I want to be clear about this from the jump: an extraordinary family is not a perfect family.

It’s a critical distinction and that grace matters for you, for your partner, and for your children. An extraordinary family doesn’t mean our children always listen, our partner always concedes that we were right all along, or that we live in bliss without stress, grief, or arguments. I wholeheartedly believe that intentionally building an extraordinary family is one of the most important things we as parents can do with our time, but it shouldn’t be governed by the impossible pursuit of perfection.

You know who doesn’t have it all figured out when it comes to building an extraordinary family? Me. What I’m sharing with you today and what I shared at our recent Extraordinary Impact Family Event is what my wife Carla and I have intentionally put into practice in our own family, thanks to the wisdom we’ve gleaned from great men and women who have built their own extraordinary families. But even so, our boys are still growing up; we’re 10 to 20 years from knowing if what we implemented worked at all, but I know that we approach each day, each moment as a family, with great intentionality. Just as a craftsman trains his hands through thousands of repetitions, extraordinary families are built in life’s ordinary moments.

“Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.”
(Proverbs 22:6)

The true risk of a failed legacy has nothing to do with wealth itself.

Wealthy families are often so because of great professional success, but no professional success in the world can replace being present at home. Read it again. Write it down. Snap a picture of it and make it your phone background. Why? First and foremost because the #1 regret of high-achieving professionals is that they didn’t spend more time with their families. Second, because the greatest danger your legacy faces has nothing to do with your success, financial planning, or the performance of your investment portfolio—it all has to do with failing to invest in your family.

The zeros in your bank account do nothing to steel your family against the shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves curse. The curse refers to a toxic three-generation cycle of wealth in which the first generation makes it, the second maintains it, and the third spends it; the family’s legacy has failed.

A survey of wealthy families across America asked families to think about what could cause their legacy to fail. Their answers overwhelmingly prioritized things outside of their control:

Investment / Asset Specific Risk: 37%

Economy / Financial Market Risk: 26%

Tax / Political Risk: 16%

Family Culture, Communication and Relationship Difficulties: 7%

Source: Family Office Exchange

Yet in their research, Roy Williams and Vic Pressier found that more than half of respondents—60%—pointed to a lack of communication and trust (i.e. a lack of a healthy family culture) as why their legacy did fail. If we think that legacies fail because of a lack of capital, or tax planning, or poor investments, it’s easier to shirk accountability or say it’s out of our control. But when we face the fact that failed legacies result from a lack of clear values, purpose, vision, and communication around wealth (including its various forms and purpose), there’s nowhere for us to hide. Said simply yet harshly, the shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves curse is a parenting crisis.

As parents, we are in control of building and preserving our legacies. We must be intentional about building a healthy family culture, about building an extraordinary family.

Invest in your family like you invest in your company.

Now that you know what’s at stake and your responsibility in it, there is an incredible opportunity ahead of you—the opportunity to intentionally invest in your family, starting today. To build an extraordinary family, you need to invest your time and energy into establishing a family culture built on rhythms, standards, and love that doesn’t have to be earned.

The first step on any great journey is awareness. Make a commitment to yourself here and now that you are going to put in the work to build an extraordinary family, to build alongside your partner and children a life where you are living fully in the 8 F’s of life: faith, family, friends, freedom, fun, fulfillment, fitness and finance.

You can’t build a path without a destination: do you know where you want your family to go? How you want your relationship to grow and mature through the many seasons of your life? What living fully looks like for you? If not, this is the best place to start.

A good first step is determining a family mission and vision. These are representations of the principles your family lives by and what defines who you are and what you want to do as a family, not as individuals.

Wenner Family Mission and Vision

Family Mission: Lead with love and intentional action to light up the world.
Family Vision: Every generation, making a 100x impact.

I also highly encourage coming up with a set of core values for your family, the same as you would (or have) for your business; there’s no magic number, just what feels right for your family. At the recent event, we gave the audience time to brainstorm two potential core values and it created some meaningful conversation and introspection around the room. Action is always the first step. Nothing you put on paper has to be perfect or permanent; just start thinking, start talking, start building.

