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Rendez-Vous with a Purpose

This week was a very interesting one in my life, as I enjoyed some time in one of my favourite states, along with some of my favourite people.

The state is Colorado, and the occasion was the annual “Rendez-Vous” of the Purposeful Planning Institute (PPI). It was my second time attending the Rendez-Vous, following up on the 2014 edition last July.

The people that I met there in both 2014 and 2015 were without exception fantastic collaborators with whom I look forward to exchanging again and again going forward. Of course that doesn’t automatically qualify them all among my “favourite people”.

Last year I made the trip to Denver (actually Broomfield) solo, but this year, I travelled with my own collaborator, my 14-year old daughter. She also helped me celebrate my birthday the day before Rendez -Vous, which included a visit to the Broncos training camp in the morning and a Sam Smith concert at the Red Rocks amphitheater at night.

She also proved to be an excellent navigator using the maps on my phone, getting us everywhere with very few missed turns. But let’s get back to the PPI conference.

PPI has only been around since 2010, but already boasts over 350 members, including some 200 who were present this week, which is an impressive turnout. I recognized a few dozen names on the attendee list from last year, and a couple dozen faces as well.

Along the way I met even more interesting people, all of whom shared one common characteristic: A willingness to share and to learn from each other, about the subject of helping families plan their wealth and busness transitions, while focussing on the FAMILY.

As usual, the Rendez-Vous featured a couple of inspiring keynotes: Ian McDermott on Developing an Innovation Mindset on Thursday and Matt Wesley on the Power of Family Culture, on Friday. I heard nothing but positive comments about each of them.

On Thursday afternoon, we were also treated to a panel featuring Jay Hughes, Joanie Bronfman, and Stacy Allred, discussing Fiscal Unequals in Relationships, about couples that feature a woman with much larger wealth than the man. It was fascinating stuff, moderated by John A. Warnick, the founder and “heart and soul” of PPI.

Along the way, there were 4 rounds of break-out sessions, and the only complaint I heard was that it was so hard to choose which ones to attend, since there were so many interesting topics, put on by so many great speakers.

For my part, I truly enjoyed Buddy Thomas’ “Beyond Collaboration: Advisory Team Coordination as a Specialty Profession”, as well as my friends Karen Laprade and Kyle Harrison’s “Reveal or Conceal: a High Stakes Game for the Whole Family” in which we experienced the “Samoan Circle” method of discussing important topics in a large group.

As a student of (and big fan of) Bowen Family Systems Theory, I also got a lot out of Elaine King and Marianna Martinez’s “Establishing Family Governance Strucutures using BFST” on Thursday, before the final breakout session on Friday AM.

For the finale, I chose to attend Rodney Zeeb’s “Developing Leadership in the Rising Generation” which was a great choice for me, as it allowed me to hear and learn from someone who has been at it for a couple of decades longer than me, but whose ideas, methods, and philosphy are very much in line with my own.

I have now been to 2 Rendez-Vous events, and the combination of the high caliber of speakers, the fascinating topics, and mostly the spirit of sharing and collaboration of every last person with whom I engaged, all add up to the fact that I have already marked July 27-29, 2016 on my calendar.

I will not miss it, and I look forward to meeting many other great new people there too, as well as renewing and deepening relationships already begun in 2014 and 2015.

 

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Planning your Dreams and Dreaming about Plans

Spending quality time planning for the future is something that just about everyone should do, but which very few actually do in sufficient quantity and detail.

There are so many reasons why this is the case, like the fact that:

  • we are very busy putting out today’s fires;
  • we kind of think we know where we are going, and we figure that everything will kind of work out anyway;
  • we really aren’t sure how or where to begin.

In most cases, it is some combination of all of these elements, and even a few others.

To their credit, many advisors who specialize in helping people with long term planning have developed various approaches and processes to help engage clients in these important tasks.

Coming at this as I do, from a holistic family point of view, where I specialize in helping business families and families of wealth with their long term “Continuity Planning”, the process can get a bit hairy. Let me explain.

There are a lot of moving parts in a family, where each person is important and has their own views, priorities, and desires. There are lots of stakeholders, if you will.

Add in things like different generations, gender differences, in-laws, those working in the business versus those not, and you can start to see how complexity rears its ugly head.

