Thrive In Business And In Life As Entrepreneurial Partners, with Ann and Sunny Sheu

Dan Sullivan: Hi, this is Dan Sullivan, and I'd like to welcome you to the Multiplier Mindset Podcast.
 
Today's Multiplier Mindset is a real treat. It's a husband and wife who obviously are married to each other, but they're also in business with each other. And they have a great company called Mpowered Families, which is sort of the way that they operate as a couple and empowered, you know, they're husband and wife and they have children and they're an empowered family. And what they teach is empowered family to other people who are in the same situation as they are. It's such a treat to see this because Strategic Coach today wouldn't exist unless I had this tremendous teamwork with my partner in life. We've been married for 38 years, and we've been in business for 35 years. And we have great teamwork, and Babs runs the company and I'm responsible for the Program. So we've got two parts to the business. And there's a real division of labor, but at that time we're totally in sync with each other. She keeps me up to date, and I keep her up to date what's coming next.
 
What I loved about Sunny and Ann's experiences here and how they express them is that they had counter examples growing up in their own families. They were the children of immigrants, and the whole point, there was such an emphasis on not being poor. And it was about success, success, success, but not being poor, not being poor, not being poor, which means that nothing else is important. And it puts enormous strains on the family. I would say they didn't get nourished by what they were doing when they were not at work, because they were never not at work. And that happens with entrepreneurs who aren't in business with the person they're married to. The business actually becomes something that separates them. It becomes a wedge in their relationship, which to me makes no sense whatsoever.
 
I didn't experience it because I was never in the business that my father ran. I'm kind of fortunate because I'm a late child. I'm a fifth child. You know, fifth child is like an only child with no responsibility. So I just got to do what I wanted to do. The other thing is, I got a real sense that the two should be together, that the business and the family should be together, and I really grew up with that. So when I got the first chance to actually have a business with other people—and I wouldn't have started this business at all, I wouldn't have started Strategic Coach at all, and Babs wouldn't have started Strategic Coach at all if we weren't together. So it was the combination of two souls, two minds, two hearts that actually created what we have today. We take enormous amounts of time for ourselves, and we more and more empower our team to just use their Unique Abilities to create, you know, value inside the company and outside the company that really corresponds to our vision of what we want Strategic Coach to do in the entrepreneurial world.
 
The one thing that I love about both Sunny and Ann's commentary here is that it's all about mindset. Behavior follows mindset. If you want to change your behavior, you have to change your mindset first. You have to look at things differently. And that's what we put the emphasis on in all of our Strategic Coach workshops is we have new tools that allows you to take your experience and take a look at it and say, am I approaching this correctly as far as my mind goes? And then, am I doing the action? So am I actually behaving in a way that corresponds to the vision we want for ourselves, but we want for all of our team members, the vision that we want for all the clients and customers that we have. I deeply appreciate the value that Ann and Sunny are telling us about what they're getting out of Strategic Coach and being in the Strategic Coach community and feeling very, very supported by other people who are taking an entrepreneurial journey in their lives, but more and more making sure that there's no separation, there's no tension between what they're doing at work and what's happening with their life partner and with their family.
 
Ann Sheu: Hi, my name is Ann Sheu, and my husband, Sunny, and I have been married for almost 10 years, and we have been together for, I think, 18 years. I've been in Strategic Coach since—I think it was 2020, because when I joined, it was all virtual because of the pandemic. I am an EOS Implementer, and on top of that, we also have a business called Mpowered Families, where we help couples, high-achieving couples, entrepreneurial couples, be as intentional about their family life as they are about their business life, especially people that are in Strategic Coach. We're very intentional about growing our businesses, getting clear about what we want from our businesses, what freedom looks like. But we're helping couples do that same work for their family, getting clear about values and vision and do that work and apply that same level of intentionality to their family.
 
Sunny Sheu: Hey, my name is Sunny. I am an entrepreneur. I have a home furnishings business, retail business that's brick and mortar in the DFW area. I'm also in commercial retail real estate, and I've been married to Ann. We have three kids: six-year-old, three-year-old, and one-year-old. I joined Strategic Coach one year after Ann, so I think it was post-COVID, around 2021-ish or so.
 
