Je deviens parfois frustré par le temps nécessaire pour accomplir certaines tâches, et je crois que la plupart des gens ressentent souvent le même sentiment. Il me semble que nous sous-estimons presque toujours le nombre de semaines ou de mois qu’un projet prendra, et la fréquence avec laquelle nous terminons les choses à temps (ou même en avance!) est effectivement très basse.

Des exemples? Commençons avec la création d’un site web. J’ai déjà deux sites web, mais je ne les aime pas beaucoup, puisqu’ils ont été conçus il y a un certain temps, et ils ne répondent plus à mes besoins. Il y a plusieurs mois, j’avais donné un contrat à une compagnie pour développer mon nouveau site, mais je l’attends toujours.

Mais je ne peux pas blâmer la compagnie, parce que depuis l’octroi du contrat, j’ai changé les spécifications, ce qui a fallu des semaines de retard pendant que je redéfinissais ce que je voulais. Je sais que le résultat sera beaucoup meilleur, mais le fait de vivre avec les retards est assez frustrant quand même.

La leçon ici, c’est que pour avoir quelque chose qui a de l’allure, il faut être patient, parce que la bonne qualité, ça prend du temps.

Pour mon deuxième exemple, je veux discuter de conditionnement physique. Aujourd’hui, je viens de compléter une course de 5 KM pour la première fois. Je me suis inscrit pour la course vers la fin du mois de février, et je croyais à l’époque qu’avec deux mois de préparations, je serais en mesure de courir la majorité de la course, parce que je ne voulais pas simplement marcher le 5 KM.

En réalité, avec le niveau de conditionnement que j’avais au début, il y aurait fallu quelques mois additionnels. De plus, pendant les 3 dernières semaines, je ne me suis même pas entrainé une fois à cause d’une blessure à mon genou. La blessure était le résultat du programme d’entrainement trop progressif que je m’étais fait, parce que je n’avais pas prévu assez de temps de préparation. Plus de temps aurait été bénéfique.

Je pourrais aussi parler de mon livre qui devrait sortir dans les prochains mois. Je croyais avoir complété l’écriture du texte avec assez de temps pour que la production se termine avant ma date limite, (je me suis imposé un “deadline” de mon 50ième anniversaire, au mois d’août) mais les réponses que je commence à recevoir de la compagnie qui fera la publication me laissent avec des doutes.

Mais mon but dans ce blogue est de parler d’entreprises familiales, n’est-ce pas? Bon, alors, quand vient le temps de planifier et d’executer des transitions dans les familles en affaires, est-ce que vous pensez qu’elles se laissent trop de temps, juste assez de temps, ou pas assez de temps?

Dans les exemples que j’ai cités, je parlais de semaines et de mois. Mais quand on essaye de préparer une nouvelle génération pour son avenir dans la gestion d’une entreprise, c’est plutôt en années ou même en décennies qu’on devrait penser.

Et en plus du transfert de la gestion de l’entreprise, il y a aussi le transfert des actions de la compagnie. Avec tout cela, il faut penser en termes de gestion de la famille, pas simplement de la business.

Du point de vue de la complexité, on ne parle pas nécessairement de projet comme la construction du CHUM ou du nouveau Pont Champlain, mais si on doit se faire un échéancier, le nombre d’années devient comparable.

Quand il s’agit de décisions importantes, et de changements qui affectent beaucoup de gens, et surtout des gens que nous aimons, il est quasiment impossible de prendre trop de temps pour être sûr de notre coup.

Malheureusement, les familles attendent souvent trop longtemps pour commencer ces transferts importants. J’essaye de vous convaincre autrement, et j’espère que vous saisissez le message.

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.

As we age, it is widely accepted that we lose a lot of our flexibility, especially when we look at our physical selves. Stretching is far more important for older folks than it is for kids, and there are good reasons why yoga and pilates are so popular with the grey-haired crowd.

But the kind of flexibility that I want to talk about today has little to do with our physical being, and everything to do with an attitude towards things that happen on a regular basis in our lives. I have not seen a lot written on this subject, so I wanted to throw some of my ideas out there.

Let me start with where this flexibility kick began for me, last year, as I was forming the idea behind my first book, on which I continue to work (update: manuscript just back from its first edit, working on a few modifications). The title of the book is SHIFT your Family Business, and the letters in “shift” are capitalized because they each stand for one of the five steps in my “call to action”.

