The Nine-Children Question: What People Get Wrong About Big Families and Business

Every business dinner, every investor meeting, every new introduction — at some point, the conversation turns to family. And when I mention that I have nine children, the response is predictable.

First, surprise. Then, some version of the same question: "How do you do it?"

What they mean is: how do you run a serious business and raise nine kids at the same time? The implication is that the two are in tension — that one must be suffering for the other to succeed.

They are wrong. And here is why.

A large family does not compete with business. It completes it. Not in some sentimental, greeting-card way. In a structural, strategic, deeply practical way.

Raising nine children — including children we adopted from difficult circumstances — has taught me more about leadership, resource allocation, crisis management, and long-term thinking than any MBA program ever could.

When you are responsible for nine human lives, you learn to prioritize ruthlessly. You learn to delegate. You learn that perfectionism is the enemy of function. You learn that systems matter more than heroics.

Sound familiar? Those are the same skills that build durable businesses.

My wife deserves more credit than I will ever give her publicly. She is the most capable leader I know. The logistics she manages daily — school, health, emotions, meals, schedules, conflicts, growth — make running a portfolio look straightforward by comparison.

Together, we have built a household that operates with intention. We do not wing it. We cannot afford to. And that discipline carries directly into how I approach business.

People assume a large family requires you to work less. In my experience, it requires you to work smarter. There is no room for wasted time when your evenings belong to your children. There is no room for vanity projects when your weekends belong to your family.

A large family forces you to be honest about what actually matters. It strips away the noise. It makes you allergic to meetings that could have been emails, to deals that look good on paper but feel wrong in your gut, to opportunities that would require you to trade presence for profit.

I am not suggesting everyone should have nine children. That would be absurd. What I am suggesting is that the narrative around family and business being in conflict is lazy.

The truth is more nuanced. Family does not limit ambition. It refines it. It gives ambition a context, a purpose, and a set of guardrails that prevent the kind of reckless pursuit that burns people out and hollows them out.

I build what I build because of my family, not in spite of it. Every investment I evaluate, I run through a simple filter: does this serve the life I am building, or does it compete with it?

That filter has saved me from more bad decisions than any financial model.

So when someone asks me how I do it — nine kids and a business — my answer is simple: I do it because they are not separate things. They are the same thing. The family is the foundation. The business is the expression. And neither works without the other.