Now let’s look at some of the subjects that need to be addressed:

  • Who will manage the business in the future?
  • Who will “lead” the business, how will decisions be made?
  • How do we get from today’s realities to the best set-up in the future?
  • Just when will the leading generation cede control to the rising generation?
  • Who will own how much?
  • What are the legal, accounting, tax, and insurance questions that we need to address as part of this planning?

Most of the answers to these last questions are found with the help of specialists in the various domains. The advice industry, however, is still very much based on a “silo” approach, and while everyone says that they “collaborate” with professionals in other disciplines, they do so with varying degrees of ability and success.

OK, so I am sure that some of you are saying, “Yeah, yeah, I know that, but what about your “dreaming” and “planning” stuff that you teased us with in your headline?” Here goes.

I have been developing a process to address these issues for families, and in so doing I came to an “A-Ha!” moment of sorts a couple of weeks ago, based on the planning and dreaming points of view, and which I am convinced will be the heart of its success. Here goes:

  • You do NOT plan your dreams, but you MUST discover them so that you can then plan on achieving them.
  • When the dream is for a family, and not just an individual, communication is vital for the co-creation of the dreams.
  • Just as you do not plan the dream, you do not dream up a plan either, you must develop the plan, which then helps you arrive at your dream.

The tool, or process, that I am currently putting the finishing touches on, is based on a “Business Model Canvas” that I found on my wife’s desk at home. It is a tool that she uses in her job coaching social entrepreneurs.

Rather than calling mine a Canvas, I have entitled my tool a Blueprint, as in “a photographic print that shows how something will be made” and “a detailed plan of how to do something” (a couple of definitions I found via Google).

The Blueprint looks at the three circles important to Business families: Family, Business, and Ownership.

We look at where they are now, the dream of what they could look like in the distant future, and the plan for the transition to get them there.

It may look simple, but it is actually quite a detailed process to help families discover their dreams, and work together to develop the plans to achieve them.

 

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Exit Door or Exit Corridor?

Last week’s blog about “Exit Planning” elicited some confusion, and this week’s post will try to clear things up.

To actually exit a family business, especially one that you founded, nurtured, and grew, is not something that is taken lightly. To do so on one’s own terms, and to the satisfaction of all stakeholders, is truly a rare feat. But just because it is difficult, does not mean that we can’t try to pull it off.

One reader questioned the fact that setting an exit date that is too far in the future might actually “de-motivate” the rising generation, if that date was too far in the future. Another asked which date I was referring to when I spoke of the “exit date”, was it management of the business, or ownership?

These are both valid questions, of course, as they invite further discussion. There are no “stupid questions” in my book, the only stupid question is the one that you are afraid to ask, for fear of looking stupid.

The point of last week’s post was that IF we are able to get the founder to choose a date (actually, just a year) in the future, where he would no longer be involved in the company he founded, we could use that year as a reference point, or an anchor.

The idea is that just getting “engagement” is an important starting point, and if we don’t get to the point of engagement, then no real, worthwhile discussion of the issues will ever happen.

The title of the blog, “Under-Promise and Over-Deliver on your Exit Plan”, was used to highlight the fact that once a date is set, the engagement in the process can begin, and THEN, with time, the person would grow into the idea that there would be a future phase when he would leave the business to others.

As the person begins to “get” the fact that he will one day no longer manage, lead, and own the business, he will (hopefully) also buy into a future of great possibilities for himself, and look forward to this reality, and eventually agree to leave sooner than originally planned.

If you are really paying attention, you will have notied that the previous paragraph is actually a segue to answering the second question, that of understanding which date we are referring to.

That is where the title to this week’s post comes in.   An exit door represents a “one step” exit process, whereby the owner sells his business and in one fell swoop goes from “all in” to “all out”.

This does happen on occasion, of course, but is not common in the family business arena. More often than not in business families, when this does occur, it is almost always the result of an untimely death or other tragic circumstances.

A better scenario is almost always a phased approach, where the “exit door” is replaced by an “exit corridor”

The corridor is a place that one goes through on the way to the exit. The first door (to enter the corridor) is most often the day-to-day management of the business. The six-day work -week becomes five days, then four, then three. Eventually, coming in once a week is sufficient.

After management comes leadership; approving all major decisions is often the norm as you enter the corridor, but by the end, there is sufficient trust and confidence in the successor(s) to allow them free reign.