Wenner Family Values: BE A LIGHT

Be Present: Enjoy the moment with an attitude of gratitude.
Authentic: Maintain and display humble confidence. Be honest and transparent at all times.
Live Fully: We strive to maximize each day and the blessings the Lord has provided to us across the 8F's of life.
Impact: We give our time, our talent, and our treasures generously.
Grit & Growth: Passion and perseverance towards long term goals with curiosity and desire to grow.
Honor God: Through servant leadership to the Lord, family, and at work.
Tribe: Build thriving relationships through our relationship with the Lord.

All the tangible things that come out of sitting down and talking with your family about your mission, vision, etc. are valuable, but the true value is in being together. Putting intentional time into being with the people you love is the real key to building an extraordinary family.

Habits fuel extraordinary families

“We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Will Durant

I said earlier that a lot of what Carla and I implement in our own home comes from the wisdom of other great men and women who are building extraordinary families. One of the books I can’t recommend enough to anyone who is on this journey with us is Habits of the Household by Justin Whitmel Early. The book taught me that the habits we adopt as a family, from our commitment to eating dinner together to prioritizing 1:1 time between Carla and I, quietly build our family culture in the background, training our family on what we love and value.

Not just that, but you don’t need me to remind you that you’re busy. Intentional routines, rhythms, and habits are an incredible tool for bridging the gap between the chaos of daily life and actually making time for the things that matter to you as a parent, as a husband or wife, and together as a family.

We focus on keystone habits, which are behaviors that can cause a ripple effect of positive change, with daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual rhythms. What these habits and rhythms are will be different for every family and there is no right way to do it; the most important thing is that you’re intentional about why you’re doing something. For example, in our house, Carla and I are both dedicated to daily keystone habits that have us at our best, because when we’re at our best we can be better for our children and for each other.

Another really important habit we have in our household is sitting together for dinner, whenever possible. Once you can get that rhythm in place, it might not feel that impactful at first; maybe the kids are just arguing, conversations are limited. But when you are intentional about the rhythm of dinner time, the value comes immediately. In our family, we always start dinner with prayer and then we take turns answering questions that necessitate answers beyond “good” or “fine;” questions like, “What is something you are proud of that happened today?” or “Who did you help today?” The key is to not expect this miraculous event the first time you approach the rhythm differently and instead to let its impact and your connection compound.

When you start looking at habits and rhythms for your own family, it can feel overwhelming to “fit it all in,” but there’s several ways to maximize your habits.

Maximizing Keystone Habits Across the 8 F’s of Life

Assess your life and ensure the habits you’re building align with what you can reasonably achieve. You can always take on more in another season.
Be clear on your goals for you, your family, and for this season of life. How are the habits and rhythms of your life bringing you closer to success?
Look for opportunities to integrate the priorities of your life. Play a sport with your children or spouse, integrating family with fitness and fun.
Get to know your family members deeply.
- Can you name 10 things each of your family members loves? Not the layups like God or eachother. What about 10 things YOU love?
- Do you know each family member’s love language? Their strengths?

When I talk about habits, I am talking about intentional habits, the things we choose to do again and again, not the habits we fall into. I’m going to ask you this not from a place of judgment, but because I would want someone to ask me: what percentage of time are you co-parenting with screens?

The fight for screen time is the fight for formation. Getting rid of screens isn’t the solution: curation is. This means choosing rhythms that function as limits and then choosing good content to fill those limits.

A limit in our home is that we don’t allow screens in bedrooms—period. We didn’t even allow our older sons to have cell phones until a year or so ago. The pushback, the frustration, the “everyone else has one” was all there, but Carla and I knew our values, knew our job was to protect our boys from all the inherent dangers of screens, and we stayed true to that part of our family culture. Was it easy everyday? No. But it was made easier by being in it together, by being aligned on what we wanted for our family.

Adopting a Rhythm of “On” and “Off” Times for Screens

Expectations to Have
- Expect others to push back.
- Expect a detox period where your children (and you) act and feel worse when the screens are taken away.
Conversations to Have
- Talk through rhythms with your spouse: a family has to be on the same page.
- Once you decide your on/off norms, have a conversation with your kids about what they are and why you’re adopting them.

