Deevo Tindall

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Transcription - How Single Dads Build a Thriving Business

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Are you a single dad with dreams and aspirations of owning your own business or being your own boss?

Do the demands and the stress on your time as a single dad require control of your schedule and your workload?

My guest is here with me to talk about how single dads like you can get control of your time and your dreams and succeed.

So don't go anywhere.

Welcome to the Fatherhood Challenge, a movement to awaken and inspire fathers everywhere,

to take great pride in their role and a challenge society to understand how important fathers are to the stability and culture of their family's environment.

Now here's your host, Jonathan Guerrero.

Greetings everyone. Thank you so much for joining me. My guest is Devo Tendol.

Devo is the founder and CEO of Fusion Creative, a branding and marketing agency.

Devo is expertise and experience have not only made him the authority on how to grow a successful business but also how to do it as a single dad.

And this is why I have brought him on the Fatherhood Challenge. Devo, welcome to the program.

Hey my man, thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Okay, I got to ask, what is your favorite dad joke?

What do you call a cat with eight legs?

Cat with eight legs.

Definitely haven't heard this one.

Octopus.

That was great.

I've never been asked that question before so thank you.

Well Devo, what is your own story of what led you to become an entrepreneur and start Fusion Creative?

I think really it's some similarities with a lot of entrepreneurs.

I was driven by a blend of necessity and passion.

I worked a very successful job. I learned a boatload of information and met some amazing people and got the opportunity to rub shoulders with some pretty amazing and intelligent and motivated people that were also equally successful.

But I wasn't really utilizing any of my passions that I felt drawn to do and I certainly wasn't utilizing my creativity.

And because I'm a creative at heart, I interestingly have sort of a nice blend of pragmatism and left and right brain sort of synergies.

And I really wanted to build something, I've always been passionate about building things.

And I got exposed to that in the corporate world for many years working in the areas that I was blessed to work in.

I got to build projects but I didn't have any ownership of them.

And I really was looking for something where I could express my creativity but also provide practical solutions and sort of be the owner of all that.

And so Fusion was born from that desire to merge innovative design with really with strategic marketing.

I know that there are so many dads out there listening who are experiencing some form of burnout where it almost hurts to get out of the bed just to get into work.

And it feels like it drains their soul.

And I'd be willing to bet that besides probably the schedule thing and all of that.

The lack of ownership in their creative energy is probably a big factor in why they might feel that drain and burnout because this is how we were made.

We were made to create things.

We were definitely not designed to sit in cubicles for eight hours a day doing redundancy tasks and working for other people in a capacity where we're just sort of taking orders and knee jerk responding.

And that and entrepreneurship is not for everybody.

There are people who sort of thrive in those sorts of conditions and I'm not making any judgments on any of that.

But for certain people, I'm one of those people.

And it wasn't designed to sort of sit. And there's an argument to be made like you just said, Jonathan, that humans themselves were not designed to be sitting in a cubicle or in an office, you know, just judging over these sorts of minutia and redundancy.

And for me, that was sort of an observation that I made early on that, you know, I could do this for 50 years for rest of my life, make a lot of money, have a lot of things, have a nice big house, all those things.

But I just realized, do my own sort of introspective way that I just this is not this wasn't my calling. And so I set out to find a way to step out of that space.

What do you think are some of the reasons that single dads with aspirations of entrepreneurship won't go after their dreams?

I don't think first and foremost that we are taught to go after our dreams.

I think critical thinking and self-awareness and doing something for ourselves is is frowned upon.

It's viewed as vain, it's viewed as selfish, it's viewed as narcissistic.

And the collective, the collective educations that we receive from from a very early age, you know, three, four, five years old, we're stuck in the classroom.

And then we're stuck in another classroom and then we're stuck in another classroom, a cult, a cubicle or an office. And we're not trained to step outside of that space.

We're educated to become automatons in a lot of capacity. And so we just don't really have the self-awareness to think outside of that space.

And then when we do think outside of that space, there's a lot of fear associated with it. There's a lot of trauma associated with that, especially if you just came out of a divorce, you just went through a divorce, you're going through a divorce or you're a single father.

Man, I can tell you my entire life changed and anyone who listens to this is a single parent, not just fathers, but you, your paradigm changes really fast.

And you really are forced to either figure it out or pass it off like a lot of people do.

And so I think concerns about financial security and time management and resources and really understanding that balance between being a present parent and a business owner.

It can be really daunting for a lot of people and I don't think it's insurmountable. Obviously I'm doing it and thousands of others are as well.

But I think early on when you sort of think about, what do I want to do with my life? There's so much bigger.

And when you start to actually materialize those ideas, you get stopped up against this stop gap because you're like, "Shoo, man, I don't know how that's going to be possible.

I suddenly have kids. I have to be the mother and the father for. I got to cook for them. I got to drive them around."

Like all these different things and it's like, "I just want to stay in something really comfortable right now."

You touched on it in the very, very beginning. I thought that was really cool. You brought that up. And that is the education system.

Our education system is decades old as far as the model that we're using today.

And the model that we're using today is based on a thought process of producing obedient factory workers.

And so we still have that mindset within our own education system. I mean, we're trying to break it, but we're really having a hard time.

And sometimes I wonder if there's an epigenetic component into the way we approach education that is making it so difficult for us to break free, not only from the education model that we've been using,

but also within ourselves to become entrepreneurs when we were brought up completely the opposite way. And that's what makes it such a challenge to break.

Wow, brilliant point, epigenetics. How many of your listeners know what epigenetics is? So that's fantastic reference.

It partially is a collective consciousness of epigenetics and sort of DNA remoluculizing in a capacity.

But I think more than that, there is a fixed and concentrated effort from the powers that be, that maintain and control the education system and are teaching the teachers that are teaching our kids to maintain that sense of control and manipulation so that the type of output that we're getting are people who don't know how to critically think are people who don't know how to function on their own who are not independent and autonomous in the sense of the system.

There are slaves to the system, if you will, and that system is rewarded or I'm sorry, that system rewards the people who not only educate those people, but then the people who are part of the systems themselves are rewarded sort of that.

It's sort of like bread and circuses. There's a, you know, you know, you like the Roman civilization, I'm going way outside of where I think we should be going, but the Roman civilization is no dissimilar to what we did.

You know, they knew that in times of crisis, the best thing to do was to feed the masses and give them alcohol and give them entertainment and set up all these different massive arenas all over the world.

And if you look at our society today, that's exactly what's happening in sports or in everything else, you know, you have these massive events that are scheduled to entertain the masses and we keep them drunk and we keep them high and we keep them stone.

We don't ever encourage them to step outside that space of self awareness and introspection and mindfulness and then sort of become ind