Today, I want to try to tie together a couple of themes that occurred to me this week. I began the week in London Ontario, where I attended the Ivey Case Teaching Workshop at my alma mater.

Then after I got back to my office I came across an interesting report about how and when wealthy families handle information about their wealth. I found it alarming and really difficult to comprehend.

Back in the spring, I shared in this space that I had been bitten by the teaching bug. As part of being a student in the Family Enterprise Advisor Program, the return to the classroom had me feeling that I had more in common with the people at the front of the room than the people who were there to learn.

Having done my MBA in a “case school”, where business cases form the vast majority of the learning, I resolved that when I did get into teaching, my preferred instruction method would to use cases for most of the learning.

For the final day of the workshop they asked for a volunteer and I am so glad that I stepped up and lived the experience. It is interactive learning at its finest, where the teacher is more of a discussion facilitator than anything else. It is a really cool feeling to have a bunch of bright students all wanting to contribute, and just trying to coordinate it all in some meaningful way.

I loved it and I want to do more of it. And I will.

Now, on to the wealthy families report I came across. Here is a link:

http://familyofficenews.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/wealthy-parents-fear-kids-cant-handle-family-fortune/

Let me pull out the two most alarming stats from this survey. Only 42% of the over 700 respondents believe that their children are well prepared to handle their inheritance. About 20% believe their children should wait until they are 40 before the family fortune is disclosed.

Yes, you read that right, DISCLOSED. Not that they should wait until they are 40 to handle the “family fortune”, which would be interesting in its own right. But these people think it is normal and appropriate to keep their children in the dark for 40 years.

Okay, so just how does that work. You live a low-key lifestyle and pretend that you are just another upper-middle class family, I guess. And then one day, once your kids are finally “old enough”, you will let them in on the family secret. “Surprise! You are going to inherit tons of money some day!”

And they wonder why their children are not well prepared to handle the inheritance.

I get the “aversion to discuss wealth”, and I get the “not wanting to negatively impact their work ethic”, believe me I do. But there are other ways to take care of those issues.

It all comes down to open and honest communications. They are your children. You are their parents. You are a family. The parents are supposed to teach their children all the stuff that they don’t learn at school. This includes work ethic and how to handle money.

Back to the teaching workshop, I said it was interactive learning, with the teacher acting as a facilitator. I guess I didn’t realize it until I sat down to write this blog, but that is almost a description of my parenting style.

Thankfully I have a co-teacher called Mom, and the class size is only 2. But if our kids are not prepared to handle information about our family wealth until they are 40, then somebody will have screwed up somewhere, it in won’t be the kids.

 

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.

Ceux qui sont assez à l’aise en anglais et en français ont sûrement remarqué qu’il existe un certain nombre de traductions qui sont en effet moins évidentes qu’elles semblent à première vue. L’exemple que je cite souvent est “librairie” qui est un magasin qui vend des livres, et “library” où ils prêtent des livres, donc une bibliothèque.

Dans mes jours à McGill, j’avais pris un cours de traduction, et le prof surnommait ces instances des “faux amis”, et j’ai gardé sa terminologie et je le répète souvent, même s’il fait déjà bien des années que j’ai oublié le nom du prof.

Quand j’étais au secondaire dans une école anglophone, on m’a placé dans les cours de français avancé puisque j’avais complété mon primaire en français. Rendu en secondaire 4, ceci me donnait aussi le droit de prendre d’autres cours en français comme options. De loin, le plus mémorable de ceux-ci était le cours de comptabilité donné par Monsieur McGee.

M. McGee était un anglophone avec un sérieux accent quand il parlait français, mais il s’exprimait quand même très bien et l’effort était toujours là aussi de sa part. Il s’amusait à nous souligner plusieurs faux amis aussi, même s’il ne les appellait pas par ce nom.

Loyer, ce n’est past votre “lawyer” (avocat), c’est le rent, il nous disait. Les fournitures, quand à eux, étaient des “supplies” et non pas des meubles.

Je préfère trouver des exemples avec plus qu’un mot, des expressions. Je m’amuse avec la famille quand on voyage en campagne et je vois des pancartes indiquant une “auto-cueillette”. Je me demande souvent s’il y a des anglophones qui regardent dans leur Larousse anglais-français pour apprendre ce que veut dire cueillette, et ensuite présument qu’ils peuvent ceuillir des pommes directement de leur voiture, comme un genre de cueillette-au-volant.

Sur une note plus sérieuse, notez si vous ne le savez pas déjà, la différence entre “il n’est pas question”, et “no question about it”. En français, c’est l’équivalent de “no way”, mais en anglais, c’est plutôt “certainement”.

