How Ridge’s Annual Revenue Hit +$250M & Sean Became a Dad

**Mike Beckham** (0:00)
Welcome to the Operators podcast. Today, you have Matt, Sean and myself, and we are gonna be talking about the life of Sean Frank. A few weeks ago, Sean put me on the hot seat and asked me a bunch of questions about my business, my dreams for the future. Today, we're turning it around, and we're doing the same exact thing with Sean. This will be a great episode. We're gonna talk about new products, how you grow a company that's already pretty big, and then how you do all that while your family's growing. I think you're gonna really enjoy it. So without further ado, on to the show.
Sean, I'm gonna kick off here. It seems like a huge theme of your life over the last few months has been growth. Your family's grown, Ridge is growing, you're growing into other product verticals.
What's been your experience over the last few months?

**Sean Frank** (0:49)
Well, you know, I just got a pool, so I'm just finishing that right now. So that's been a big update. No-

**Matt Bertulli** (0:55)
Overhead's growing.

**Sean Frank** (0:56)
Yeah, I haven't thought about growth as the central theme, but I think it makes a ton of sense. Look, me, I've been with my wife like 10 years, and we knew we were going to have kids. So glad we started that and got it out of the way. We had a great time before kids, we're having a great time with kids. My son's a couple of months old now.
My tips, and I think I tweeted some of these out, and people are going to hate hearing it, and I'm sorry if it comes off as pretentious, or makes me look like an a**hole. My number one tip for having kids is make sure you have lots of money. So I totally get why there's a fertility crisis, because it's just expensive.
Not only is giving birth expensive, all of the medical care around it is expensive, and then if you want to have a job, like I have a nanny now, that's expensive, have a night nurse to take care of him when he's sleeping, that's expensive. All these things just add up to just be incredibly expensive. So I think, dude, if you're having a kid, you're easily over the course of your life, it's $500,000 to a million dollars, so just, if you're listening to this, you probably have no problem making money, that's why you listen to the Operators podcast, you're in it, you're grinding. But yeah, luckily we have resources, it's made a lot easier. My son had to have surgery, so all those things just add up, like, oh shit, it's expensive.

**Mike Beckham** (2:07)
That's worth adding that we've moved our recordings of this, and Sean's moved his schedule around because his son's having to get a cast on every Wednesday, and that's just the reality with kids, that things happen, and it seems like you've been really transparent in sharing that in some of our groups.

**Matt Bertulli** (2:23)
Sean, have you changed your schedule a lot with the arrival of the baby, and your involvement in the company? Has any of that changed, or is it just status quo because you have the help?

**Sean Frank** (2:35)
I've tried to keep it as status quo as possible. I probably missed a good 10 days of actual work, but my wife wouldn't mind in sharing this.
Yes, my son had to have surgery. He's healthy now, he's going to be totally fine, but he's going to have casts for four months or whatever. When you're a baby or grown so much, you need to change your cast all the time. He's going to the doctor at least once a week, usually twice or three times a week. But then on top of that, my wife had a really hard postpartum on her body. While dealing with the baby, the reason why I need so much help is my wife had to go to the ER twice, and I have a concierge doctor for my wife. There's just been an issue that goes on in your life that you don't expect to happen. It's a miracle there's so many people walking around healthy.
So many things can just go wrong. So it's a miracle it's all working out.

**Mike Beckham** (3:27)
Yeah, it would have been tough to live a hundred or several hundred years ago when we didn't have any of this stuff because your bodies are just fragile.
So, okay, before we go forward, I actually want to ask another question about having a kid. How did you decide that for your marriage, for you and your wife, that this was the right time in your career to have kids? How did that conversation go?