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Coming Out of the Dark

It was about this time last year that Tom and I started to seriously discuss the business venture that has now become TSI Heritage. Quite a few things have changed for me as a result, but I wanted to share one in particular.

You see, as the head of a Single-Family Office, I preferred to keep a very low profile. When people find out that you manage family money, a few things happen.

Typically, many form an instant opinion about you, not unlike the Steve Forbes scenario that I discussed in last week’s post.  But still others instantly see you as the perfect recipient to their great sales pitch, for whatever financial product that they just happen to be peddling.

So for those reasons, and a few others, keeping a low profile was the way to go for me. And I did not mind. Some of the people who know me may think of me as an extrovert, but I honestly feel more like a natural introvert, so laying low also works with my personality.

So what changed? Well, all of a sudden, now that we decided to offer family-office services to other families, not only can I no longer lay low, I actually have to “sell” myself, and the services that Tom and I now provide to other families.

It is as if I had been hiding, and am now forced out of the dark and into the bright light, saying “Look at me, I can help!” Ugh!

I have always preferred the soft sell, whichever side of the table I happen to be on. When people come on too strong with their sales pitch to me, my guard immediately goes way, way up, and I am usually turned off for good. Now that I am the one who needs to be the pitchman, I certainly prefer the soft sell even more.

In fact, when we started, I told Tom that I wanted to be so exclusive with our service offer that we should only accept clients who were prepared to beg us to take them on.

Obviously we are not that stringent in evaluating potential clients, but it is quite clear that in order for a relationship such as this to work long term, it needs to be a good fit for both parties.

With this venture as in all others, I continue to prefer to crawl before walking and then to walk before running.  So, marketing-wise, my preference has been to go slowly as well.

We set up our website in order to explain our thinking and our proposition.  There will be a few changes to the site coming soon as well, and one change will be to highlight the blog section, as it has become the liveliest part of the site.

Tom and I have also become quite active on LinkedIn, which is a very useful networking tool, more so than I had imagined. If you work in any business or professional capacity and you are not yet on LinkedIn, I strongly encourage you to not only sign up, but to really get into it.

There are plenty of other things that continue to evolve in our venture, and we look forward to moving things forward in 2013. As for coming out of the dark, I understand that the first year is the hardest, so you can expect to hear more from me. But I promise to stick with the soft sell.

 

Steve Legler “gets” business families.
 
He understands the issues that families face, as well as how each family member sees things from their own viewpoint.
 
He specializes in helping business families navigate the difficult areas where the family and the business overlap, by listening to each person’s concerns and ideas.  He then helps the family work together to bridge gaps by building common goals, based on their shared values and vision.
 
His background in family business, his experience running his own family office, along with his education and training in coaching, facilitation, and mediation, make him uniquely suited to the role of advising business families and families of wealth.
 
He is the author of Shift your Family Business (2014), he received his MBA from the Richard  Ivey School of Business (UWO, 1991), is a CFA Charterholder (CFA Institute, 2002), a Family Enterprise Advisor (IFEA 2014), and has received the ACFBA and CFWA accreditations (Family Firm Institute 2014-2015).
 
He prides himself on his ability to help families create the harmony they need to support the legacy they want. To learn how, start by signing up for his monthly newsletter and weekly blogs here.
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Poor Steve Forbes

In the 1990’s, Steve Forbes was attempting to secure the Republican Party’s nomination to run for President of the United States. He was not necessarily a front-runner, but he was highly regarded by many, in part because of his proposal for a flat tax.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the nomination. At some point during the campaign, a question was asked of all the candidates, in order to try to find out what made them think that they would be the right person to lead their country.

The question was quite simple, but Forbes’ honest answer was seen by many as one of the reasons his bid faltered soon after.  It seems that many did not think his response was credible. As I recall, Forbes was asked about the biggest challenge he had overcome in his life. So what was the answer that he gave, which pretty well ended his hopes of ever becoming President?

He said that taking over his father’s business was the biggest challenge that he had ever faced.  Aaaaah, poor Steve Forbes! His Daddy gave him a big company and he had to work hard to “take over”, ooooh, that sounds really tough.

Bet he would have preferred to be born poor. Rather than judging him based on the job he did in actually taking over the family business, people chose to focus on the fact that this did not seem like a very worthwhile “challenge”. The fact that the current US President was a former “community organizer” is beside the point.

People simply thought that “taking over from Daddy” sounds like a pretty cushy job. So he was a member of the “lucky sperm club”, he should just be happy and shut up. If this was the toughest thing that he has ever faced, he must not be very “battle tested”.

But wait a second.  Aren’t we regularly hit over the head with statistics about the poor survival rate of family businesses from one generation to the next? Aren’t successful transitions the exception to the rule? Well, yes, passing a business on to one’s children is not as easy as it looks or sounds.

But when businesses are successfully passed down, the credit almost always goes to the older generation who did such a great job preparing their offspring for the transition. But aren’t there two parts to that equation?