Ann Sheu: We attend our Strategic Coach workshops in person with Chad in Santa Monica. And it's incredible. We love Chad. He is phenomenal. We just have such an incredible experience. But since Sunny joined a year after I did, we had to do some weird things to get him caught up so that we could attend our Coach sessions together. Our sessions are always on Wednesdays. So we fly in on Tuesdays. We do a date night on Tuesday night. We attend Coach session on Wednesday. And then we do a Free Day on Thursday where we'll usually do like a class pass workout class in the morning and then a lunch to kind of debrief on what we learned the day before, some of our big takeaways. And then we'll fly home and see the kids and try to get home in time to put the kids to bed on Thursday night.
 
Sunny Sheu: Yeah, it's kind of like a clarity break for us. Like, we kind of, it's like a part of our quarterly routine at this point.
 
Ann Sheu: People ask us all the time, "Oh, isn't it hard being married and working together?" And I just think it's such a gift that we get to do these things together, to be on this Strategic Coach learning journey together, and to have him there next to me as there's some amazing truth bomb from Coach Chad. And then I turn to Sunny and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, can you believe that?" And then just how it applies to our work or to our family. And to be able to just immediately talk about that, and both of us hear it instead of me hear it and then try to go home and tell him and convince him and sell it. I could never sell it the way that Chad sells it, right? And so, I think it's really special to be on that learning journey together and to be growing together.
 
Sunny Sheu: And one thing I think about us working together, I mean, there's a huge Venn diagram, like where the overlap, like the Mpowered Families is a business that we work on together, but Ann's EOS practice is totally separate from what I do in commercial real estate and retail as well. So we kind of each have our own things, and then we have this huge overlap, and that happens in our networks as well. Like we're in several organizations. So a lot of our organizations overlap, but then she has her own organizations that she's part of. And I have my own as well. So there's a pretty good mix of areas where we do need to collaborate on. And we do that really well in shared learning environments like Coach. And then we have our own separate things as well. So that kind of helps us not be on top of each other all the time.
 
Why start Mpowered Families? I don't even know if it's really an industry. Like, we have trouble figuring out where it's classified under. But I mean, I grew up in a family business. Ann and I, we started dating pretty early on as well. And we kind of saw my parents kind of grow apart. As the business became more successful, my parents started growing apart. And then like, Ann and I were both part of that. It's a very long story, I guess. But we saw it over time and it eventually it led to their separation. And so this business that gave us everything we dreamed of—like success, American dream, and everything—also tore everything apart and took away everything that was important to us. So, I mean, just seeing that happen in real time told us that we wanted to do something different. And that was early on before we got married. So after we got married, we started applying things that we learned in business that helped create clarity and alignment in business, and we started applying that to our personal lives. We're like, oh man, some of this works and some of it's not applicable, but a lot of it works. So we just started testing. As we were learning how to run a business better and better, we're also learning how to run a family better and better. We're kind of simultaneously testing them.
 
Ann Sheu: Mpowered Families helps high-achieving individuals be as intentional about their families as they are about their work and their businesses. At work, we are great at setting values, getting clear about our vision, leading a team, being intentional about giving feedback and receiving feedback and creating open lines of communication. And so we're just doing the same thing now for our families because we're doing all of this work, this intentionality for our businesses, but many of us don't create the time and the space to do that for our families. And we argue that your family is the most important team in your life. And so why aren't we doing that same type of work? Getting clear about your family values, getting clear about your vision, being intentional about creating the time and the space to work towards it every single quarter. So that's what we're doing at Mpowered Families is creating the time and the space and the community, and sharing that collective wisdom so that family leaders can really lead their families with the intentionality that they want so that they can create this amazing family life that they can really be proud of.
 
What's really… fun about the work that we get to do is the impact that we see immediately. You know, our Mpowered Families program is a year-long program, and couples enter the program with a cohort so they're creating community with a group of like-minded couples that are also serious about family. And so they're moving through the program with a cohort and even after the first workshop, that first quarter when they come back, they are talking about incredible transformations in their family. And these are couples that have a really strong foundation already. We're not taking couples that are on the brink of divorce. We're taking couples that have a solid foundation of trust and respect, but they know things could be better. They know that there could be a little bit more, whether it's more clarity, more communication, whatever that looks like for their family. And they're coming back 90 days later, and they're telling us about how their marriage has blossomed, how their relationship with their kids is so much better because they're just carving out the time.
 
