You know the one I’m talking about.
Tucked into a strip mall somewhere, Formica tables, fluorescent lights, a takeout menu that hasn’t been redesigned since 1994. You’re eating your General Tso’s chicken and you look over and there’s a kid, maybe nine years old, doing math homework at a corner table while her mom runs the front and her dad cooks in the back.
Nobody gave that kid a choice about whether to be there.
But she’s there. And she’s part of it. And when she’s twelve, she’ll be taking orders. When she’s sixteen, she’ll be running the till. And when she’s thirty-five, she might be running the whole thing, or she might have used what she learned to build something completely different.
Either way, that restaurant raised her as much as her parents did.
I think about this a lot, because there’s something the most successful family-run businesses understand that most of us in the advice business have completely forgotten.
The business and the family aren’t separate things.
The Senators suite I almost didn’t get to use
The Sens are in the playoffs.
Down 3-0 in the series as I’m writing this, so by the time you read this, the season might already be over. But I had a box secured for game six. A whole suite. The kind of night you build relationships around.
And here’s what I was planning to do with it.
I was going to bring my daughter.
Not just bring her. I was going to put her to work. I was going to tell her she was the welcome committee. When advisors and partners walked in, she’d greet them at the door, show them where the snacks were, point out where to grab a drink, give them the tour of the suite like she owned the place.
She would have loved every second of it.
And here’s the thing nobody tells you about this kind of move. It works on two levels at the same time.
My daughter gets to feel important, gets to feel like she’s part of what dad does, gets a memory she’ll carry for the rest of her life. That’s the family side.
But the business side is just as real. Every advisor who walked through that door would have seen me differently. Not just as the PPI guy who hosts good events. As a dad. As a person. As someone whose daughter is comfortable enough in this world to greet a room full of adults like she belongs there.
You can’t fake that. You can’t manufacture that. And you definitely can’t buy that with a corporate suite and a charcuterie board.
Why this matters more than you think
Most advisors I work with have built a wall between their business life and their family life.
They keep them separate on purpose. The business is the business. The family is the family. The two shall not meet.
I get the instinct. You don’t want your kids growing up thinking dad cares more about clients than about them. You don’t want to drag your spouse to another networking thing. You want home to be home.
But here’s what most people miss.
The wall costs you something. And it costs you more than you realize.
When clients only ever see the business version of you, they’re only ever buying from a fraction of who you actually are. They don’t know what you care about. They don’t know what your kids are like. They don’t know that you took your daughter to her first hockey game last year and she fell asleep in the third period because she’d had too much cotton candy.
That stuff is the relationship. That’s what makes you a person they want to keep working with for the next thirty years.
When you keep it all separate, you’re showing up to every meeting as a salesman. And nobody wants to spend thirty years buying from a salesman.
The Rideau Club feeling
There’s a private club in Ottawa called the Rideau Club. If you’ve never been, picture what you’d imagine an old Ottawa private club to look like, and you’d probably nail it.
Leather bound chairs. Old bookcases. A bar that looks like it’s been there since Mackenzie King was still alive. The kind of place where you half expect someone to be smoking a cigar and discussing the price of wheat.
Here’s the thing about the Rideau Club.
It doesn’t feel dated. It feels permanent.
There’s a difference. Dated means stuck in time. Permanent means rooted. The Rideau Club has a feeling, and that feeling is something nobody manufactured. It accumulated. Decade after decade after decade of the same kind of conversations happening in the same rooms.
You walk into IKEA, you get a feeling too. Different feeling. But a feeling.
You walk into a Tim Hortons at 6 AM in a small Ontario town, you get a feeling.
You walk into your grandmother’s kitchen, you get a feeling.
Spaces have feelings. And the spaces that feel best are usually the ones where real life has been happening for a long time. Where the same families have been showing up. Where kids have been running around. Where stories are layered on top of stories.
This is what most advisor events get wrong. They feel like advisor events. Sterile, professional, a hotel ballroom with a beige carpet and a beige speaker and a beige chicken dinner.
There’s no feeling.
Nothing accumulates.
What the family business gets right
Go back to that Chinese restaurant for a second.
Or think about every Italian restaurant in Toronto where the owner’s mom is still in the kitchen at 78 making the gnocchi by hand. Or that bakery in Montreal where the third generation is now behind the counter and the original sign from 1962 is still on the wall.