Maybe the reason that successes are few and far between is because there are so many ways for things to go wrong. In fact, the expectation level that exists in some business families alone is enough to make the transfer a long shot from going well. I remember this Forbes story really well because I could identify with it, having grown up in a business family.

As the only son, my father made it quite clear what was expected of me. I do not regret following in his footsteps, but I truly never felt like I had a choice. I don’t know if Steve Forbes felt the same way, but it certainly would not be surprised. The fact that he was seemingly successful in taking over should not have been held against him as it was.  But once again, in politics, perception is more important than reality.  And sadly, it’s not just in politics either.

Steve Legler “gets” business families.
 
He understands the issues that families face, as well as how each family member sees things from their own viewpoint.
 
He specializes in helping business families navigate the difficult areas where the family and the business overlap, by listening to each person’s concerns and ideas.  He then helps the family work together to bridge gaps by building common goals, based on their shared values and vision.
 
His background in family business, his experience running his own family office, along with his education and training in coaching, facilitation, and mediation, make him uniquely suited to the role of advising business families and families of wealth.
 
He is the author of Shift your Family Business (2014), he received his MBA from the Richard  Ivey School of Business (UWO, 1991), is a CFA Charterholder (CFA Institute, 2002), a Family Enterprise Advisor (IFEA 2014), and has received the ACFBA and CFWA accreditations (Family Firm Institute 2014-2015).
 
He prides himself on his ability to help families create the harmony they need to support the legacy they want. To learn how, start by signing up for his monthly newsletter and weekly blogs here.
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What Does a Sounding Board Sound Like?

Everyone has heard the one about the tree that falls in the forest with nobody around to hear it. Does it make a sound? Probably. Does it make a difference whether it makes a sound or not? Not really.

But what about a person who has ideas about what they think they should do, but doesn’t have an impartial, knowledgeable resource to bounce these ideas off?

Surely they would like to make sounds by talking to a trusted advisor, who would hear their ideas and provide arguments for and against their plan, as an unbiased person who is not billing them by the tenth of an hour, or a yes-man just trying to keep his job.

An ideal sounding board has a combination of qualities that are not always easy to find in one person.  And someone who might be a good sounding board in one situation may be a bad fit in another. So finding the right match is even more difficult.

A person who has successfully run their own business for many years must be good at dealing with all sorts of people, on a variety of subjects, and in many different situations. But it can be a lonely job.

This is why groups like the Young Presidents Organization and Canadian Association of Family Enterprise have had some success. They are a place where these company leaders can exchange with others who operate at their high level.

But these relationships also have their limits, since these contacts may not relate well to your industry or there may even be competitive reasons not to exchange too much information.

While running a company, most CEO’s will develop a good rapport with their CFO, since they are involved in so many important decisions. Or in a family business, the founder may develop a great working relationship with one or more of their children who they are grooming to one day replace them. Unfortunately, these kinds of relationships do not always survive a business transition.

One problem that we have seen on numerous occasions is with business owners who have sold some, most, or all of their operating businesses. Once they get over the divestiture, they are now in a new and different realm, and they are not always sure to whom they should turn.

Selling a business rids you of a whole slew of problems and worries, but it also creates new situations and new realities that need to be dealt with. As I have heard it put nicely, someone who is comfortable running a $25 million company, may not be as comfortable managing $25 million of proceeds after the sale.

So what does a sounding board sound like? It probably says things like this: “are you sure that you want to go in that directions?, “have you thought about doing it like this?” , “okay, sounds pretty good, but what about ____ ?”, “let me talk to someone I know who has done something similar so I can get some ideas about how to go about it”.

People who are good sounding boards are not necessarily easy to find, but they do exist. You just have to know where to look. We would be happy to discuss this subject with those seeking this kind of resource, so we can get started on the most important component in such a relationship: trust.

Once you have a trusted advisor (or two) to use as a sounding board, you will not want to give them up.

Steve Legler “gets” business families.
 
He understands the issues that families face, as well as how each family member sees things from their own viewpoint.
 
He specializes in helping business families navigate the difficult areas where the family and the business overlap, by listening to each person’s concerns and ideas.  He then helps the family work together to bridge gaps by building common goals, based on their shared values and vision.
 
His background in family business, his experience running his own family office, along with his education and training in coaching, facilitation, and mediation, make him uniquely suited to the role of advising business families and families of wealth.
 
He is the author of Shift your Family Business (2014), he received his MBA from the Richard  Ivey School of Business (UWO, 1991), is a CFA Charterholder (CFA Institute, 2002), a Family Enterprise Advisor (IFEA 2014), and has received the ACFBA and CFWA accreditations (Family Firm Institute 2014-2015).
 
He prides himself on his ability to help families create the harmony they need to support the legacy they want. To learn how, start by signing up for his monthly newsletter and weekly blogs here.
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