So there's just been some really fun stories that happen quarter after quarter after quarter. And we do this thing, we have everyone check in at the beginning of the day, and then about an hour into the workshop, we have everyone share wins from the past quarter. And that section, we actually ended up having to put a timer on that section because it would go on for so long. People would come back and share their wins from the past quarter. And we would just keep going and going and going. And finally, our operations leader was like, "OK, I got to add a timer because we're running behind because this section of wins is taking way too long." So it's just been really fun to hear how the work that they're doing in our workshops is having immediate impact on their families, with their marriage, their relationship with their kids, and how that is then having a ripple effect in their businesses.
 
Because what we're seeing is, when the family life is strong, and when you feel supported, and when you've got things taken care of at home, then you really have the space to go out and give your all to your business and really create a business that supports your family. So it's just this machine that keeps feeding itself. As you improve your family, your business gets stronger. As your business gets stronger, you create more freedom to go and lean into your family more. So it's just a really fun cause-effect, cause-effect that keeps happening.
 
Sunny Sheu: And then specifically, transformation for our participants. I mean, there's been a whole bunch of career changes that we've heard of, or just people gaining clarity about what they really want out of life and making sure that the business they're in serves the life that they want and not the other way around, which happened in my family. There's been people being more intentional about Free Days, their Free Days as a family or personally. There's more intention around their relationships with their parents, like taking the time and knowing that their parents aren't going to be around forever. So it's just kind of like putting everything into perspective and being a little bit more intentional about everything they do, like personal and business.
 
My parents were immigrants, so I mean, they came here almost with a singular goal of "don't be poor" or "stop being poor" or something like that. And that was probably our sole focus as a family. I mean, me and my brother grew up in the business. So, working 80-hour weeks, which is probably underestimating. It's probably way more than that. We had two days off a year: Thanksgiving and Christmas. I mean, that was kind of part of life. I can't say we knew anything better. It's like, after school, my brother and I, we went to work. It's just what we did. And then we'd work, close down the stores, and then go home and then make dinner, eat dinner, and then go to sleep and rinse, repeat: go back to school and all that.
 
I think at some point, I mean, hard work and brute force, at some point we became not poor. I can't even tell you when, but my parents didn't really recalibrate and say, okay, now that we're not poor, quote unquote, not poor, then what else do we want out of life? They just kept grinding and because that was our way of life. So in some ways, and as the business grew, it kind of demanded more of our attention and more of our efforts. So, in some ways, I think we just kind of became a slave to the business, like we got sucked into it. And I think Ann and I were part of that journey, following the same path. I, like, convinced her to finish law school, but to drop that, come work with me in this amazing life we're going to build together, which was kind of my own tunnel vision at the time.
 
So anyways, when my parents ended up having issues and ultimately separated, that was like a wake-up call. So we're like, hey, this is not good, and this is not what we want. So it was more about like, hey, let's try anything but this. So that's kind of what we did, I think. And then to add on to it, as we started testing these things in our personal lives, like, I mean, we're sharing with friends, with our forums, with our inner circle. And people were telling us, oh, this is helpful. This is really cool. I was like, OK, great. As long as it helps you and helps us, then that's good enough. And Ann was the one that was like, hey, this is too important not to share with the world. And I was like, I'm good. I don't need another business. But yeah, she was the one that was like, so she took the ball and ran with it. And then it wasn't until I was like, oh, you're serious about this. Then we started really going for it. And it's been super rewarding. This journey has actually strengthened our relationship. As we develop the curriculum and even interact with our participants, I mean, we're learning from them as well. So it's been a really fun journey.
 
One more point around freedom. I mean, they work for financial freedom. They didn't know about the other freedoms and nor did I. I didn't have the language at the time before I joined Coach to know about relationship freedom, purpose, time freedom. Now that I reflect back, there was a time in our lives, like after my parents separated, and this is before we even knew about Coach or EO or YPO or other organizations. I think internally, we were both had a pull towards time freedom and we're fighting for time freedom. Because the desire for time freedom was so strong internally, we didn't know it at the time. Like, it caused us to really implement, like really absorb learnings and implement them and test them because we were just trying everything possible to not end up down that path.
 
