Can we be more effective and efficient if we run our families like a business? | Canada Voices

As an entrepreneur, I use a strategic planning framework that helps our leadership team set goals, analyze metrics and make decisions at our company.

So when I recently read The Family Firm, a book by economist Emily Oster that urges parents to apply some of these same principles to parenting, it left me wondering: Can we be more effective and efficient if we run our families like a business?

Ms. Oster’s target readers are parents of post-toddler, pre-teenage children – like me – who will face big decisions with logistical, financial and social implications. They include things such as which school to send your children to and when, how children should spend their summers, how much screen time they should have and when they should get a phone, to name a few.

For many of these questions, there is no “right” answer, so in order to frame these decisions, she recommends starting with your family’s “Big Picture.” Most companies, mine included, have a corporate mission statement and associated values – Shopify’s is “making commerce better for everyone.”

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Your family’s Big Picture lays out your high-level values, such as eating dinner together every night or prioritizing family travel in your budget, which act as a way to evaluate a decision. If it goes against our corporate values, we’re not doing it. The same should go for your family.

Then, when faced with a big decision, such as whether you child can go to sleepaway camp, Ms. Oster recommends a framework she calls the Four Fs. First, frame the question: Step back and put some context around the question. For example, “Can I go to summer camp?” may actually be “What is our approach to summer vacation for our kids?”

Next, fact find – something we inherently do in our business. Gather the evidence, details and data related to a decision by, for example, speaking to other parents who have sent their kids to the same camp, assessing the cost and reading online reviews. How will this affect your family’s schedule? Are there social implications?

Then, make a final decision and follow up. Not a perfect decision, since those don’t exist. But align with your partner, if you have one, and move forward confidently, then revisit later.

I love using a framework we use in our business: Is this a one-way door (a.k.a. it would be hard to reverse it) or is this a two-way door (easy to walk back)? Summer camp is a two-way door – if they don’t like it, they don’t have to go back next year.

Ms. Oster also says many of us who use task management or other tools that streamline our workdays often forget that these have parallel uses at home – guilty as charged – and she highlights ways to use business tools and processes to improve household management. While I’m sure the last thing working parents like me want to do in their free time is Slack their spouse about grocery logistics, these tools simply save time.

I had already implemented several of her recommendations, including shared calendars, Google docs for things such as babysitting instructions and shared to-do lists. But she had some ingenious suggestions, including colour-coded calendars for each family member, setting recurring calendar reminders for key dates such as summer camp booking deadlines and a Google doc with a family packing list. (Why on Earth do I create a new packing list every time we go on a trip?)

Reading Ms. Oster’s book showed me that, without realizing it, I had already applied many of the things that make my business run smoothly into our family life – I just hadn’t thought of it that way.

Ultimately, this approach to running your family like a business doesn’t mean you’re sitting down for family board meetings or reviewing your budget over dinner. It just means you’re setting guiding principles and using those to determine how you spend your time, money and energy.

As parents, we could all benefit from those savings.

Erin Bury is the co-founder and CEO of online estate planning platform Willful.co. She lives in rural Ontario with her husband and two young children.