The final hurdle is usually ownership, where the person who was at one point the 100% owner of the business actually gets to be 0% owner.

That is the final exit, and does not always occur while the founder is alive, but that’s okay too. Just getting a founder to understand that they will not live forever can be a big step.

Traversing the corridor is a process that is usually measured not is weeks or months, but in years. That is also okay too, so long as there is a plan.

 

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Underpromise and Overdeliver on your Exit Plan

The concept of under-promising and then over-delivering is not a new one, not by any stretch of the imagination. However, early this morning upon waking, I believe that I came up with a novel application of the idea.

My usual weekly blogging schedule has me selecting a subject on Thursday or Friday, writing on Saturday, reviewing and posting to my website on Sunday, and putting up a link on LinkedIn and Twitter on Monday.

I am composing this on Wednesday, July 1, which happens to be Canada Day. Perhaps it is the fact that as day off work, it felt a bit like a Saturday, which may have inspired me. But I think it was more a case of the confluence of a few things that I have been working on that so inspired me.

I recently committed to writing some longer content pieces, which I have dubbed the “Quick Start Guide Series”. The first such Guide is entitled “My Kids in My Business?”, and it is available on the Resources tab of my website.

It seems kind of lame having a “series” in which only the first output is available, so I have quickly begun working on the second piece, which will be called “Sticky Baton Syndrome – Ask Prince Charles” (working title), and which is slated for August 2015 release.

Let’s just say that I have been reading a lot of stuff that is out there about how to encourage the senior generation of leaders in family businesses to loosen their grip on passing the baton to the rising generation.

Simultaneously, I have recently been spending a good deal of time working with a colleague, who works the “wealth management” side of the street, and together we have been developing a methodology and tool for working with business family clients.

We are trying to find the most useful way to help them begin the process of planning for the intergenerational continuity of their enterprising families and the wealth contained therein.

We are tentatively calling it the “Blueprint”, and we are just entering trial mode with a select number of families as we work on the exact application and sequencing of the intervention.

What I can tell you for now is that I had a bit of an A-Ha moment when trying to figure out how to piece together the “Current Situation” part of the Blueprint and the “Next Era” portion.

(Basically, the Blueprint is a three-part affair: 1) Where are we now? 2) Where do we want to go? 3) How do we get there?. No reinventing the wheel, just structuring the discussion).

The trick, I discovered, is in setting the date for the “Next Era” part. You see, asking a business founder to picture things after they are gone is always a dubious proposition at best, so there are many nuances that need to be thought through.

For the purpose of illustration, we might exaggerate and invite the person to look at things in 2065. Can we agree that you will not be running and owning your business in 50 years? Unless we are dealing with a young entrepreneur, we all know what the right answer is.

So if 2065 is surely part of the “next era”, what about 2055? 2045? I think that you can see what I am doing here. But how far do you reel it back? As you get closer, you can step back in 5-year increments.

And where do you stop? Glad you asked, because this is where the “under-promise and over-deliver” comes in.

Why don’t we let “Dad” under-promise and choose a year that is “too far off”, and then as the plan comes together, and he can see how the rising generation is pulling up their socks and getting ready to take over, we can always let him “over-deliver” and in fact leave a few years ahead of the plan?

It sure beats the other way around.

 

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Mes 24 heures en Beauce

J’ai récemment eu la chance et le privilège de passer une période de 24 heures dans la compagnie de plusieurs personnes assez extraordinaires, et le tout s’est passé à St-Georges-de-Beauce.

Mais avant de vous raconter ma visite, je dois reculer dans le temps. En octobre 2014, durant une formation de la Business Families Foundation à Montréal, j’ai rencontré Jessica Grenier, de l’École d‘Entrepreneurship de Beauce (EEB), qui est devenue une amie.

À l’époque, je ne connaissais rien de l’EEB, mais je suis maintenant prêt à louanger cette merveilleuse institution pour son originalité et son audace, en plus de ses programmes uniques.

Vous pouvez visiter leur site web pour toute l’information sur ce qu’ils offrent, et moi je vais me concentrer sur mes fameuses 24 heures les 14 et 15 juin derniers.

Le plus récent programme de l’EEB s’intitule “Triomphe”, où les clients ciblés sont des entrepreneurs qui ont eu du succès en bâtissant ou en grandissant leur entreprise, mais qui sont maintenant prêts à passer à autre chose, et à passer le flambeau à la prochaine génération.