Ann Sheu: So, one of our foundational principles in Mpowered Families is this concept of "me for we." We believe that to build this family life that you love, where everyone in the family feels loved and seen and heard, you have to first do the work on yourself. We think that what often happens in families is, people bring a very diluted version of themselves to the table. They maybe make themselves small because they think that's what the family needs. So they may put on all these hats of mom or wife or daughter or aunt or business leader, and they're wearing all these hats and they have buried their passions and their hobbies and things that really energize them and light them up and their true values. And they've essentially diluted who they really are because of what they think all of these other circles expect of them, society expects, what social media expects, what their family expects.
 
So, we really believe that to do this work for the family, you have to first do, we call it "me work." You have to do your "me work." That means getting clear about who you are as an individual, what is important to you, what you want out of life. Then, you can go and advocate for those things and then your family can support you in that journey. What often happens is, people don't do that work and they don't have a clear way to articulate what really matters to them, what they want out of life, and they're just unhappy and they don't know how to ask for what they need or what they want. So in our program, we really believe in this "me for we" concept so much so that we have a one-day workshop called Know Thyself that is actually a prereq to do the year-long program. We don't allow anyone into the year-long program unless they've done this one-day workshop to build out their individual road map, which consists of their values, their affective self and destructive self, so the things that energize them, the things that drain their energy, their life-changing adventures, and their decade dream. And that's really just getting clear about their values and what's important to them and what they want out of life so that then they can go and show that to their spouse, their partner, and advocate for what it is that they want and need out of life.
 
Sunny Sheu: That was definitely on my list, one. The second thing is, and then probably the follow-up to that is, so once you're clear about who you are individually, then you can come together and create a shared vision. So aligning together—they don't have to be the same—but there needs to be alignment as far as values and what you want for the family, what kind of experiences you want the family to have, and the family identity and where the family wants to go. Like, there needs to be alignment from the couple there. And that's not always easy, but generally people became a couple for a reason. And there's always commonalities. People are always like, Oh, what if we find out that we're not compatible or whatever? I'm like, well, no one's compatible. You just do the work, and you figure out where there's overlap. There's always overlap. I think that's the second part. And then like having tools to resolve conflict in healthy ways, like communication tools and stuff like that. I mean, those are all mindset shifts and tools to help kind of like work through differences. We're all individual and different.
 
I mean, our program is a year long. We know there's a whole bunch of weekend retreats, and we think a habit needs to be formed over time. We need to keep coming back towards it and keep working on our life instead of in our life. And we need to do that periodically, and every once in a while check in. So that's why the structure is a year-long program that's quarterly in cadence versus four-day weekend retreat or a week-long retreat or something like that.
 
Ann Sheu: Yeah, so to add on a little bit about this clarity of who you are and then coming together with your partner to do the work for your family, part of all of that work is a tool that we call Decade Dream. And Decade Dream is just thinking about what your ideal family life and what your ideal individual life looks like 10 years out. And we intentionally pick 10 years out because that is further than most people are used to thinking. Maybe they're thinking 10 years out for their business, but very rarely are people thinking 10 years out for their personal lives. And we have seen this Decade Dream have massive impact on individuals in helping them create this North Star, where they're using their Decade Dream to filter all of their decisions: "Does this help our family get to our Decade Dream faster?"
 
So, our family's Decade Dream is, by the end of 2029, our family is going to take 2,000 Free Days together. So last year—Sunny, you're going to have to help me with the math. Last year, we took 165 Free Days together. This year, our goal is to take 180 Free Days together. And then by 2029, for us to hit our goal, we're going to take 300 Free Days together as a family. So that has just been an incredible filter for us and for our family. Am I going to join the board of this nonprofit? Are we going to start this business? Are we going to buy this lake house? Are we going to move to this city? All of these questions now get filtered through the lens of our Decade Dream. And this Decade Dream really serves as a North Star for us to help us stay focused on what is truly important, which, for us, having gone through this experience with watching Sunny's parents' marriage unravel, we have clarity on what we want and don't want. So our Decade Dream is focused around Free Days.
 
Sunny was mentioning earlier about the time freedom. Taking this many Free Days together is really about our family's time freedom. And so that's what's really important to us. But it helps us stay focused on that because it would be so easy for us to go out and start 10 new businesses and for me to join all these nonprofits and for me to do all of this work at our kids' schools and just get very, very sidetracked with things that don't create time freedom for us and for our family.
 