If you are playing along at home, you have likely already guessed that the F stands for Flexibility.

The goal of the book is to get business families to begin to concentrate more on the family side of things, and slightly less on the business side. After getting Started, finding Help, and Investing time, we come to the chapter about staying Flexible, and in many ways this is the key to success. But some people find it difficult.

Many heads of family businesses attribute a lot of their success to their vision and hard work to achieve that vision, and flexibility is sometimes anathema to them.

But when it comes time to start to plan how you want to set things up for the future of the company and the family, these people will almost surely need to adopt some flexibility to assure a continuity plan that everyone can and will buy into.

The person who has always had it in their head that a certain child will certainly be ready, willing, and able to take over from him, may just end up discovering that that child is not interested, is not competent, is not liked by key non-family employees, or is not able to get their siblings to agree with them.

The family that believes they have it all figured out needs to be ready to adapt when someone unexpectedly get sick or has an accident, and it becomes clear that it is shifting gears and rolling with the punches are important for survival.

I believe that many family business leaders are actually more flexible than they realize in the way that they operate their businesses. What I think many of them could use help with, is to be more flexible in how they look after the family side of things.

The key skill that they usually need to brush up on is communication, which is actually a two-way street. Often when you are at the top, you become accustomed to doing a lot of talking and very little listening, and it is in the listening that you learn.

When you are able to listen, while holding off the need to judge, you can really learn a lot, and some of what you learn may not fit with your preconceived views. This is where the flexibility comes in.

When guiding a family business, and a business family, it is often tempting to try to just lead and expect everyone to follow. But if you adopt a more flexible attitude and truly listen to your key people, you will have more success when it comes time to hand the reins over to the next generation. Things rarely work out exactly as you expect them to.

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.

Many of the family issues that business families face come from the relationships between different generations. After a certain number of years, the eventual changes that will be required to move the business from one generation of leadership to the next, just become inevitable.

But in some families, where siblings work together, the intra-generational issues come to the forefront, and become the focal point for long periods of time. When you think about it, two family members from different generations might work together for two or three decades, but two siblings may be working together for four or five.

I thought about this subject this week, when I had lunch with two brothers, who have been working together for as long as I have known them, and that’s about 25 years. I will call them Jack and Ron, and they run a family business unlike any other that I know.

I am not talking about the industry that they are in, but the way their business seems like a true family business, in the way the two brothers have made the company their life’s work, and the way they complement each other in terms of skill sets.

The other thing that sets them apart is the fact that neither of them has any children, so there is no succeeding generation. They started this business without any direct help from their parents, have run it togther for some forty years, but there are no obvious heirs to whom they can pass their assets.

I don’t know any other single-generation sibling partnerships, but these two brothers work really well together, have amassed a number of assets by watching every dollar they spend, and finding great value in a variety of places.

They have numerous real estate holdings all over the city, and they can tell you stories about deadbeat tenants for hours on end.

Jack is five years older than Ron, but I had to ask them who was the older brother. Ron is more of a tinkerer, fixing machines and seemingly making something out of nothing, while Jack is the legal expert, and knows his way around the legal system better than most lawyers. I guess that when you have tenants who don’t pay their rent, you end up learning about the legal system pretty quickly.

But this blog is about family business, and I have known these guys for quite a while, and I felt compelled to write about them because even though they are not your run-of-the-mill multi-generational company, they do exhibit something that I find truly inspiring when I watch them work together.

Their parents were always very important to them, even though they were not involved in the business. And their parents clearly did a great job in instilling the right attitude in their sons.

There does not seem to be any jealousy between Jack and Ron, any ill will or desire to seem superior in any way. They work together the way any parent would be proud to see their children work together. Maybe if they had children following in their footsteps it would be different.

They have their own challenges due to their situation, though. With no heirs, it will probably be a charitable foundation that ends up owning most of the assets down the road, but that needs to be set up, and many decisions and steps need to be taken to make sure that happens, and will be handled the way they want.

I have no doubt that they will make all their decisions together, without much fuss, since they have been getting along so well together for as long as I have known them.

Getting along with your family, and those that you work with, is pretty much one of the keys to happiness, isn’t it? Too many business families seem to forget this.

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.