In this profound episode, Cris Zimmermann, Co-Founder of Medici Global Ventures, shares Medici principles for transitioning from success to lasting significance. If you struggle with emptiness despite wealth and unclear legacy impact, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What strategic planning secures your wealth and values for centuries
– How to foster multi-generational family and business continuity like the Medicis
– Why blending art, leadership, and strategy builds enduring influence
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the start, scale and succeed podcast. It’s the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey as a founder. And there’s something that I see, particularly for those in the latter parts of our journey. In stage seven, you have built more than most people could ever hope to build. You’ve accumulated more resources, and whether that be financial wealth or relational wealth or network wealth, and you’re sitting there in what most people would define success, yet you’re haunted by this question, what do I actually want to leave behind because you look at those bank accounts, but you still somehow feel empty inside. You look at your companies and wonder what’s going to happen when you’re gone, what’s going to happen when they’re gone, and you realize you’ve been playing on a field that’s too small, and this is especially true in stage seven. Now it’s not a new question, right? This dates back hundreds, if not 1000s of years, and fortunately, we can look back some of those years to find some answers from those who have gone before us, specifically a 15th century banker of all things, and to help us figure that out is the one and only Chris Auditore Zimmermann, who is a seasoned entrepreneur, global investor and keynote speaker with over 25 years of experience. He emphasized the importance of strategic planning and legacy building. He’s founded more than 20 companies across five countries, authored get your house in order, and co founded the Medici community. Chris empowers entrepreneurs to harness the timeless principles of the Medici legacy to build lasting success and impact. Well, Chris, welcome to the show. So excited to have you here calling in from Frankfurt, Germany, if I’m correct,
Cris Zimmermann
Yes. Scott, greetings here from Germany. And I love it that you have a German last name as well.
Scott Ritzheimer
I had another guest on the show, and he corrected the pronunciation of my name for me, so I learned how to say my name.
Cris Zimmermann
It’s Ritzheimer. It’s very simple is there’s no there’s no doubt about how to pronounce your name.
Scott Ritzheimer
Oh, that’s so funny. That’s so funny. It’s got a little too much phlegm for me, but that’s all right. So Chris, you’ve done a thing or two in your life. You’ve started 20 companies, five countries, and by just about any measure of success, it’s been remarkable, right? But in you tell the story of, I believe it was back in 2020, you found yourself having a panic attack on a beautiful vacation in a wonderful place. What happened? What led to this? And how did a story about an Italian banker turn it all around?
Cris Zimmermann
Well, yes, I’ve been, I’m an entrepreneur, and I’ve been building companies here. I’m from Frankfurt, Germany, and studied law at Frankfurt University and but I’ve never really wanted to be in law. I’ve always been creating companies, and been doing that for many, many years, but what was absolutely dramatic was exactly that incident that you just mentioned in 2020 during the pandemic. Obviously, different places around the world had different ways on how to handle the pandemic. Germany was on a brutal lockdown for about a year. We couldn’t go to any restaurants. We couldn’t go out to fitness studios. They even closed down golf courses with the explanation of social distancing, which I have no idea how you cannot have a social distance on a golf course. And anyhow, I have a family. I’ve been married for almost 25 years to my wife, Andrea, and we’ve got three boys, and we had three teenagers sitting here at home playing video games all day long. Homeschooling didn’t work, and it was just a terrible year for us. I’m naturally more of an extrovert. I like to have meetings. I like to go to the office. I like to fly around the world and to the different projects and different companies and and I couldn’t do any of that, and then my wife wasn’t doing well. She had a she had a health issue with her heart, and hit something like, like a burnout. Yeah, everyone was mad at me because I was very irritated at home, so we had a house on fire, and that’s literally why I called the book that I wrote a couple of years later, get your house in order, because that’s literally what I had to do. I needed to get my house in order. And I got inspired on a vacation in the beautiful city of Florence in Italy, when I learned more about the Medici family, or the Medici family, specifically the founding patriarch. His name is Cosimo de Medici, and he probably was the wealthiest person in the 15th century. It’s a little bit more difficult to measure these things. Nowadays, because their currencies are different, but, but he was a self made entrepreneur. They started off as cloth merchants. They went into banking, and then they built this incredible banking Empire all over Europe and and as I was reading about him, doing my moment or my time, really of crisis. And, you know, I don’t use this word crisis lightly, because literally, it didn’t feel at all good for myself. It didn’t feel good for my family, and it also didn’t feel good for a number of our companies. Interest rates started climbing during that time. I had a number of deals fall through, so also economically and financially, it wasn’t a good time for us as a family. Yeah, I kind of started digging myself into someone who lived 500 years ago, and and I, and this kind of sent me off on a journey to really learn some from some some from some families from the past on how do you set up yourself, how do you set up your family, and how do you set up your business? And so I can say that the last few years I’ve been on this quest of learning more, and this is what I’m very passionate about.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it caught me because get your house in order was not exactly what I expected from a title of a business book and and so there’s this interplay between our life and entrepreneurship and how intertwined those are. But you also think of you speak to something very specific, and it’s not one house, but four. So walk us through from your book, the four different houses and why they’re relevant to us as entrepreneurs.