Why do those places have a feeling?
Because the family is there.
Not as a marketing ploy. Not as a brand strategy. Just as a fact. The family is in the business because the business is the family. There’s no wall.
When you walk into a place like that, you’re not just buying gnocchi. You’re buying into something that has continuity. Something that has roots. Something that exists for reasons beyond the transaction.
This is the thing that’s almost impossible to fake and almost impossible to compete against.
A big chain restaurant can copy the menu. They can copy the décor. They can hire consultants and run focus groups and engineer something that looks the same.
But they can’t copy the grandmother in the kitchen. They can’t copy the kid doing homework at the corner table. They can’t copy the feeling that this place exists because this family decided, three generations ago, that this was what they were going to do.
You have something that big chain restaurants don’t have. You have your actual family. You have your actual life. You just have to stop pretending those things are separate from your business.
The Roman example, because why not
Here’s a tangent that’s actually relevant.
The Roman elite didn’t separate family and work the way we do. The family business, the family name, the family reputation, those were all the same thing. A patrician family ran their political career, their commercial interests, and their household as one integrated operation. The kids learned by watching. The wife managed the household, which managed the politics. Clients showed up at the house.
The whole concept of going to “the office” while your “family” is at home is actually a pretty modern invention. For most of human history, people lived where they worked, worked alongside their families, and built their reputations as a family unit, not as individuals.
I’m not saying we should go back to that. I’m not pulling the kids out of school to answer the phones at PPI.
But I think we lost something when we built that wall. And the businesses that have figured out how to selectively tear it down, even just on event nights, even just sometimes, are the ones building relationships that compound over decades instead of quarters.
What this looks like in practice
You don’t need to put your kids on payroll. You don’t need to drag your spouse to every wholesaler dinner.
But here’s what you can do.
Run a family-friendly event. Not a kids event. A family-friendly event. Where advisors bring their kids and your kids are there too and the whole thing has the feeling of a backyard barbecue instead of a corporate function.
I did one at PPI. It was one of the best events we’ve run.
Take your daughter to the suite when you have one. Give her a job. Let her welcome people. Let your clients see her. Let them see you with her.
Have your spouse at the client appreciation event. Not as decoration. As a person. Introducing themselves. Making conversation. Being part of the night.
Send a Christmas card with a family photo on it. The hokey one. The one where the kids are wearing matching pajamas and the dog is wearing a Santa hat and everyone looks slightly miserable.
Your clients will keep that card on their fridge for a year.
The advisor down the street who sent the corporate card with the embossed logo? That one went in the recycling bin on December 27th.
The compounding effect
Here’s what happens when you do this consistently.
Your clients stop thinking of you as their insurance person and start thinking of you as someone who’s part of their lives. They ask about your kids. They remember your wife’s name. They send you a card when there’s a death in your family.
Your kids grow up understanding what you actually do. They meet your clients. They see the events. They watch you run a business. By the time they’re teenagers, they have a sophistication about adult relationships and professional networks that none of their friends have.
Your spouse stops feeling like the business is the thing that takes you away from the family and starts feeling like the business is something the family is doing together.
And your events stop feeling like events. They start feeling like something else. Something that has a feeling. Something with roots. Something that accumulates.
That’s the Rideau Club thing. That’s the Chinese restaurant thing. That’s what you’re actually building when you stop separating the family from the business.
You’re building permanence.
The book that sparked this
This is the kind of thinking I built my book around.
The Advisor Event Engine isn’t just about how to run events. It’s about how to run events that feel like something. How to use events to build the kind of relationships that don’t unravel when a competitor shows up with a 10 basis point cheaper fee.
The family piece is the hardest piece for most advisors to internalize. It’s also the most powerful.
If you’ve been thinking about running better events, building deeper relationships, creating something with more accumulation and less churn, the book walks through exactly how to do it. Including how to bring your family into the business in a way that feels natural instead of forced.
One last thing
If the Senators somehow win three in a row and we get to game six, I’m bringing my daughter.
She’ll greet people at the door. She’ll show them the snack table. She’ll do her little tour of the suite like she’s the host of the whole thing.
Some advisors are going to remember that night for the hockey.
Most of them are going to remember it because of her.
That’s the whole game.
Talk soon,
Andrew