Jon-Mark Craddock runs a leather goods company out of Texas called La Matera, co-owns a place called Ramp Ranch, and hosts The Dadrepreneurs Podcast. He lives in Spicewood with his wife and two daughters, ages four and one. He drives a 1974 MG Midget that has followed him from Charleston to Atlanta to San Francisco to Austin over the past twenty years.

He does not have it all figured out. He’ll tell you that himself.

The thing Jon-Mark keeps coming back to is attention. Not time, exactly. Attention.

His life runs on three pillars: his wife, his kids, and the business. The problem is they never need the same amount from him at the same time. Some days the business can coast at 60% because one of the girls needs more of him. Some days his wife is having a rough one and she needs him to show up fully before anyone else gets a turn.

The hard part isn’t managing the calendar. It’s recognizing which pillar needs him most in a given moment, shifting without guilt, and trusting that the others can handle a little less for a while.

He’s gotten better at it. He’s still working on it.

Most mornings start the same way. His wife gets a workout in while Jon-Mark handles wake-up and breakfast. They eat together, and he has his coffee while the girls eat, watching the sun come up from the dining room table.

“It’s nothing elaborate,” he says, “but it’s easily the best part of my day. Every day. I’d give up just about anything else in my life to protect that time.”

He picks them up from school most afternoons too. The schedule is built around access to them, not the other way around.

The business is called La Matera. They make leather goods, the kind worth keeping. His wife works in the company with him. The girls come to the warehouse and, in his words, sling belts. Business conversations happen at dinner, in bed, and just about everywhere in between.

“It’s one big bowl of chaotic spaghetti,” he says, “but somehow it all seems to work out.”

He’s not interested in the idea of clean work-life balance anymore. The longer he’s in it, the less he believes that’s a real thing. Everything is mixed together and he’s made peace with that. When it all hits at once, they figure out what needs them most and let the rest wait.

His non-negotiable is letting his girls into the world he’s building.

He wants them to see how things actually work, the business, the good days, the hard ones, how something gets built from scratch. Not as a lesson. Just as exposure. If he’s heading to a meeting and it makes sense to bring one of them, she’s probably coming.

“I don’t want them to just hear about what their parents built someday,” he says. “I want them to grow up inside the story.”

The advice that stuck with him is three words: mind like water.

The idea is simple. When a rock hits water, the water responds exactly as much as it needs to and then returns to calm. No overreaction. No carrying it longer than necessary.

He thinks about it most when he’s running on four hours of sleep, the house is in an uproar, and his youngest has just dropped her second full glass of milk on the floor. The goal isn’t to never react. It’s to respond appropriately, clean up the milk, and find your way back to even keel.

His reset is the workshop behind the house.

There’s no shortage of projects in there that are either 75% complete or working about 75% of the time. The MG Midget is his favorite. He bought it in college and it has been with him through every city, every chapter, every version of himself. Working with his hands gets him out of his head, and that car has a way of reminding him who he was before life got quite so full.

When he’s on the road alone, the bar is low and that’s the point. Diet Coke on the plane, an action movie in the hotel room, a quiet dinner at a nice bar by himself. “The older I get,” he says, “the more luxurious a quiet meal with nowhere else to be feels.”

At home, though, he doesn’t really enjoy the solo thing. If the girls leave town with mom, he’d rather just go. He prefers the chaos to a quiet house.

That probably tells you everything you need to know about him.

Follow Jon-Mark and La Matera at @lamatera and find The Dadrepreneurs Podcast wherever you listen.