Quand je dis “plus récent programme”, en réalité ce que j’ai appris c’est qu’ils étaient en train de finir leur première “mini-cohorte” de 7 entrepreneurs et leurs conjoints lors de ma visite, et que la version complète de Triomphe sera lancée en 2016.

Jessica est responsable du programme, et elle m’avait contacté quelques semaines avant la troisième et dernière session de 3 jours de ce premier groupe à vivre l’expérience de Triomphe signé EEB.

Elle m’a confié qu’elle avait eu “un feeling” que si elle m’invitait à prendre part à quelques-unes des activités du début de ce troisième séjour à l’EEB de ce premier cohorte, ce sera un Win-Win-Win pour l’école, les participants, et moi. Je ne peux pas parler pour les autres, mais pour moi, je peux vous dire que j’en suis sorti gagnant.

L’expérience que chaque entrepreur vit, quand vient le temps de planifier sa sortie de son entreprise, est unique à lui-même, mais ceci ne veut pas dire qu’il ne peut pas bénéficier d’un groupe de pairs avec qui il pourra vivre la planification et les premiers pas de cette expérience.

Ceci résume assez bien la raison-d’être de Triomphe. Chaque programme de l’EEB fonctionne selon la formule de cohortes de participants, qui passent à travers plusieurs étapes tous ensemble, mais j’imagine que les liens formés entre ceux et celles de Triomphe seront parmi les plus puissants et profonds.

Pour débuter le dimanche après-midi, il y avait une scéance de “réchauffement” avec un accompagnateur-coach expérimenté, suivi par une session de “L’athlète sur le podium”, où quelques participants partagent un défi auquel ils font face actuellement, et les autres leur offrent leurs suggestions et points de vue.

J’ai eu la chance de passer, moi aussi, où j’ai raconté mon histoire personnelle et j’ai répondu à quelques questions des particpants.

Lors de la soirée, durant le souper, les entrepreneurs et conjointes ont chacun fait une présentation de 10 minutes au groupe, et il semble que le devoir de préparer ce discours avait causé du stress à certains d’entre eux au courant des semaines précédentes. Mais c’était tellement émouvant comme spectacle!

Lundi matin, c’était au tour d’une invitée spéciale, la conjointe d’un entrepreneur très connu, à venir nous conter son histoire, avec ces hauts et ces bas. Encore émouvant et révélateur pour tous.

À tout celà s’ajoutait une scéance sur les génogrammes, donnée par Jessica elle-même, en utilisant sa propre famille.

Le partage de tous ces éléments personnels est au coeur du succès de ces interventions. Les participants vivent tous leur propre version de la vie entrepreneuriale, mais ils s’inspirent les uns des autres.

J’ai eu la chance de partager mes perspectives sur le Modèle des 3 Cercles, et j’ai donné une copie de mon livre “Changer votre vision de l’entreprise familiale” à chacun des participants.

Je devais quitter après dîner, et laisser ma place à Placide Poulin, qui était arrivé pour partager ses perspectives pour le bénéfice de tous.

Je n’étais présent que pour 24 heures, et je suis sorti avec beaucoup d’idées et d’histoires. Pour les participants, il leur restait encore une journée et demie. Je ne doute pas qu’ils étaient tous épuisés, mais motivés, en partant mardi soir!

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Succession Planning in the Laundry Room

To begin, I must confess that I really hate the term “succession planning”, but in a title or headline, it is important to use words that are familiar to most people, otherwise they will likely miss your whole point.

I must also confess that the term “laundry room” was only used in the header here because it was a way to make my idea a bit catchier. The “real” title of this blog would more correctly be something like “How Succession Planning is Like Doing the Laundry”, but that doesn’t feel as sexy.

So how is succession planning like doing the laundry? I am glad you asked, but first, I told you that I detest the expression “succession planning”? Can we please just call it “Continuity Planning” instead?

Continuity planning is like “life insurance”, insofar as the insurance industry realized many years ago that selling “death insurance” (which is what it really is, after all) was not an easy thing to do, because people don’t want to talk about their ultimate demise.

So, without further ado (I think we have had enough “ado”, don’t you?), just how is Continuity Planning similar to doing the laundry? Let us count the ways.

