Applying business tools to a family of 15 children

“Yes, they are all mine...”
“No, we are not a blended family...”
“Nope, no adoptions...”

I have to say these lines nearly every day. For some reason, it was around our 10th kid that people stopped asking, “Do you know what causes that?” or told me to get a television. It was never the joke that bothered me – just the notion that they were original. Now, however, it is as if having 15 kids is so serious that it is no joking matter. People just stare – eyes filled with a mixture of fascination, awe, confusion . . . and tiny bit of terror.

“How do you do it?”

The loving husband answer: “My wife does it. I’m just along for the ride.” But this isn’t really true. Come on. I contribute somehow...

The supportive answer: “Whether you have one kid or 15, you are 100% parent all the time. My time is just divided differently.” But in truth, that’s just pro-life propaganda.

“How do you do it?”

Well, I suspect there is a natural and supernatural answer.

The natural answer is astoundingly similar to running a business. I’ve applied business tools to running my family. A few examples include:

The Gallagher Family Mission Statement:
“To understand and implement the Two Greatest Commandments (Mark 12:30-31) through the liturgical, sacramental, and devotional life provided by Holy Mother Church, no matter how contrary such life may be to the kingdom of man, no matter the suffering required, no matter the humiliation endured.”

Core Values:
Humility: because all other virtues are impossible without it.
Piety: because if we believe God is present, we must act like it.
No Scorekeeping: because only God’s score matters.
Joy: because anything less is lack of gratitude to Almighty God.

And I have brought a little “Lean Six Sigma” into the house with visual chore-charts and process improvement sessions with the kids. I have created SWOT and PESTLE and 80/20 analysis tools for family use, but I’m too busy or too tired to implement most of it.

Key Metric:
But there is one key metric that I track carefully. Like Jim Collins says in Good to Great, you have to figure out what “fuels your economic engine.”

In my family, I’ve chosen the rosary to fuel our natural and supernatural engine. Why? Because I am so pious toward our Blessed Mother? I wish. In reality, I’m looking at the metrics of “return on investment.” You don’t need your CFO for this math. Just follow along.

If your child is 10 years old and were to pray the Holy Rosary every day until death at age 80, how many times would he ask the Blessed Virgin to intercede for him at the moment of death?

There are 53 Hail Marys in every rosary.
53 x 365 = 19,345
19,345 x 70 years = 1,354,150

If you want a return on your parental investment in your kid’s salvation, teach him to pray the rosary every day of his life. It’s likely to be the one metric that drives everything else; or, as Collins says, the metric that “turns the flywheel.” If a daily rosary is present long after you, dear parents, are dead and gone, then Confession is likely to follow, and so is Mass, and so is adoration . . . and so is eventual salvation.

Perhaps this is a little too natural a way to think about parenting, but I’m sticking to it for now. May God help me.

CONOR GALLAGHER is CEO of Good Will Publishers and its subsidiary, TAN Books, and earned both his master’s degree in philosophy and his Juris Doctoris from The Catholic University of America. He and his wife, Ashley, are the proud parents of 15 wonderful children. He is the author of If Aristotle’s Kid Had an iPod, Still Amidst the Storm, and Parenting for Eternity.