Lost in the Woods, without a Guide

In a strange set of coincidences, this turned out to be “University Week” for me. I am writing this in Lewisburg Pennsylvania, home of Bucknell University.

I am here mostly as chauffeur for my mother, who today witnessed the first University graduation of one of her grandchildren. I also got to watch my niece walk across the stage and pick up that diploma that she worked towards these past four years.

Listening to speeches always gets me thinking, and today a lot of time was spent praising the faculty. I guess that every school thinks that they have great teachers, but they sure did a great job of making a believer out of me here today.

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of meeting some important people from the business schools of a few of the Montreal-based Universities.

As a participant in the FEA Program in Toronto this year (given by UBC’s Sauder Business Families Centre) I am interested in helping the Institute of Family Enterprise Advisors (IFEA) expand their reach across Canada, as they look for the right education partners.

I had offered their new President any help I could with the search for Quebec partner(s). This week she was in Montreal, and I met with her and people from HEC, McGill, and Concordia.

Now most of the talks were only in their very early stages and it is way too early to say what if anything may develop as a result. But for me it was an opportunity to talk about (okay, I was mostly listening) programs, courses, instructors, designations, etc.

The instructors that we have had in the FEAP course modules that I have had thus far have all been excellent and inspirational. Being involved in the IFEA meeting in Montreal also got me pumped up even more about the program and the ways I expect that it will evolve and help business families in the future.

Coming to the Commencement this weekend at Bucknell was a further catalyst for me personally, as I heard a few professors talk about how inspired they are when they teach. Knowing that my newly-graduated niece is going into teaching (and we all just know that she will be fantastic at it) also has me thinking more and more about this subject.

We have all heard the expression, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach”. Sometimes it is true. But most of the time it is full of crap. The best teachers have of course already DONE. And now they are teaching others.

I have been married for 20 years. My wife knows me pretty well. She often used to tell me that I should write a book. Well I now write a weekly blog. She also often tells me that I should be a teacher. I have always agreed with her that it would be interesting and I believe I would be pretty good at it.

But until now, I never really had anything for which I had enough passion to teach. If you have followed my recent posts, you will know that I am slowly (or maybe quickly) discovering that family business is my passion.

I have lived it, I understand it, from all the angles. I know that it is complex and that there are many issues that need to be discussed, and that often those issues are not discussed.

Teaching, and family business. Time to figure out how to put it all together. Stay tuned. If you have any ideas, I am all ears.

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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Those Who CAN, Teach

In a strange set of coincidences, this turned out to be “University Week” for me. I am writing this in Lewisburg Pennsylvania, home of Bucknell University.

I am here mostly as chauffeur for my mother, who today witnessed the first University graduation of one of her grandchildren. I also got to watch my niece walk across the stage and pick up that diploma that she worked towards these past four years.

Listening to speeches always gets me thinking, and today a lot of time was spent praising the faculty. I guess that every school thinks that they have great teachers, but they sure did a great job of making a believer out of me here today.

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of meeting some important people from the business schools of a few of the Montreal-based Universities.

As a participant in the FEA Program in Toronto this year (given by UBC’s Sauder Business Families Centre) I am interested in helping the Institute of Family Enterprise Advisors (IFEA) expand their reach across Canada, as they look for the right education partners.

I had offered their new President any help I could with the search for Quebec partner(s). This week she was in Montreal, and I met with her and people from HEC, McGill, and Concordia.

Now most of the talks were only in their very early stages and it is way too early to say what if anything may develop as a result. But for me it was an opportunity to talk about (okay, I was mostly listening) programs, courses, instructors, designations, etc.

The instructors that we have had in the FEAP course modules that I have had thus far have all been excellent and inspirational. Being involved in the IFEA meeting in Montreal also got me pumped up even more about the program and the ways I expect that it will evolve and help business families in the future.

Coming to the Commencement this weekend at Bucknell was a further catalyst for me personally, as I heard a few professors talk about how inspired they are when they teach. Knowing that my newly-graduated niece is going into teaching (and we all just know that she will be fantastic at it) also has me thinking more and more about this subject.

We have all heard the expression, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach”. Sometimes it is true. But most of the time it is full of crap. The best teachers have of course already DONE. And now they are teaching others.

I have been married for 20 years. My wife knows me pretty well. She often used to tell me that I should write a book. Well I now write a weekly blog. She also often tells me that I should be a teacher. I have always agreed with her that it would be interesting and I believe I would be pretty good at it.

But until now, I never really had anything for which I had enough passion to teach. If you have followed my recent posts, you will know that I am slowly (or maybe quickly) discovering that family business is my passion.

I have lived it, I understand it, from all the angles. I know that it is complex and that there are many issues that need to be discussed, and that often those issues are not discussed.

Teaching, and family business. Time to figure out how to put it all together. Stay tuned. If you have any ideas, I am all ears.

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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Spreading the Gospel vs. Cornering the Market

One day not long ago I was speaking to someone who had organized a “maker space”, which is a place where kids and teens can go to play around with stuff and make things. With 3-D printing becoming more mainstream, these spots are starting to pop up in various places.

