Nobody tells you that single fatherhood comes with a commercial driver's license for a minivan and approximately 8 hours a week behind the wheel. School drop-off. Pickup. Football practice. The tournament two towns over. The forgotten cleats run. The "can we stop for food" negotiation that I lose every single time.
For a while I resented it — that's 8 hours I could be working. Then I did the math differently: 8 hours a week is 400 hours a year. That's a part-time job. So I started treating the minivan like what it is: a rolling office with excellent acoustics and brutally honest passengers.
Lesson 1: Shut Up and Listen
My daughter talks in the car. Not at home — at home she's in her room with the door closed, as is tradition. But something about the car, the forward motion, the not-making-eye-contact of it, opens the floodgates. Eighth grade drama, friend politics, teacher grievances — all of it, usually starting about four minutes into the drive.
Early on, I did what dads do: I tried to fix everything. "Have you tried talking to her?" "Why don't you just—" She'd go quiet. Door closed again, metaphorically.
Then I learned the move: just drive and listen. Mm-hmm. Wow. Tell me more. No solutions unless asked. And you know what? She kept talking. For entire drives.
This rewired how I run discovery calls. I used to walk into a prospect meeting with solutions loaded — I'd diagnosed them from their website before the call. Now I drive the conversation like I drive the minivan: ask the question, then shut up and let them talk. The prospect who talks for twenty uninterrupted minutes will tell you exactly what to sell them. The one you pitch at in minute three will politely end the call.
My daughter taught me the highest-ROI sales skill I have, and she did it complaining about math homework.
Lesson 2: Dead Time Is Think Time
My best business ideas don't come at my desk. They come at red lights.
The dead-brands-as-a-service model? Thought of it waiting in the school pickup line, watching 200 parents idle in 200 cars, every one of them scrolling a phone, every one of them a potential customer for SOMETHING. The ERP content calendar that tripled my inbound? Outlined mentally on the way home from a football tournament, dictating notes at stoplights like a maniac.
There's science here — the brain's default mode network does its best work when you're doing something automatic, like driving a familiar route. But you don't need the science. You need the habit: keep a notes app one tap away and capture everything. Half my ideas are garbage. The garbage ones are free. The good ones paid for this year.
The minivan rule: no podcasts on short drives. Short drives are for thinking. Long drives are for the kids' music, which is non-negotiable and occasionally, against all odds, pretty good.
Lesson 3: Logistics Is a Superpower
Tuesday schedule, real example: school pickup 2:45, son's football practice 4:00 across town, daughter's thing at 5:30 back near school, dinner somewhere in the wreckage, homework supervision, bedtime. Three humans, two towns, one dad, zero margin.
I plan Tuesdays like a supply-chain manager: route optimization (never backtrack), buffer stock (snacks in the car — always), contingency planning (the "forgotten gear" bag lives in the trunk permanently), and stakeholder communication (the group text with other parents is a logistics network, treat it like one).
Then I walk into a client's warehouse and they tell me their delivery routing is "complicated," and I just smile. Buddy, I route perishable children with emotional needs and fixed deadlines across a county with construction zones. Your pallet routing is adorable.
But seriously: the dads and moms doing complex family logistics every day already think in systems. If you can run a household, you can run an operation. The skills transfer perfectly — it's just that nobody puts "coordinated 14 weekly activities across 3 schedules" on a resume. They should.
The Fare
The dad taxi doesn't pay in money. It pays in ideas, in listening skills, in logistics black belts, and occasionally in a quiet "thanks, Dad" from the back seat that hits harder than any closed deal.
Four hundred hours a year. Best part-time job I ever had.
David Strausser, Dead Brands LLC / Quaint Business Solutions
Want help with your ERP? Book a call — I promise better logistics than your current system, and I've got the minivan miles to prove it.
Deadbrands.co merch: the Dad Taxi official uniform. Now with 100% more snack crumbs.
