CJ and Sydney McMahon Are Building a Life Bigger Than Success, and Redefining What It Means to Have It All

For CJ and Sydney McMahon, ambition has never been in short supply. But as the newly engaged couple looks toward marriage, family and their future together, they are discovering that the life they really want may have less to do with how much they can achieve, and much more to do with how they spend their time.

OK! Magazine got to sit down exclusively with the Nashville-based couple to learn more about the new shift that comes after years of building individual careers defined by discipline and drive.

At just 30, CJ has become a prominent figure in alternative asset investing. The entrepreneur, private equity investor and financial specialist is the founder and CEO of ATMInvestors.com, which has deployed millions of dollars into ATMs, laundromats and other cash-flowing businesses across the country. Coming from a lower income family, CJ has made being a role model and showing others what is possible an important part of his story. He is also a champion bowhunter and is preparing to release his first book, The Art of Acquisitions.

Sydney has built her own career through a decidedly steady approach. A Senior Capital Accountant with nearly a decade of experience in healthcare finance, she credits consistency, precision and her appreciation for working in an industry centered around people’s health and lives as guiding forces professionally.

Together, however, the McMahons are interested in building something neither a balance sheet nor a resumé can fully capture.

“I think [our recent] engagement [made] everything feel more real,” CJ says. “You stop thinking only about the relationship you have today and start thinking about the life you’re actually building together.”

For someone accustomed to moving quickly, CJ admits Sydney provides an important counterbalance.

“I’m naturally someone who moves fast. I get an idea and immediately think, ‘How do we make this happen?’ Sydney has a way of slowing things down just enough to make sure we’re building something that actually lasts.”

Sydney, meanwhile, has discovered another side of her fiancé.

“Underneath CJ’s intensity and ambition, he cares much more about family and time than people probably realize,” she says. “Business is a huge part of his life, but it isn’t what he wants his life to ultimately be about.”

That realization has changed CJ’s definition of entrepreneurship itself. After years of believing success meant more deals, businesses, money and hours, he has become increasingly focused on ownership and systems that don’t require his constant presence.

“If everything you build requires you to constantly be there, you haven’t necessarily created freedom — you may have just created a very successful job for yourself,” he explains.

Today, time is the asset he is most interested in protecting.

“Sydney and I want a family. We want to travel. We want to hunt, be outdoors and actually experience our life together,” CJ says. “I don’t want to wake up one day with everything I thought I wanted financially and realize I missed the life I was supposedly building it for.”

Of course, when two ambitious people share a life, keeping work from invading every moment can require its own strategy.

“Sometimes we literally have to say, ‘Okay, no more business tonight,’” the couple admits. “Because if you aren’t careful, dinner becomes a meeting, a boat ride becomes a strategy session and suddenly every part of your relationship has a business agenda attached to it.”

Their antidote is intentionally simple and sounds like a Luke Bryan song: hunting, boating, fishing, training, traveling and spending time outdoors.

Hunting holds a particularly special place in their relationship, in part because, as they joke, “There aren’t many places where CJ willingly sits quietly for hours!”

Life in Nashville has also given them the combination they were looking for… the excitement and entertainment of Music City alongside the ability to quickly escape into nature. And while their circle includes celebrity friends, the McMahons aren’t interested in turning every relationship or experience into social media material.

“Not everything meaningful needs to become content,” they say. “Social media shows pieces of our lives, but it doesn’t get all of our lives.”

That philosophy of protecting what matters extends far beyond their relationship.

After CJ survived Lyme disease, he and Sydney co-founded Joy in the Fight, a nonprofit supporting individuals and families confronting serious health battles, including the financial and practical burdens that can accompany them.

The mission also reflects Sydney’s upbringing. Raised in an exceptionally close family, she learned that when someone you love is hurting, you move toward them. During difficult seasons, she watched grief bring her family closer, teaching her that even when you cannot remove someone’s pain, you can make certain they do not carry it alone.

For the McMahons, creating their own organization offered the opportunity to develop direct relationships with families while redirecting some of the resources and network they had built professionally toward people who needed help.

“We don’t just want our legacy as a couple to be what we accumulated,” they explain. “We want part of it to be what we gave away and who we helped when they needed somebody.”

The experience has also changed how they view ordinary life.

“It has made us more intentional about appreciating normal days,” they say. “Dinner together. Being outside. Calling family. Taking the trip. Saying ‘I love you.’ Not allowing a disagreement about something small to become bigger than it needs to be.”

Their takeaway is straightforward: “You can always make more money. You can’t manufacture more time with someone.”

That doesn’t mean they always see things the same way. CJ readily admits he is usually the bigger risk-taker, while Sydney describes herself as more calculated. “The middle ground usually comes from respecting that we need both personalities,” they say. “CJ pushes us outside of our comfort zone, and Sydney makes sure we’re not driving off a cliff while doing it.”

It’s a dynamic that helps explain their vision of success away from public accomplishments: a peaceful home, strong marriage, healthy children, faith, family nearby and control over their time.

“If we’re still best friends decades from now, our kids want to come home and spend time with us, we’ve helped a lot of people along the way, and we still genuinely enjoy waking up next to each other — that’s success.”

Their advice for other young couples follows the same philosophy: stop measuring relationships against what appears online, communicate through uncomfortable moments, don’t keep score, learn how your partner receives love and keep dating each other.

“Build a relationship that works when the phones are down,” they say.

Family served as an important model for both growing up, with the sacrifices, work ethic and resilience of those who raised them shaping how they now approach responsibility and relationships. Ask which celebrities should portray them in a future movie, though, and the answer becomes less serious: “We may need to let the internet cast that one. We’d probably argue about our answers anyway.”

There is one upcoming production they are taking very seriously: their wedding.

While we here at OK! hope to get all the juicy details first, details remain deliberately under wraps, including Sydney’s dress, which CJ won’t see a second earlier than tradition allows. But they promise a celebration that feels unmistakably theirs: “Beautiful, intimate, fun and centered around the people we love most.”

Beyond the wedding is the bigger picture: companies, investments, philanthropy, marriage and, they hope, children. “We want our kids someday to be proud of what our name represents — not because of money, but because of character, generosity and the way we treated people,” they say.

It is perhaps the clearest expression of how their ambitions have evolved. They are still chasing big goals. They simply know now that bigger does not automatically mean better.

“At the end of the day, we don’t want to simply build a big life,” CJ and Sydney tell us. “We want to build a meaningful one.”