To some people, and here I am picturing my Dad, as well as most fathers of his generation, the laundry room of our house was just a place that he passed through on the way into the garage. His job was to make sure that if the washer or dryer ever broke down, he was to pay to have them repaired or replaced.

The “doing the laundry” was never in the realm of the things that he worried about. As someone who was the beneficiary of having the laundry taken care of by my Mom and my grandmother who lived with us for many years, I am going to go out on a limb and guess that he never fully appreciated everything that went into the effort.

As someone who know lives in a house with my wife and two teens, and where we separate the household tasks more equally (give or take…) I can tell you that laundry is more than throwing the clothes in the washing machine and pressing “start”.

Nobody “wants” to do the laundry, but if the person who takes care of it is absent, it doesn’t take more than a few days before you start to notice that something is amiss. As people start to run out of clean clothes and the hampers are overflowing, someone eventually decides it is time to do something. And how hard can it be, right?

Put the clothes in the washer (what, you are supposed to separate them by colour first?), add some detergent, and press the button. OK, great, I’m glad that’s done. Oh, the washer is done. I guess now we move the wet stuff over to the dryer, right?

Now the dryer beeped, so we are finished. Oh, some of the stuff is still a bit damp, so I guess we press Start again. Alright, everything is dry now, but it is all mixed up, inside out, crumpled. This is a lot more work than I thought.

For people who are so busy taking care of business, there is a great potential to underestimate what goes into preparing the next generation of leaders and owners of their business.

Getting your accountant to do an “estate freeze” is putting the clothes in the washer and starting the machine.

The real work takes place before, and especially after. And it takes a long time, there are lots of steps, and it never seems to end.

The clothes need to be folded and hung up, and you need to make sure that the right clothes go back into the right rooms, the right closets, and the right drawers. Throwing the clothes in the machine and pressing the button was the easy part.

Maybe you should get going, before you run out of clean underwear.

 

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Is It a Problem with Design, Material, or Workmanship?

This week’s blog post is one that I have been thinking about for a while, because I really liked the story from the time I started blogging, but I could not figure out how to relate it to the subject of business families. Until now.

The title, asking where the problem was, comes from a question that my father asked me over a decade ago, after I had tried to describe a situation that I needed his help with.

My wife and I had a couple of toddlers in the house back then, and during a trip to Costco, we saw a swing set with a circular slide that we thought would look great in our backyard. We hastily decided to buy it, not realizing the monumental task of assembling it that lay ahead.

Now I love Costco because they sell really good stuff at the lowest prices you will likely find anywhere, but that does not necessarily make their merchandise “user-friendly”. I am not the most “handy” guy either, but my wife is actually one of the best IKEA furniture assemblers I have ever met.

How hard could it be? “Next to impossible” was the eventual answer.

Literally four or five weeks later, the structure stood in our yard, but just barely. We hesitated to allow the kids to use the equipment, because we could not trust the thing the way we had put it together. “Maybe your Dad could help us”, suggested my wife.

So I called him up and described the issue as best I could. “Is it a problem of design, material, or workmanship?, came his question. I thought about it and answered “Yes, Yes, and Yes.”

In retrospect, I had not realized how good he was at getting to the root of the problem before trying to offer solutions, and I Iike to think that I inherited some of that from him, to make up for the lack of handyman skills that I got.

He came over a couple of days later to analyse the job we had done and immediately began shaking his head at the monstrosity we had cobbled together. Within an hour, we had put together a list of material and we headed to the local lumberyard to buy what we needed to address the shortcomings.

A couple of days later, after he returned with his tools and equipment, we had a veritable fortress of a structure. It was now strong enough for the whole family to climb aboard, and was eventually a heck of a job to remove later when the kids were too big for it and me opted for a pergola instead.

The business family lessons here are numerous. Dad founded a company with certain skills and abilities, some of which I inherited, some of which I did not. We still managed to work together and produce a great result, but it was not necessarily straightforward.

Let’s look again at the design, material, workmanship question. How does the family design the way it will work together, especially over the long term, and how are they going to govern the family enterprise as one generation will make way for the next?

The material of the business family is basically the family members, the human assets that are the heart of the operation, the ones upon whom the focus should be (as opposed to the widgets the company makes).

Is the family putting the emphasis on making sure the materials are the best they can be, thinking about education and finding the best role for each person?