Cris Zimmermann
Yeah. So that was actually what was so surprising to me. So I had always learned about the Medici family growing up in Germany. It’s part of our normal high school education that you learn that in the 15th century, you know, the Renaissance family that literally, kind of became the great patrons of the arts. They sponsored people like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello, they had some Popes. They worked themselves into the Catholic Church. They InterMed with the house of Spain. They InterMed with the house of friends. So I’d always known kind of about them being kind of this very extravagant, successful business family. But when I started reading about the life of specifically Cosimo, the founding patriarch, I was so astonished that, literally, he wasn’t just successful on his business side, but it kind of became obvious to me that he had the different areas of his life in order. And, you know, this is how this, you know, the title of this book came about, and, and, and so I’ve structured the book in a sense where I take people through this journey influence in Italy, where there are these different houses, which most of them you can still visit today. So the first one is what I’ve called the House of personal development. So Cosimo built a or bought a countryside home called Villa di Careggi, which is just outside of Florence back then. Now, is actually included because the city has grown and it was so interesting. This was a house where he countryside home where he would go, and I literally found some quotes where he said that he goes there to work on himself, and so, you know, not to take care of business. You know, even though he had lots of people employed, and he was running all kinds of things, but he literally had a physical location where he, as an entrepreneur, would go to work on himself. And so a few things that kind of stood out, one, one of them was that in the mornings, he would get up very early to kind of work himself in the garden, you know, water the flowers, you know, perhaps plant a few trees, and literally get his hands a little bit dirty in gardening.
Now, I’m not a gardener, but I thought it’s quite interesting for a guy who can employ 1000s of people to do his gardening. Yeah, he had a location where he would spend time, and he said that, you know, it’s almost like this gave him, you know, fresh fresh wind under his wings, and fresh air to breathe and and then he found, then he then he started assembling a library at the Villa Dicareggi, which was very astonishing. He lived before the printing press was invented. So he grew up in a house where there were three books, you know, because there were no books. No one had books around. But he went on this hunt for books, actually, before he entered into kind of fully into business, he had two years where he went scouting around the world to collect books, ancient manuscripts of Greek philosophy, theology, books, all kinds of Wisdom literature, and brought it back to his home. So by the end of his life, at his Villa Dicareggi, he had this massive library, which now is one of the most fundamental European libraries we have in the whole continent. And so he, as a business guy, was a reader. He loved to read devout books, climb into the manuscripts of Plato and Aristotle’s and Socrates and, you know, and that’s why. You know, he and his family is called the Renaissance family, because they rebirth some of the old, ancient wisdom. Yeah. Anyhow, so he had, he had this place for personal development. But then the other, you know, other kind of houses, just to hint at that. So the villa Medici, which is downtown Florence, I call it the house of relationships. He was very much a relationship manager. You know, he built his own family there, but he also built very strong relationships with popes and and and kings from around the world, and he would host them at his place, and they sit around the, you know, campfire in the evening there in his house and and kind of share some of these stories. And then he would also host the artists. And so build relationships with the artists. Like Donatello, for example, lived with a manichi family. They would discuss the artworks over dinner. So house of relationship is the second 1/3. One is the, you know, the house of influence is kind of the political center, the Signoria in Florence that he would go to in order to influence the city the good of the city, get involved in politics. And the fourth one is that, you know, the house of business, which is the manager bank.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, there’s so much in that that we could unpack for hours. I think one of the the interesting things about stage seven in particular, that you touched on just briefly, and I’d like for you to expound on a little more for us, is that it’s not just business, right? So it’s the personal development, it’s the relationship, and it’s influence, which I think is a really, really key piece in stage seven, that we’re moving away from control of everything to influence in a much greater scale. How did, how did he think about influence, especially toward the latter part of his life?