Things to Try for “On Times”
- Weekly family movie nights
- Saturday morning cartoons
- One night a week
- Sick or “bad” days
Things to Try for “Off Times”
- Typical car rides
- Dinner table
- Alone in bedrooms
- After a certain time at night

Tips for Curating Screentime Within Your Limits

Make lists of shows, movies, video games, and books and share them with family and friends.
Keep lists of creative video or computer games, especially multiplayer ones.
Consider watching with your kids sometimes, and let shared content become conversation starters.

Turn off auto-play! Don’t let algorithms choose for you.
Don’t be afraid of repeating quality content.
Consider that quality content is not always free, but often is worth the cost.

Remember that parenting should always be a balance of warmth and structure, even when that structure may feel uncomfortable, or difficult. Our kids must always know that we love them and that we are putting them first in every decision we make. When you build a strong family culture, your children will come to trust that even the difficult decisions (or the unpopular ones) are done from a place of unconditional love.

Remember: there’s no perfect rubric for an extraordinary family.

Just as an extraordinary family isn’t a perfect family, there’s no universal list of extraordinary family traits. No two of us are raising the exact same family. Of course our children and our partners are different, but so are our circumstances, our goals, and how we define what it means to be thriving in our lives.

I intentionally didn’t lead with the characteristics of an extraordinary family because building your family culture is bigger than just matching a list. But for those who find it helpful, here are the characteristics that I’ve found over the years most extraordinary families have in common.

Characteristics of an Extraordinary Family

God at the center
Integrated
Intentional
Know and see each other
Love each other extravagantly
Surrounded by values-aligned people

This is not to say that you need to align with everything on this list to truly build an extraordinary family, but these are some of the commonalities I’ve noticed. Of all these characteristics, being surrounded by values-aligned people, what we call in our family our tribe, is of particular importance. If the people that your children value most outside of you and your spouse—that they go to for advice, that they want to share their biggest wins and challenges with—don’t reinforce the same values that you’ve deemed integral to your family culture, each interaction threatens to erode what you’ve built.

How do you know if you’re surrounded by the right people? Well, it’s all integrated, right? I’ll give you an example. At our most recent family meeting, I gave a talk about how we are biblically called to be salt and light in the world. If you aren’t familiar it refers to the positive influence that we as believers are called to have on society, preserving goodness, revealing truth, and guiding others to God.

We spent some time talking about why this was important and how we could as a family and individually be salt and light in the world. Then I asked our boys, who do you know that is salt and light to you, and they started with some pretty big names, including John C. Maxwell and Tim Tebow—and then they kept going. Soon, they had named some of my closest confidants, godly men who I surround both myself and my family with. It was clear that there was no disparity between our family culture and those we trust to influence it, which adds to its strength.

That’s what I mean by it all being integrated. Who you surround yourself with should always match what you prioritize as your values.

Interested in learning more about building your own extraordinary family?

Join me for a live discussion on August 20th where I’ll talk about the biggest lessons from our recent Extraordinary Impact Family event.

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NEW DATE for Elevate: The DLP Marriage Retreat

Our first ever marriage retreat, hosted by Lloyd and Linda Reeb, has moved to April 16-18, 2027. Hosted at Island Oaks Resort in Glen St. Mary, FL, this unique experience is designed to help you invest intentionally into your relationship, no matter what season your marriage is in. Space is limited; don’t wait to register.

Elevate: The DLP Marriage Retreat

DLP Named a Fastest Growing Company by Inc. 5000 for the 14th Consecutive Year

Since the ranking began in 1982, only 25 companies have made the list 14 years in a row. Not only have we consistently made the list, but our steady inclusion on the list is a testament to the execution of our 20-Mile March. We haven’t seen dramatic ups and downs with our positioning, but rather stayed in the middle of the pack. We aren’t chasing extraordinary risk; we are putting in consistent effort year in, year out, always prioritizing stewardship.

Wenner Family BHAG Progress

Our family's big, hairy, audacious goal (BHAG) is to experience 1,000 in 100 different places before Donny goes to college. As of August 10th, 2026, we’ve shared 449 extraordinary days as a family.

Where I've Been

Pigeon Forge, TN for the Extraordinary Impact Family Event

Dallas, TX

Jackson Hole, WY

Where I'm Going

Boulder, CO

Telluride, CO

New York

Bar Harbor, ME

Johannesburg

Cape Town

What I’m Reading

Incorruptible

Eric Ries

Inside the Box

David Epstein

Theo of Golden

Allen Levi