When Thursdays Are Take Your Dad To Work Day 'It Feels Special'

SCARSDALE, NY — Andrew Barrocas always wanted to work with his father when he grew up.

The 43-year-old is the CEO of MNS, a large brokerage firm in New York City. His dad Joel, a business owner, retired as the pandemic began. So the two of them hit upon a plan that is highly satisfying to both. Eighteen months ago, they created Take Your Father To Work Day — and made it every Thursday.

"We had an incredible father-son relationship when I was growing up," Andrew told Patch. "It was always something we talked about, working together."

However, after Andrew graduated from college, Joel told him to go work someplace else for a year. "I wanted to give hm a chance to see other things. I was in a penny business, I wanted him to be in a dollar business."

Andrew stuck with real estate, but kept his dad in the loop.

"My father mentored me, helped me with the business part. I had the advantage of having someone with 30 years of successful business experience on my side. We spoke every morning on the way to work," Andrew said. "Then my father retired, and we decided it would be fun for him to start coming in."

Now Joel, 77, drives from West Nyack to meet Andrew Thursday mornings at his house in Scarsdale. "He gets to see his three granddaughters leave for school. That’s always very nice as well," Andrew said.

On the drive to Brooklyn, Andrew will tell Joel about what he's been working on in the past week.

"He's looking for suggestions on how to approach things, deal with people honorably," Joel told Patch. "It always comes down to people. Every industry has its good people and its bad people. He very much wants to be good people."

This is not new: Joel has been a loving guide since Andrew's childhood, when the family lived in New City.

"He was different from my friends’ dads," Andrew said. "He always told me, ‘I won’t give you any money, I’ll give you 100 percent of my time.'"

"My three children were the only ones in the neighborhood who had jobs after school," Joel added. "They had to know where money came from, that it didn’t grow on trees."

Life lessons like that were very important to Joel, who said he had had a crazy childhood in Florida and New York.

"I looked up to my grandfather who drove a taxicab. I learned a lot from him," he said. "The most important thing in my life was to raise my children and have a close relationship. I feel very lucky I was able to succeed at my most important goal."

Life isn’t a dress rehearsal, Joel said. "The bad times make themselves. The good times — you have to make. Every day is a chance to make good times and laugh."

It's still a mentoring situation, they agree. But Joel is not just mentoring his son. Even before he retired, he would give training sessions to Andrew's staff. Now, he often goes out to lunch with them.

"If they have a deal they've been having a problem with, lots of times they’ll call me up," Joel said.

"They call him at all hours," said Andrew. "People who no longer work for me call him!"

One incident really stands out, Andrew said.

"I brought my dad to a meeting with a client who had just lost his father. During the meeting my dad starting talking, offering a lot of different ideas. Now this client — he's 6-foot-6, a big guy — he saw me hit my dad under the table to get him to shut up, and he grabbed me and told me 'no!' He didn’t care about the time it took, he just wanted to hear him talk.

"Us spending time together, being involved in calls, that's the new thing," Andrew said. "I work with a lot of clients that are father-son or father-daughter teams. It always made me sad inside that I didn’t work with my dad. Now I have my father along and it feels special."