Et là, nous arrivons au mot du jour, concierge. Le premier concierge dont je me souviens était M. Aubry, qui lavait les planchers et les toilettes de mon école primaire. En plus, il habitait un appartement en haut du gymnase avec sa femme. Ils avaient même une corde à linge sur le toît, où une belle journée de printemps j’avais aperçu les sous-vêtement du concierge et je me suis mis à partager mon observation avec tout les autres élèves qui jouaient au ballon-chasseur. “Les culottes de M. Aubry! Les culottes de M. Aubry!”

Mais en anglais, un concierge (prononcé plutôt “KON-si-err-GE”) est une personne qui fait beaucoup plus que nettoyer vos dégâts. Il ou elle vous aide avec toutes sortes de choses. Nous les apercevons plus souvent dans les grands hôtels, mais c’est une profession qui prend beaucoup plus d’ampleur ces jours-ci.

Ce n’est pas tout le monde qui peut se permettre d’engager un “majordome” ou un “butler” en anglais, mais toutes les grandes villes ont un certain nombre de professionels qui se font engager pour règler bien des problèmes pour bien du monde. Ils vendent leurs service en explicant qu’ils peuvent se charger de bien des choses pour ceux qui travaillent de longues heures et qui ensuite sont débordés en arrivant à la maison.

Ceux qui gèrent l’argent des plus fortunés, essayent même parfois de mentioner qu’ils offrent, eux aussi, ce genre de service aux clients avec des gros portefeuilles. Je me demande s’ils ont vraiment des clients qui en bénéficent et qui en sont satisfaits.

Un bon concierge peux vous sauver beaucoup de temps et de misère. Il s’agit d’en trouver un ou une qui prendra le temps de vous connaître et de vous proposer des services qui rentrent dans votre budget.

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.

Late August has always had a certain feel to it for me, but this year is different. Maybe it’s because we took an extra-long vacation in July, or because the weather has been really good, or maybe because we brought the dogs to the cottage so the place feels more like home now.

Or maybe it’s because instead of only worrying about two kids, we are now responsible for five teens for a couple of weeks!

Our kids have been curling for the past 3 winters, and last year we joined a new club. This got them to a more competitive level, which came with new teammates who have become good friends. Our cottage is within a 45-minute drive of one of the country’s top junior curling camps, featuring a couple of former world champions.

I thought it would be a great idea for our kids to attend the camp and take advantage of the opportunity to learn form some of the best. It seems some of the parents of their new friends also wanted to take advantage of that opportunity, and since we have a place not far away, of course they were all welcome to stay here with us.

I guess the one thing that I had not been mentally prepared for was now being the temporary “father” to 5 teenagers, rather that just our 2. My wife has been handling the “Mom” role in exemplary fashion, to no one’s surprise.

We geared up for the arrival of the extra bodies by adding a camper where the three girls sleep, and the two boys are in the kids’ room. The kitchen, living and dining rooms are just big enough to handle the load. The fridge and pantry are well stocked, the WiFi works pretty well, and I can easily control access to it by shutting the unit down at night.

But the parenting is exhausting. They are not bad kids, they are actually very good kids, all of them. But they are all so different. And so each one of them needs to be handled in their own special way. Handling them one-on-one and as a group is completely different too.

But as mentally draining as it is, I love the experience because there is so much to learn, and along with that, so much to teach too.

I love to take the time to explain things to my kids, on whatever subject comes up on any given day. It could be something we see on TV, something one of us comes across on the internet, or something that happened at school that day. I often start with “Do you understand why such-and-such is that way?” or “Do you understand what so-and-so meant when they said that?”

With three extra people around the opportunities to explain things multiplies.

Probably the best part of the arrangement is that our kids are learning how other kids don’t have it quite so easy as they do in life. I like to think that they appreciate what we have and how their parents treat them. They are very lucky, and we are lucky to have them too.

I often preach about communication and how important it is to family relationships. I also like to think that I am a living, breathing example of what I preach. I hope my kids agree. Please don’t forget, it’s not just what you say, how you say it is usually more important.

After this, if they end up being better curlers, that will be a bonus.

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.

Today’s word is Disingenuous. Today’s sponsor is a large Canadian telecommunications company, which makes up one third of what is known as “Robellus” in some online forums. Robellus is a made-up name that stands for ROgers, BELL, and telUS.
Without naming it specifically, the company that irked me is the one whose company softball team would most likely be known as the Dodgers. (Or Dogers?)
My family recently returned from a wonderful vacation in Brazil. I had heard horror stories about roaming charges, so I decided to get out in front of that potential problem, bite the bullet, and buy one of their packages.
My mistake was in assuming that their offer was somehow grounded in today’s reality of what constitutes fair business practices. I had purchased their Mobile Hotspot to use at our cottage, so I decided that it should become the tool we used for online data access during our trip to Brazil.
I am positive that I am not alone in being confounded by data plans for any service. Kilobytes, Megabytes, Gigabytes, Terabytes? I just wanted to check my email and my Twitter timeline.

