The Topline: Three Kids and Three Careers for this Working Dad

This week on The Topline, we are talking to Dave Mirgon, a working dad with three kids and three jobs and not a lot of free time!

Tell us about your family and work roles

Dave: I've got three kids. Elise is a sophomore at Ohio State. She's majoring in business and real estate. AJ is a senior at Hilliard Bradley High School, plays basketball, football. And then Ben is a 6th grader and he is also very active in sports as well.

            And then for me, I've got basically three lanes that I play in as a "working dad." I left the corporate world and decided to go out on my own, created a co-working space where I'm at today, Brick House Blue in the Dublin Bridge Park area. Actually opened up our second location and did that with the idea of continuing on with consulting, which is what I do with another company I started called Landid, where we help companies and people land their identities in the job market.

            And then the third lane is the Mid Ohio Pumas. So I've got the largest AAU travel basketball program in the Midwest. We've got over 600 kids in our program, 50 teams.

            We played in 750 games in Indiana over the course of June, July, and August. And we have zero COVID cases. So just as a parent who's always wondering, "Should I introduce my kid back into sports, et cetera?" I just think it's important that we were able to do that and had not a single kid test positive for COVID.

If you had to say really quickly how were you able to pull that off, what's the secret?

Dave: We were very diligent about the process. We respected the process. We have kids and parents, parents can come in, but they can only come in for about 15 minutes. They wear a mask, the kids wear masks in, we take breaks and hand sanitize, wash hands. Same thing on the way out.

How are you doing in all of this? I mean literally how's it feel to be you in this COVID time?

Dave: Well there have been ups and downs.

When COVID originally hit, the basketball side of it was shut down and I had 500 kids' uniforms, practice shirts and shooter shirts in my garage. So we looked like a Dick's Sporting Goods Store.

            And in communicating with all my parents, there were maybe three to four parents that were just like, "Look, this isn't what we want to do." Many others were delighted that we were trying to find a way to get the kids back out being active. So that began to put a lot of work, we kind of had to restart and do things all over again to get these kids back out playing. As far as Landid goes, recruiting slowed down dramatically. The unemployment rate skyrocketed, which we have an outplacement side of our business. So that began to as people figured out whether they wanted to go back to work or they wanted to collect unemployment, once they decided it's time to rebrand and find a job business started to pick up in July as well.

            And then here at Brick House Blue, of course in that first six weeks while we stayed open, we were pretty much empty. A lot of our meetings were canceled, our coworkers were working from home. The meetings have gradually come back, but the co-working has ramped up significantly. People realizing, "I don't want to work from home. My company's making me do it. I want to go somewhere where I can focus." So we're getting a lot of those past people, as well as entrepreneurs who are traditionally working from home who are now saying, "My kids are at home. I need to take my office into somewhere professional." So that's a plus.

How have your kids impacted your career?

Dave: Actually, they built my career in some sense. The Mid Ohio Pumas piece I was doing when my son started as a 1st grader, he's a senior. So this is our 10th year. I was doing that after work 6:00 to 9:00 three nights a week with my son’s practices. And then we started to build more teams and it was a big part of my evenings nights, life, weekends, et cetera.

            It's allowed me to show them that talent being in recruiting and talent acquisition, that their skill sets, their talents, that the people that they are, their core behaviors are important and they should recognize them. So we've had a lot of great dialogue about who they are and who they want to be. So I've been able to actually bridge my career and they as individuals growing up into one.

Did you ever feel like it was hard to be a dad and have a career?

Dave: No. I was fortunate to have a fantastic wife who worked full time as well at Cardinal Health who'd been there for 20 years, who created flexibility for me, understood the kids in the evening, we're going to have to have somebody at practice, whether I was running it or whether they were participating in another program.

            And so she was very good about knowing that we were doing all this, sacrificing this for the right reasons to get these kids out there. She did a great job with me taking phone calls till 10 o'clock at night talking to parents about our program when it was probably her time for me to be with her. So it was never truly an issue just because she had a lot of bandwidth and flexibility with it.

What conditions do you need around you to be your most creative? And do you feel like you have those in your life right now?

Dave: Well, those that know me really well know I'm a big thinker, Shark Tank ideation guy. My brain never turns off. So the only conditions I need to be in that space, because it's me driving, laying in bed at night, mowing the lawn I'm always thinking about the next best thing. The main condition is being around people who are big thinkers and open-minded.

            But it has allowed me more time for me to really digest and you kind of marinate and nurture those ideas where traditionally they're an idea and they sit over here on the shelf because you’re too busy.

            So I've been able to kind of create some new things for all three of our business lines and to kind of look at them differently.

What is a tip that you would give other working parents and specifically dads right now?

