Do Chip and Joanna Gaines put family first?

That’s not how you build giant business empires

I love Chip and Joanna Gaines of HGTV’s Fixer Upper. There is much to be admired about them, including their commitments to their faith, marriage, family and community. But their millions of fans and would-be imitators need to remember: Chip and Joanna Gaines did not get where they are by putting their family first.

The Gaines are often portrayed as the gold standard of “family first” couples. It’s an image Chip and Joanna work hard to convey. From photo shoots to scenes from Fixer Upper, there are countless moments that are “captured” showing the Gaines family spending quality time together. Chip and Joanna make the case for putting their family first in nearly every interview they give, from Success magazine to ABC News.

I’ve always believed that we prove what we value most by where we spend our time. Where do Chip and Joanna Gaines spend theirs?

In addition to running their home and 40-acre ranch, they also run a real estate company across the Texas cities of Waco, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, Houston and San Antonio. Their real estate services include land development, renovations, rental property management, remodeling, fixing and flipping homes, a brokerage, and managing a large team of real estate agents.

Since their oldest child, Drake, was born in 2005, they have written three books (with a fourth on the way) and started or maintained two weekend stay locations, a shopping center, a quarterly magazine, an online store, a restaurant, an interior design company, a blog (which Joanna still writes herself ), and lines of wallpaper, furniture, paint, designer pillows and rugs, and Target home decor products. They also filmed five back-to-back seasons of

Fixer Upper. And they announced just last week that they’re organizing and hosting an annual marathon, half-marathon and 5k for the residents of Waco.

That’s all incredible. The problem is that Chip and Joanna want to be seen as a couple who can do it all while at the same time making their family their top priority. This is just not possible, and it does a disservice to the parents who really are putting their children first. No matter how rich and famous, we are all limited by the same 24 hours in a day.

Lest anyone think I’m in a glass house throwing stones, I take the responsibility of providing for my family very seriously. My wife and I have owned our business for nearly eight years now. We have deliberately kept it small because we have never wanted it to have a monopoly on our time, and we run it from home so we can be present at all times for our three children (soon to be four). Even still, I’m amazed at the number of distractions even one small business churns out every day.

That’s how I know that Chip and Joanna have got to be two of the busiest people on the planet.

What’s most unfortunate to me is that they say they are aware that they need to spend more time with their children, but their actions continually contradict this. In their book The Mag

nolia Story, Joanna talks about the difficult decision to close her first store on Bosque street in 2006. She said that her intent in doing so was to have more time to “cherish” her firstborn, and that “soon I would have two children whose time deserved cherishing.”

Yet the additional time created from closing the shop was quickly filled by a new interior design company, a hit TV show and, ironically, opening an even larger store: Magnolia Market at the Silos. Joanna has since reopened that original store as well as an outlet store, by the way. And soon after Chip and Joanna announced they were leaving Fix

er Upper to spend more time together as a family, they opened their new restaurant and announced the Target deal. They already have a new spinoff TV show called Behind the Design that premiered exactly one week after Fixer Up

per aired its final episode April 3. There are a lot of people who wish they could be the next Chip and Joanna. But they’re kidding themselves if they think they can achieve that kind of success and still give their children the time and attention they deserve. Some truths, even shiplap can’t cover up.