Cris Zimmermann
Yeah, Scott, great question, and that’s very true. So basically, this is where I find find myself after, you know, after this 2020 pandemic, I basically reorganized my life and now our company. So I own like 26 or 27 different companies around the world. Mainly, I’m an investor. Now I’m not operational anymore, so I handed over all operational work, and now we run things through our Family Foundation, which is all about not just, as you say at the beginning of your the different stages, kind of the hustle and the building out phase, but it’s really now about, how do you structure things, not just for yourself, but also for your family, for your kids, for your grandkids and their kids and so forth, but also for impact in this world. You know, at some point it’s really, you know, it’s not about just another deal. It’s not just about another investment, and whether you have a few more euros or US dollars on your bank account. It’s really kind of what kind of impact you want to do have in this world. And so this is, you know, if you’ve ever been, have you, have you been to Florence, Italy? Have you ever taken a trip? Not, I have not Well, Scott, I’d love to invite you, because that’s one of the things that I now do, is I, I invite business, business families to come and join me on one of these trips. Basically the Medici family constructed the city of Florence. So, you know, every Palazzo, every church, the Cathedral, the museums that people go to in Florence, they all stem out of a building period where the Medici family was in power and in influence. And so what is fascinating is that they literally went beyond just money, just creating a successful business. They really invested into culture and into art and into the sciences and religion, you know, and many of the but today, that’s why they call the Renaissance family. And so one of the great joys that I have now is to be thinking through strategically. You know, how can I do that with my little family, with with with my few companies? You know? How can I set them up? And that’s where it goes beyond just, let’s say, financial success. It also really goes about impact in the world.
Scott Ritzheimer
It’s so true. It’s so true. Chris, there’s this question that I ask all my guests. I’m very interested to see what you’d have to say. But in the light of this conversation and where you are in your journey, what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all. What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Cris Zimmermann
So that, basically what I’m what I’m trying to draw out here. There are about 1000 books written on the Medici family, and they’re all written by historians and art historians, which are wonderful people to kind of record the story of this family. But what I’m trying to draw out is some of the principles that actually help us, you know, shape our lives and our families and our companies. And so I almost feel like it’s a it’s a missing secret, that there are principles that can help and guide us towards success, significance and legacy. And it’s almost. We do not have to walk in the dark, but there are things we can learn and study. And you know, it needs some brain capacity, it needs some good thinking, it needs some research, but there are things we can work out that can help us in the present to be successful, and that’s what, what I think, you know, oftentimes, gets, gets missed, that it’s not just, you know, the nice country that you’re born into, or the kind of nice degree that you’ve got from university, or some luck in finding some investors to invest in your company, but there are steps to take in order to set yourself, your family and your business up for success and legacy.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, so good Chris. There’s this old Greek proverb, I’m sure you’re aware of it. It says society grows great when old men plant trees under whose shade they’ll never sit. And stage seven is rarefied air. It’s not often that we get to see folks who have been there, let alone really looked at how stage seven works and and made that pathway easier for those who follow in our footsteps. So thank you so much for being on the show. Before I let you go, I have to know, how can folks reach out to you and find out more? Where can they get a copy of the book?
Cris Zimmermann
Yeah, so I’ve now a Family Foundation. We’ve set up what we call the Medici community, where we’re involving business families around the world who really want to think beyond, you know, just success. You know, how do you how do you create a legacy? So, under Medicilegacy.com Medici legacy.com you can get a download of my book. I just wrote, actually, a second book on the life of Lorenzo de Medici, which is the which is the grandson of Cosimo. And that book is coming out very soon. It’s called from success to significance, and there are some lessons from the art and the leadership of Lorenzo, managing some leadership principles. Yeah, I’d be very happy if you, or any of your listeners are interested to really kind of work on the on the theme of legacy. We’ve really created a realm of learning together. So that’s well, be happy to be in touch.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s fantastic. Chris. Thank you so much privilege and honor having you here with us today, and for those of you watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to us, I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Cris Zimmermann
Cris Auditore Zimmermann is a seasoned entrepreneur, global investor, and keynote speaker with over 25 years of experience. He emphasizes the importance of strategic planning and legacy building. He has founded more than 20 companies across five countries, authored Get Your House in Order, and co-founded the Medici Community. Cris empowers entrepreneurs to harness the timeless principles of the Medici legacy to build lasting success and impact.
Want to learn more about Cris Zimmermann’s work at Medici Global Ventures? Check out his website at https://medicilegacy.com/
You can buy his book Get Your House in Order at https://medicilegacy.com/medici-box/