What about workmanship? Hmmm, this one took a while for me to put my finger on. I am not 100% sure that this is the best fit for the analogy, but I am going to go with relationships.

When looking at a business family and attempting to diagnose where to begin to help them, you might ask if their key issue is Governance, Human Capital, or their Relationships.

Hopefully it won’t be all three!

 

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Independently Wealthy vs INTERdependently Wealthy

The family business space is a fascinating area because of all the complexities that can arise when you mix business with family. When a business is successful enough to provide the family with not just a job but with significant wealth, things can get even more interesting.

I just finished reading a great book, Strangers in Paradise, by James Grubman, that does a superb job explaining how and why family members from different generations can have such different views about wealth.

The book is worth a read for anyone interested in this subject, whether they are part of a business family or a family with wealth, or advisors to such families. Grubman makes the analogy that those who are not born wealthy, but become wealthy along the way, are like immigrants to a new land.

When those immigrants have children, the children are natives to wealth, and will thus view wealth very differently. The book gives detailed explanations of the different ways that these immigrants make the adjustment to being wealthy, again comparing the journey to that of people who uproot the family and move to a new country.

I recently spent some time with my late father’s sister, asking questions about their childhood and their immigration to Canada, and I can tell you that packing up and moving to another country that you have never even visited can be a terrifying experience, even if you do end up in “paradise”.

One of the things that surpises most people is that wealthy people are not always happier than middle class folks. Money can solve lots of problems, but it can cause just as many, if not more. But few people will feel sorry for those whose problems stem from having too much money.

One of the take-aways for me from readig Strangers in Paradise was Grubman’s use of a new term (for me), which I decided to feature in today’s blog title.

When a family has accumulated significant wealth, and they have decided to keep the wealth together as a family, they need to learn how to get along and figure out how to make decisions together. This is not new to me, or to any regular readers of this blog.

What is new to me is the wonderful term “Interdependently Wealthy”.

Most people have heard the term “independently wealthy”, even if they would not necessarily be able to define it. Just so that we are all on the same page, here is a definition that I just Googled:

Possessing enough wealth that one does not need financial support from another person and does not require income from employment.

So if you have enough wealth that you do not have to rely on anybody else, and you do not need to work, you are independently wealthy, fair enough.

But what about a wealthy family? OK, so maybe they don’t have to work for money, and many families are in the position where the next generation do not have to find a job to pay the bills, and hopefully they can find something productive to devote their lives to (but that is the subject of another blog).

Now let’s look at the part about “does not need financial support from another person”. When the wealth is created, it is very often because of the efforts of one person, and for simplicity’s sake, let’s call him Grandpa.

As long as Grandpa is still alive, things are usually pretty clear, since it is “his” wealth, so he calls all the shots, and few will argue with him.

Once Grandpa is no longer around, and there is not one person, but a number of people who own and control the wealth, I strongly suggest that these people learn to get along.

They are NOT independently wealthy, they have become INTERdependently wealthy.

The difference is huge. Some families have figured out how to make it work. Many other families have great difficulty with the distinction, and unfortunately those are the ones that we hear about the most.

 

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When Did You Spring Forward?

The ritual takes place twice a year, and people handle it in different ways. For some, it is no big deal, for others it is a source of problems, from disturbed sleep patterns to missed appointments.

I am talking about changing our clocks because of the observance of Daylight Savings Time throughout most of North America and many other parts of the world.

After moving our clocks back an hour last November, two weeks ago it was time for everyone to “Spring Forward” an hour, in order to “save” an hour of daylight. The whole notion of “saving” daylight is ridiculous or course; all we are doing is making the daylight more convenient for most people.

As someone who enjoys observing people, I find it instructive to look at how different people handle some of these mundane situations, because you can often gather a pretty accurate picture of someone from how they handle relatively insignificant events.

Ever since I have known my wife, she has complained about having to change the clocks twice a year, while pointing out that the practice was started to help farmers, at a time in our history when they made up a far larger percentage of the population.

While she does like to complain about this twice a year, it really has not ever negatively affected her, but she just dislikes the inconvenience and the couple of days it takes to readjust her body clock.

Personally, I find it hard to relate to the people who are readjusting their watches and clocks on Sunday, ex post facto. Wow, did they really NOT see it coming?

OK, so maybe I am a bit extreme in my modus operandi; I start changing the clocks around the house right after supper on Saturday, along with my car and my watch. That way, I actually start to make my body clock adjustments in advance.