Dave: It's a great question. I think it's specifically to the dads, but I think even the moms, I would say inclusivity and what I mean by that is the ability I think traditionally we grew up where your dad went to work and mom stayed home and things like that. My parents did a great job of bringing me into what they were doing. My dad was a salesman. I went on his sales route, rode the truck with them, learned about his business. My mom was in mental health as a social worker. I went to her office after school and hung out there and watched what she did and they had a gym there and I would work out while I was there.

            I always felt like I was a part of my parents' career. And so I've tried to do a lot of that with my own where I brought, I know people say don't bring work home, but I think it's really important that your kids know what you do and why you do it. I would say bringing your kids into the conversation with what you do and not being so creating a declaration of I'm at home, it's now family time. I think family and work can combine.

What would you say to parents right now who are working from home and kids are doing school from home, what would you suggest to them?

Dave: I think it's a great social experiment that we're in right now where we can try and create a little bit more bandwidth for these kids to see how much they can do on their own. I think they’re learning lessons. I've had many conversations with parents as we approach the fall on how they're going to try to create structure in an unstructured environment.

            But I think you can also delegate a little bit more and empower them a little bit more to try to do it on their own and reward them for figuring it out versus hovering over them all the time and ensuring they're doing every little piece. So I think there's some experimental time in there that I think people should try to work with.

            I didn't realize like today for Friday isn't school, it's the off day on the hybrid. So it's just me keeping up with that, I'm not sure I can do that right now. Again, my wife's great at that stuff, but I would just say have a little bit more bandwidth and patience.

You've mentioned your wife a couple of times. So I'm going to ask you… according to the statistics, many of the wives are doing more of the unpaid labor in the home. So they're keeping the kitchen running, the laundry running, the house is clean disinfected, the pets are taken care of. They're managing these crazy schedules and working. Is that how it is in your house?

Dave: My wife had an opportunity to take a severance package during right when March hits and she'd been at Cardinal Health for 20 years. And so instead of staying in and moving to a different role, we both decided this was the timing where she could step away and figure out what she wants to do next in her career. And so she's been at home during all of this having some time for herself, having extra time with the kids. So it's actually been easier for me because she's been around, but we've been around together.

            It's probably the first time in our careers that we’ve both been home together and being productive. She did a great job of just ensuring that the things you mentioned were taken care of. Now, I will say I'm a clean freak. So a lot of the cleaning and stuff I do as well.

Could you have the three careers you have if you were raising those three kids on your own? If you didn't have her as a partner, could you have all the career success you have?

Dave: Absolutely not. There's just too much. I'm already juggling enough with three different verticals. If I really looked at family as the fourth vertical when I was having to do the full capacity of what comes with that, there's no way. And that's why I keep bringing her up. I mean, I'm blessed to have the opportunity to try these different things. She's allowing me to exorcise my demons of wanting to create and be innovative and such.

            She recognized that from day one with me and that's always who I've been. She actually tried to pull me out of corporate many years ago to do some of these things and take risks. So yeah. There's no way I probably would have to stick to the traditional corporate role and having daycare and some support from my parents or family if I were a single father. I don't know how single mothers do it.

What is one thing that you have just let go of caring about as a parent in the pandemic or one thing that's like come into your family's life as a tradition or something you want to keep?

Dave: We got a new puppy. During the pandemic, we went ahead and got a second one. So the whole family at home in lockdown trying to take care of two puppies, I think was a great parental family experiment because everybody had to chip in. And normally that would have been my responsibility to wake up, take the dogs out. I think being able to empower them to take on some of those responsibilities is kind of fun.

What are their names?

Dave:I've got a fox red lab named Tug and I've got a black lab named Jet.

If you were designing a T-shirt right now for working parents, what would the slogan be?

            Probably something that's my typical mantra and that is "What If, Why Not?” And what I mean by that is I think a lot of times we don't give ourselves enough energy or thought thinking to say, "But what if today's the day that I take the kids fishing? What if today's the day that I allow them to ride their bike an extra half mile to the store? What if today is the day that they make a great accomplishment in this space they've never made it before?

            And the why not is a lot of, "Why not let them try that? Why not allow myself the time to spend with them?" So I think when people are asking questions of themselves, those self-checks allow them to be a little bit more productive. So I would constantly probably have, if I had a shirt line it would be a lot of questions. Creating curiosity and thought and other people's minds versus making statements.

What is one thing you've done just for yourself lately?

Dave: We've got a workout room in our house and my son and I got the first time to really lift and work out together. He’s traditionally done that in high school, I’ve traditionally done that at work. So together, we were able to find time to get healthy together and collectively the family has.

What's one question I didn't ask you that I should ask my next guest?

Dave: I would ask them, "If you could be somebody different than you are today, how does that look? What does that feel like?" I like it when people—especially if you're talking to people our age—who’ve done something for so long, answer ‘what does pivoting look like?’