The Ciminiera Family Experiment

Who are the Ciminieras and who cares? I’ll answer the second question first. You may not care and that’s fine. But you’re here so I’ll assume you do. We are a family of four, my husband Toni, and our two sons: Jason (13) and Nicolas (10).

My last attempt at entrepreneurship between 2007-2009, I failed. Ever since I have been slightly terrified to ever try again. I learned a ton during that experience and don’t regret at all doing it. But that failure has held me back from ever trying again. Both Alan Donegan from the Rebel School and Nick Loper from Side Hustle Nation have inspired me to give it another whirl. But because I have a full-time job and career I love, my goal with this blog is to use it as a family experiment to teach my boys.

They are both at an age where they spend most of their free time either playing baseball or gaming with their friends. As their parents, we of course want them to continue to be kids and enjoy that time; because we all know how fun and simple life is at that age—gratefully!

But as we work toward financial independence as a family, I want them to have skin in the game and feel the success (and failures along the way) that we will achieve together. And who knows? Maybe they’ll really enjoy working in a startup environment. It would be my dream to see their creativity flourish and see them lead this or something else one day.

Yet another blog, you say? I know. Surely there are enough out there; I get that. My thought was, building and running a blog will give my kids an opportunity to not only learn important life skills like public speaking or how to shake a hand, but also the technical skills of installing, operating, and maintaining a blog and all the business processes around it.

And they are very curious, at least our younger son, Nicolas, is. He’s extremely interested in how money works, what makes the world go around, what he’ll be when he grows up, how he can be successful, can he be a successful businessman and professional baseball player and father all at the same time. At 10 he’s thinking about these things!

Jason is not as curious, lol; at least it’s not as obvious to me but he does have dreams of getting rich and famous. Everyone wants to be an influencer these days…sigh…

One thing they both have in common, though, is that they both have zero clue about how much work it takes to achieve success in anything in life. This “now” culture these days obscures how much work is involved in getting to any level of expertise in a subject, let alone be successful at it.

That’s why I want to use this blog as a platform to teach them. And I will chronicle our journey, openly to you all to follow along. That will be the behind-the-scenes, sidebar topic we will blog about; secondary to the core idea of this blog, which is all about becoming mentally, physically, and financially healthy to live a long, healthy, and happy life doing what we love with the ones we love.

Originally, I had a lengthy launch plan mapped out where I’d get everything perfect and in order before launching. But my inner Taylor Swift told me, I need to calm down. I decided to not go for perfection (like I usually do) and JFDI. So here we are, live and on camera!

I will officially hire my boys into the business at some point but for now we ‘played’ office. So I created job descriptions and made them apply for the jobs. Then I had them do interview training with me. I gave them a set of interview questions and asked them to think about their answers, write them down, and come prepared. Then I officially interviewed them both for their respective positions. And guess what, they got the jobs!! WOOP WOOP! Shocker, right?

Below you’ll find my older son, Jason’s practice interview video and my younger son, Nicolas’s official interview video.

I tell you, I was about to fire Jason before he even started, ooofff! 13-year-olds are somethin! But I’m going to have some patience because I really want them to get into the groove and start wanting to do the work. Right now, I do most, if not everything. That’s fine. They are 10 and 13 for criminy’s sake!

You’ll also see below the first 5 minutes of our first team meeting after they both got “hired.”

What do you think? Am I taking this a little too far? The boys seem to be having fun…sometimes, ha!

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Post your thoughts here or send me a note at [email protected].