I do a similar “purposefully fooling myself” trick when I fly to a different time zone. As soon as I board the plane and get seated, I change my watch to the time of my destination city, and I begin to slowly adjust to my new reality.

When you know that something is going to change, why would you not begin to make the adjustments in advance if you could? That is a rhetorical question, but what the heck am I really getting at in this blog that is usually (at least tangentially) related to family business?

Well, if you know that some day you are going to retire and that you expect your children to be running the company, would it not make sense to start to act as if you realize that the day will arrive at some point? Maybe let them have an opportunity to make some decisions, or run a department or division without looking over their shoulders too much?

Also, if you know that you will someday actually retire to do other things, have you started to try to find out what those other things are going to be, so that you can prepare them and maybe actually find out what you are looking forward to doing?

If you do it right, you could actually accomplish both of these things simultaneously. Give your offspring (notice I decided against using the term “children” again, since they really are more like “former children” once they are adults) an opportunity to take on more responsibility AND also take some time away to work on figuring out what you will be retiring to.

You will help the rising generation to “Spring Forward” into the roles that they have likely longed for, and you will “Spring Toward” the lifestyle that you have been working so hard to obtain. Sounds like the ultimate Win/Win situation to me.

One more thing: When did you really “spring forward” in life, how old were you? How old are your offspring now?

 

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Transition with Purpose

This past week I was in Toronto for a few days, where in addition to meeting with various interesting people, I also attended an event put on by IFEA (Institute of Family Enterprise Advisors – ifea.ca) where I gained some insights into a subject that is beginning to affect workplaces and families everywhere.

The presentation was entitled “The Multigenerational Complexities Business Family Succession” which sounded like it was going to be right up my alley, but made me almost feel like I would not be learn much of anything new. I am happy to report that I was wrong on both counts.

The presenter, Lisa Taylor, founder of The Challenge Factory, started off by asking a few questions about retirement age and life expectancy, and as soon as I heard the first few answers, I had a good idea of where this talk was going. But I had no idea how eye-opening it would be.

Let me summarize a bit by saying that when 65 became the “official” retirement age, life expectancy was 62. The fact that many people continue to operate from a paradigm of “65 = retirement” is pretty befuddling in that light.

What ensued was an in-depth discussion about how increased (and increasing) life expectancy has affected workforces everywhere, as many people who are approaching 65 are not interested in retiring, and instead wish to continue working, for a variety of reasons.

Taylor used an analogy of riding up an escalator, and looking up ahead of you, when all of a sudden the person nearing the top decides not to get off, but instead takes a step backwards in order to keep the ride going just a bit longer. (You can watch a brief video of Taylor talking about the escalator analogy on her website at challengefactory.ca)

It does not take long for that one person at the top of the escalator, taking steps backwards, to begin to have adverse and dangerous effects on everyone else trying to ride to the top. This occurs in family businesses all the time, but also in many other kinds of workplaces.

In fact, the talk did not focus much on family business at all, but was actually quite interesting from a societal perspective, as longer life expectancy has created new realities for everyone, even if many people have not really noticed or begun to change their views of work lives.

On one of her slides, Taylor illustrated the difference between a typical career path using the “retire at 65” model that had prevailed through the second half of the past century, and a more recent variation that is becoming more prominent nowadays.

What struck me was her use of the expression “Transition with Purpose” that can occur at a couple of junctures in one’s work life, with a notable one (for me) around age 50. It seems that many people feel the need to make some sort of career transition at this age, and seeing this makes me feel more “normal”, as it really “fits” my reality.

If we had had more time during the discussion, I would have liked to talk about the concept of “Transition with Purpose” as it could benefit many business families.

What I am getting at here is the problem that many family businesses face when the founder keeps stepping backwards on the escalator, which results in many complications for the rest of the family and the business. My feeling is that if more time and effort is made in helping the founder find his or her “Transition with Purpose”, we would go a long way to minimize the number of these situations.

If we look at each of the two main words in the expression, I think that “transition” is the part that most people “get”, as the realities of aging and family life cycle mean that we go from one role to another over the course of a lifetime. But it is the “Purpose” part that seems much more elusive, and therefore requires more effort.

Every effort made to discover a worthwhile purpose is well worth it in the end.

 

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