Do you spend enough time with your kids? Do you spend enough quality time with your kids? I mean, seriously uninterrupted, no electronic device, quality time with your kids. I'll admit I've got room to improve. And I read a really great book that I wanted to share with you. Today's podcast date happens to be the day after Thanksgiving, and I think this is a good book to read any time.
This book is about how to run family board meetings. I know those sound really boring, but the author points out that you really only have 18 summers to really build lasting relationships with your kids. And a lot of our clients at Ramblin Jackson are family-owned companies. People have kids, and even if you don't have kids, I believe that this video could help you improve the relationships with the people that you care about.
I'm Jack Jostes and welcome to The Landscaper's Guide to Modern Sales and Marketing. This show is all about helping lawn and landscape contractors increase your profit and enjoy a better lifestyle. But what's the point of having a bunch of profit and money and a business if it's at the expense of your family? I know that in growing my company, there have been times where it's definitely tipped way out of balance into the work direction. And I've worked on keeping it balanced. It's an ongoing endeavor to do that. And I'm really excited to share this book with you. So let's dig into today's episode.
It is fall and it's the time of year where a lot of landscapers tell me that they actually catch up on reading over the winter. The good news is this book is super short. I think you could read it in a weekend, and there's also an audiobook available. So you have no excuse not to listen to this. It was so good that I'm actually going to try and read it with my wife. Around this time of year, I love spending time with her planning out our year, and one of the things that we've done in the past is plan out vacations and things. I have a blog post and video that I'll link to in the description about how we do that and how that's really been amazing for our marriage and the business.
But this week, I'm talking about the book The Family Board Meeting: You Have 18 Summers to Create Lasting Connection with Your Children by Jim Shields. I'm in a men's business Mastermind. It's called Business Builder Camp, and it's led by Wayne Herring. You may have heard me mentioned Wayne throughout the years on our show. He gave me this cool journal. Anyways, Wayne runs a virtual book club, and I got together with a bunch of other dads who are also business owners. We read this book and talked about it and I have to share that it was really great.
This book is all about creating family board meetings and for the author that originally came from, he would have surf board meetings where he would, he would get together with some of his business buddies and they'd have board meetings. And he then transitioned to that into his family. The gist of it is really simple. It's essentially, there are four steps that ... I'm not going to give away the whole book. There's a lot more, but it's essentially to book one-on-one time with each of your kids for about a half day, every 90 days. So you do the quarterly disconnect. And this is the part that, like I said in the intro, I need to work on, disconnecting. He makes a joke and a ritual out of it like, "Hey, am I going to be on my phone today?" And his kids get excited and the answer is no. And then you let your kid choose what the activity is, and you have a reflection time at the end of it.
In the Mastermind and the book club that we were talking about, we talked about how in our businesses, many of us will do these quarterly coaching meetings with our employees, or we put things in the calendar quarterly, and we're really efficient in our business. And sometimes we don't pay as much attention in our family life. I think that it's something that I know I want to work on better. This book was ... It gave me a lot of great ideas on how to do this with my kids.
We've started doing daddy dates or mommy dates, where ... I have two kids. So I'll spend a day with one of my kids and my wife will spend time with the other, and we switch. That's been really great. Now that they're getting a little bit older, this book talks about having the reflection time with your kid, and that's where you really start to build a stronger relationship, and things come up that they really want to talk to you about.
So anyways, I hope you're having an awesome Thanksgiving weekend. I wanted to share this book with you. As you can see if you're watching this video or if you're listening, it's a really short read. It's an enjoyable read. There's a great audiobook version of it, too. So let me know if there are any cool books that you've read. My library is full of business books, and I try to make an effort to read life books, other things that are not just business, sales, marketing, leadership stuff, because at Ramblin Jackson, one of our core values is craftsmanship in life and work, especially on Fridays. And that really means that you are having craftsmanship, you're doing quality work in life and in work. And then we always work a full Friday.
So that's really why we're here. To me, that's the joy of small business is I get to work with a lot of great family owned companies where I meet them and I learn about how their business impacts their life. I really believe that when your sales and marketing is dialed in, it can have a big improvement on your quality of life and your relationships with your family. And that's really what's most rewarding about the work that we do here.
So, thanks for checking out today's video. That's it. I wanted to recommend this book. Go out and get it, buy it on the internet. Again, if you're listening, it's called The Family Board Meeting by Jim Shields. And thanks so much for checking out today's show. If you know of any other great books that I should read, send me an email, jack@landscapersguide.com. I love learning about new books. Thanks.