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EPISODE 7 of the Managing Happiness Show!

Mark Daoust is the founder and President of Quiet Light and CatholicSingles. He is a successful entrepreneur, a brave father of 6 children, and a faith-based person with a motivating life philosophy. Listen to our inspiring conversation about managing the happiest and the toughest moments in life.

About Mark Daoust

Mark is the founder and President of Quiet Light – a website brokerage firm specialized in exit planning and sales of internet businesses. He founded Quiet Light after selling an online publication that he built which boasted over 220,000 subscribers.

Recently, Mark has acquired his second business, a 20-year-old online dating service called CatholicSingles.com.

He’s been happily married for 14 years and has 6 children, 5 boys, and a girl. His oldest son is 11 years old and his 6th kid was born a few months ago.

Vision and mission

Mark has never had the ambition to grow his business into a corporation. The idea of it just doesn’t fit in his life. He likes to think of his team as a group of entrepreneurs who enjoy working with other entrepreneurs. This is the perspective that they bring to the deal-making table.

Thus, rarely has he felt the necessity of writing down the vision and mission of his business. However, in both Quiet Light and CatholicSingles, they have strong guiding principles that form and shape their decisions.

The main goal of Quiet Light is to provide all the information their clients need to make a well-informed decision whether to sell their company or not. Thus, Mark and his team don’t sell companies at all costs.

I would never want to have somebody sell their business and a year later think “That was a really really stupid thing to do”.

They understand that selling a company is a very personal decision that isn’t necessarily financially driven.

People sell (their businesses) because the landscape of their life changes. Something else changes in their life, their goals change or the opportunity landscape changes.

Over the years, Mark has realized that helping people sell their business has a great impact on their lives but helping them find their life mate matters a lot more. That’s why he has recently bought CatholicSingles.com. He recognizes that it is very satisfying to know that you create an environment where people meet each other and get a purpose in their lives outside of the business.

Work-life balance tip: stick to your priorities

Mark’s tip for work-life balance is to stick to your priorities and keep a perspective on life. The rest is simply time management.

He is a faith-based person and what drives him forward is the faith in God. He puts his relationship with God in the first place in his priority list, followed by the relationship with his wife, his duties as a father, his duties as a business owner, and his personal responsibilities.

Sticking to these priorities really helps him make time for everything he values in life and achieve balance.

Mark’s routine includes work during the day, family time in the evening, and some more work when everyone goes to bed. Every evening, he and his wife spend around an hour alone watching TV or just doing something together, so that they catch up and relax from taking care of the kids. Mark also shares that playing with his kids helps him disconnect from work.

How to find what you want in life

Finding what you want in life is something very challenging that requires self-analysis and self-awareness. The only way to deal with the hard things in life is by spending time alone with your thoughts. However, almost no one nowadays does that. We are surrounded by so many distractions that we prefer to ignore the big questions in life instead of dealing with them.

For example, a topic that we rarely talk about is death. We try to ignore the thought that all of us die because we think of death as something tragic. What we can do is to take it as a motivator instead and give back to others as much as we can.

Mark believes that by spending time alone, isolated from music, TV, work, etc., we can come up with the answers we need and find our true calling.