Sunny Sheu: To be able to go through a learning journey together with your spouse, I don't think that happens a lot. And anyways, I think that's special for many, many reasons. I don't even know how to quantify that. Like, just the fact that the Coach concepts, we learn something new every time. Chad is awesome, like Ann was talking about. We get these little nuggets. Every time, I'm like, oh, man, this is such a pain. We're just going to fly out for a couple of days and then come back. We need to leave the kids. But once we land, we have our date night. We go to session, we have takeaways that are like micro shifts in our mindset. And those micro shifts over time, I mean, they compound. By the time we know it, a year passes and we look back and we're like, oh, we're thinking about things a little bit differently now. So. It's hard to notice. Just like it is in our program. And sometimes it's hard to notice. We're just doing the work, doing the work, head down, doing the work. And then when we look up, we're like, oh, we're different people now. So having the Free Days on top, like he gets to check one Free Day off of our box for the year. So, but anyways, it's a very special time for Ann and myself.
 
Ann Sheu: Gosh, I love the Strategic Coach community so much. It's a big part of why we keep coming back quarter after quarter. I mean, Chad is phenomenal. We love him. We love his insights. And there's also something special about just being in community with other people who are doing the work like we are. And getting to learn the collective wisdom in the room and learning from other entrepreneurs is really special. The breakouts that we get to do and having an opportunity to connect with other Coach people and just- What's really been fun is that there's been some people that have been in the same workshops as us since I joined. So it's been fun to get to check in with the same people every quarter and hear about their journey and how things have been evolving in their business and watching them grow as they've been applying Coach concepts themselves. So it's fun to get to celebrate those wins with each other every time we come back together.
 
Sunny Sheu: I just can't emphasize how hard it is to run a family, and I'd like to encourage people to apply the same intentionality as they do in their professional lives to their family life. And it's not perfect. Ann and I, I mean, we probably disagree more than we agree. But at least we know where we disagree and it's on the table. It's not under the table and it's not hidden and there's no hidden resentments. So I would just encourage, especially for the entrepreneurs, the couples who work together to always make sure that the business is serving the life that they want and not the other way around.
 
Ann Sheu: One of my favorite things about Strategic Coach, and Chad says this often, is there's hundreds of tools, but really it's about the mindset shifts. Are you picking up on the mindset shifts every single time you leave a Coach workshop? And sometimes it's hard to see what that shift is right after the workshop, but a week later, a month later, a quarter later, when you come back, you're like, man, I think about things differently now. I remember when we learned Who Not How, and I was like, what do you mean you want me to delegate? That's ridiculous. Who am I going to delegate to? And how can I ever find somebody to trust that I'm going to delegate to? And now I am very proud of how much I am able to delegate and how I am willing to ask for help, especially about things around the house. And I mean, that was just a little mindset shift that happened after that workshop but has created so much freedom for me.
 
That's one of my favorite things about Strategic Coach. And I think that's one of the things that we're really proud of at Mpowered Families is we're also helping people have these small mindset shifts in their families. And we're watching those mindset shifts have ripple effects in many other areas of their lives. So a small mindset shift around time—and now you're spending more time with your parents because you're realizing that you don't have that much time left with them. A small mindset shift around taking more family vacations together or whatever it is for your family. Even if it's a small mindset shift around your values and getting clarity around values and how that then allows you to say no to some things that are not aligned with your values.
 
For me, it's about the mindset shifts that people are able to have through this work and how powerful that is. And I think reminding people that it's a journey and that in Mpowered Families, we always talk about progress over perfection. Can we just get something on paper, just something that we can iterate on. So just having the small incremental shifts of progress every single quarter, small little mindset shifts. And then you look back a year later, two years later, three years later, and things are completely different because of just little bits of intentionality, little bits of mindset shifts that have happened along the way.
 
If you want to learn more, we have a website, mpoweredfamilies.com. It's "mpowered" without the E in the front. So M-P-O-W-E-R-E-D families.com. And I'm also on social media. Ann C Sheu is my LinkedIn, and they could reach out to me. I'm also on Coach Connect—if anybody wants to reach out to me, my contact information is there. I would be happy to chat with anybody. Whether you're interested in doing the program or not, happy to chat with anybody about anything that we've talked about today. Sunny and I are pretty open book and happy to share our experiences and what's worked and what hasn't worked along the way.