cry. I’m a crier only during movies. My wife hates it. My kids make fun of me. We’re at a cartoon and I’m crying because the characters had emotion. At our wedding, I didn’t cry. I was hyperventilating. Like, oh boy, I’m doing this. But now she’s like, you cry at movies. In the book, in chapter eight, which is where we’re at right now, we have three more chapters to write. The whole purpose of the brotherhood is, I can’t wait to be 80, 90 years old and I’m sitting at a table with the other men, and we’d gone through 40 to 50 years of life together. We’ve helped each other through it.

What I’m most pumped about, this is what made me cry, imagine your sons now, the Lighthouse Brotherhood, the whole purpose of this is, imagine your sons are living a Lighthouse life. Their family unit is strong. Their kids have a Lighthouse father in their home. Your son is now part of your brotherhood. He’s one of your brothers. Imagine your daughter has married one of the guys in the brotherhood, and you get an opportunity as a father to mentor your son-in-law instead of the opposite direction. Imagine you’re mentoring him, and you know for a fact that your daughter is protected and she’s in a great relationship. You’re not concerned in that light.

It gets me pumped to know that no matter how many men we help, how many families we help, the most exciting part for me is, I want my kids, my whole purpose as a dad is to challenge the crap out of them, excuse my language. Two, I want them to want to spend time with me when they don’t have to. That’s my whole entire mouth. I don’t tell them that. I want them to get older.

Darren, you went through divorce. Marriage is not easy, especially with young kids. It’s a business partnership, not in the standard sense, but it is a legalized agreement, and you’re building something together. That’s why these KPIs and systems work so well. They allow you to slow down and have these checkpoints to make sure you don’t lose your wife along the way. If you’re not giving your wife what she needs, she’s getting all this influence from the world. So it’s really exciting. This is your Create Your Art Podcast, and this is my art, man. It hypes me up. I can’t wait to get this message out to the world and help families.

Darren: Matt, as we land the plane, where can people get information about the Lighthouse Brotherhood? At the time of this recording, it’s on a wait list. It’s about to launch. You’ve got the podcast rolling out that you’ve been working with us on. I was watching episode one the other day, and it was like, bro, this is going to change some people’s lives too. But talk about the Lighthouse Brotherhood. If somebody’s like, bro, I’ve got to get into something like that, where can they go?

Matt: You can follow me on Facebook or LinkedIn, Instagram, just Matt Balducci. The Lighthouse Brotherhood specifically, we have a landing page, LighthouseBH.co. So LighthouseBH.co.

Darren: We’ll link all that in the description and all that fun stuff. So they’ll get access to it. What about your book? You said October. At the time of this recording, there’s a little bit of time before that drops. Is there anything out there they can get access to, or should they stay tuned on your Facebook and LinkedIn?

Matt: We’re going to launch the book October 22nd, 2026. We’re finalizing it. We don’t have anything prepared yet. We’re in the process. We’re at chapter eight. We’re going to have 11 chapters. A lot of stuff we’re talking about today is going to be in the book. Plus more of my story, and not just my story, but other men I’ve worked with and their stories. There are a lot of guys out there who are amazing humans, and they just don’t have the brotherhood, the community to go to. That’s what we want to build.

Darren: If you’re listening to this in the future and it’s 2027 or 28, you can go find his book right now. For those listening this year, stay tuned. Go follow Matt and hang out with him and wait for him to launch that on October 22nd.

Matt, I want to say something. Artists, in the traditional sense, put together paintings or music or graphics that capture our heart, that tell us a story, that elevate our thinking, that really challenge us to see the world in a different way. What you have done today is all of that and more. That’s why I say you are an artist, my friend. Putting this together and challenging us to think differently about the way we might show up for our families, for our friends, for our kids, our wives, our businesses. That’s a beautiful thing, man. I’m so appreciative of your art and the thing you’re putting into the world. I’m glad that we’ve connected through 1898 Creative and all that fun stuff that we get to do together. But thank you for taking the time, sharing your heart, sharing your art with us. Dude, you’re awesome, man.

Matt: I appreciate you, Darren, and you’re awesome. Anybody who’s listening, Darren and his crew are the best. We’re pumped that we connected with him as well. So thank you, Darren, for the time.

Darren: As we finish, I want you to remember three things. Your voice is needed in this world more than you know. You are loved more than you can ever imagine. And you are an artist. So go out and create your art, and we’ll see you here next time on the Create Your Art Podcast.