Because data usage is difficult to understand, I had to assume that my provider’s offering had some degree of reasonableness. I was wrong, and I got a surprising phone call to inform me of my outstanding balance. Unfortunately, the call came AFTER we got back home.

Here are the numbers: I paid $225 upfront for their international data package. At home, it costs $40 a month for 5 GB. So I paid 5.625 times my monthly home rate for the international version. This was the largest option available. Hefty, yes, but better than coming home to a huge bill, right? If only…

You see the $225 only covered 100 MB of data. How much is that? I have no idea, as I stated above, very few people understand this technical stuff. But if they charged me over 5 times more than the high end of my home package, as long as I don’t start overusing it like crazy, I should be OK, right? Wrong.

Of course when you do the math, it is quite simple to see that 100 MB is only 1/50, yes, One Fiftieth, or 2%, of 5 GB. So that comes to 5.625 times the price for only 2% of the service. That’s 288 times the price, for the same 100 MB.

In my book, any company that charges 288 times the price for a product in this way is disingenuous at best, and, well, I will spare you the other adjectives I said under my breath.

As it turned out, we blew through the allotted 100 MB on the second day. The final bill, including the $225 and all the taxes, came to over 2 G’s, as in, “2 grand”. As in, enough to cover about 4 years of service at home, while using 50 times more data per month.

To top it off, the $225 “special data package” comes to $2.25 per MB, but their charge when you go over that is only $2.50. So by paying it upfront, you get a whopping 10% discount. What is their price for 100 MB at home? Five bucks. So even by that calculation it is 45 times the price!

To me this is disingenuous, plain and simple. I hope everyone enjoyed the R****s Cup tennis tournaments, I feel like I provided a good chunk of the prize money.

 

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.

Life is full of simple truths. So many things are so simple to explain and so simple to grasp, in theory, that you would think that everyone would live carefree lives.

But many people make the mistake of believing that “simple” is the same thing as “easy”. It is very easy to fall into that trap. So let me attempt to forever dispel that notion from your mind.

Let’s start with an area of my life with which I have struggled virtually my entire life.

From a very young age I can remember going shopping with my mother for clothes and hearing the saleslady inform her that they did not have these clothes in my size, or that we should look for something in the “husky” department.

Today I prefer to shop in stores that specialize in Big & Tall, since I can actually spend time choosing clothes that I like, as opposed to what they have that might fit me.

The point is that losing weight is a simple concept. Eat less, exercise more, and VOILÀ! If only it were so in real life. Yes, it is simple. But that doesn’t make it easy.

When we move over to the field of business, and specifically family business, there are so many simple things that you can do to make you business grow, make more profit, have a balanced life, keep everyone in the family motivated and happy. Yes, there are many simple things that you can do.

Very few of these simple things are also easy to put into practice. So let’s go back to the weight analogy. My last blog dealt with ignorance, so let’s tie that in too. I have learned a lot about nutrition in the last year since my doctor recommended that I see a nutritionist. I now understand a lot more about the subject, and she has taught me many tricks that have actually started to help me move in the right direction.

But one of the keys is that she always makes sure that we schedule a follow-up visit so that I do not forget that I am somehow accountable to her, since I know that I will be seeing her again in a couple of months. In this way, she is kind of my coach, keeping me on track.

My doc has also mentioned that he may recommend a personal fitness trainer to work with me in a similar way with respect to the exercise part of the equation. We are not there yet, but I already clearly understand where most of the benefits would come from, and that is the follow-up and accountability aspect.

So I have already used the term “coach” and “trainer”, and they both work in their respective fields. Now I want to bring in the term “facilitator”, since it actually has some use and acceptance in the field of family business advising.

During a recent course on facilitation we discussed the term and I happened to mention that the root word “facile” is actually the French word for “easy”. I thought it was a no-brainer (it’s good to speak more than one language!) but the reaction from the others illustrated that I was clearly in the minority.

The dictionary app on my phone does not have an entry for facilitator, but for the verb facilitate, we see: to make easier or less difficult; help forward (an action, a process, etc.) To assist the progress of (a person).

If you have an “A-Ha” moment here and realise that you could use a facilitator in your life your business, or your family, I felicitate you, but that is another French word for another day.

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.