During our discussion, it became clear that the people who run these types of operations are very cooperative with each other and like to help each other out by sharing what works for them.

I found myself combining a couple of metaphors into my explanation of what was going on. “You’re not trying to corner the market, you’re spreading the gospel”, I summarized. He agreed.

The next day somebody was explaining his current project to me over lunch. He was involved with a group of people that were developing an accreditation process for a particular type of professional, which does not yet exist.

He mentioned that they were collaborating with other organisations in other areas and that that was quite helpful to the cause. I found myself saying to him, “Well yeah, you’re not trying to corner the market, you’re trying to spread the gospel.” He also agreed.

Now I don’t know about you, but when I find myself uttering the same phrase two days in a row in two completely different circumstances, I remember it. I started to think that I might be on to something.

It seems to me that there are more and more people who are working at spreading gospels than cornering markets these days. Is it just my imagination?

Maybe it is because I am now involved in a service business and not selling a product. Maybe it is the social networks that I am plugged into. Maybe it is society with more Gen Y’s entering the workforce who work more collaboratively.

My father used to tell me that his father used to tell him that you can carry more sand in your hands with both your palms open than you can with clenched fists. For me, open and transparent has always been a more comfortable way to do things, so spreading the gospel is a much easier way for me to live my life.

The gospel that is now driving me is all about family business. They are very different from other businesses. There are no two the same. That makes them interesting to me.

But the more of them I see, the more I see missed opportunities. The fact that you have a business and a family interacting can have so many positives, but just as many negatives.

I feel like I can see the negatives so clearly sometimes and that I can help families to take the steps necessary to avoid some of the negatives and even turn some of the negatives into positives.

I will try to spread the gospel of getting business families to recognize that they need to look at their families separately from their businesses. Too many people concentrate so much on the business to the detriment of the family.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Maybe they just need someone to point it out to them. But few people from inside the family are comfortable doing that.

I will not try to “corner the market”, since there seems to be plenty of work to be done. I will try to spread the gospel that stepping back and looking at the family as a family should not be overlooked. Who is with me?

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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The Defensive CFA ®?

Over the past few weeks, I have continued to read, to look around, to think, to search, to find people to emulate, to connect, to reach out, and to attempt to redefine the evolution of my current (final) career transition. My feelings have ranged from total confusion one minute, to complete exhiliration the next.

In this age of mass communication and information availability, it is so easy to see what others are doing and to try to find others who seem to be doing the kinds of things we want to do. Sometimes I feel like it took too long for some things to click in my life, but then I slow down and try to be thankful that it finally feels like a fog is lifting. “I can see clearly now, the rain is gone…”

Much of this introspection came about in March when I attended the CFA Wealth Management conference in Boston. Attending that 2-day meeting with a whole bunch of other CFA charterholders reminded me why I had signed up for the CFA program in the first place.

It was late 1999 that I decided to do it, and at the time I thought my reasons were sound. I was working in the family holding company. I had been doing quite well with my stock picks in the late 90’s (like every other “bull market genius”, no doubt) and since I was managing family assets I thought that becoming a Chartered Finacial Analyst would help me career-wise.

A former MBA classmate had just published a book, and on the back cover I noticed that he displayed his CFA status. Funny, he knew NOTHING about finance 10 years ago. If he could do it, so could I.

Now I am very glad I completed the program, and it was not easy by any stretch. But in retrospect, I realize that I had done it more for defensive purposes. Yes, the defensive CFA, that’s a new one, isn’t it.

It is when a person completes the CFA program because he knows that in the future, other CFA-types will be pitching ideas at him, because they know he has money, and they will smugly hand over their business cards with those magic three letters. If you can give them your card with the same three letters, the reasoning goes, you can just give each other the secret handshake and avoid all of the BS.

Back to the Boston conference. I spent 2 days with other CFA’s, listening to many interesting presentations on all sorts of topics. I was not bored. I had no trouble following along. The stuff was actually very interesting. But I flashed back to my defensive preferences when it comes to how to manage wealth.

I concluded that there are so many smart qualified people in the wealth management space, and in the end, it is sometimes difficult to differentiate them. And I most certainly do not want to even try to play that game. I never did want to. And I certainly don’t want to go “all in” now.

The Family Enterprise Advisor Program in which I am currently enrolled has been eye-opening and enlightening. Most of the others in my classes are accountants, insurance experts, trust specialists, etc. I come at it from the family office side. But even that feels forced.

The course leaders are all family business advisors and seem more like generalists, and I identify so much more with them than my fellow classmates, almost all of whom are in the program to learn how the different specialist disciplines need to learn to work together.

I am already a family business generalist. I get it. And I love it. And I think I finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up. These are exciting times. I hope you will stick with me as all this continues to evolve. In the meantime, I would love to hear your family business stories.

Allow me to close this with a dictionary definition:

Catharsis: Purging of emotions or relieving of emotional tensions, especially through certain kinds of art, as tragedy or music

I could modify that to: Relieving of emotiuonal tensions and getting something off one’s chest through blogging.

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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