Feb 03, 2022

Succession planning—Three things I learned in session three

By Dan Beenken

If our work with family-owned companies has taught us anything (other than communication is key), it's that succession planning stirs the drink of every business family. Thus, we focus a session of our Virtual Breakfast Series program every year on succession planning. (And we also focus one on healthy communication.)

Last Friday we had another great session with one of our largest crowds to date. One of the rewarding things for our team was hearing from a panelist on how our programming has helped his family progress as a business family. It is always so cool to see the fruits of our labor and how it directly impacts our members in such positive ways!

I hope you can all join us March 25 for our next session, Leveraging Your Board as a True Advantage. Our panel is going to talk about why they have an advisory board, how they use it and how they got it started.

With that out of the way, onto my three takeaways from our January session:

Stewardship vs. Ownership: I hadn’t heard this exact phrase before and it really struck me as a great way to think about how you view your position with the family business. The types of decisions you make, the longevity you approach it with and the monetary decisions you make with the business and its profits will differ vastly under the two different labels. The big thing here is that families who view themselves as stewards typically take a much longer term approach and are always thinking about the next generation, along with branches of your family tree that haven't even grown yet.
Love Equally, Treat Uniquely: This was a nugget of wisdom shared by Steve Coleman, one of our panelists. In his work as a family business consultant, the families that truly understand this and practice it are those that can survive succession and all the changes it brings. It’s a variation of the mantra “fair and equal don’t mean the same thing." However, I like the version that focuses on loving your kids and family equally. How that manifests itself is going to look different, because they are different people.
First the "What" and Then the "Who": We covered this during a conversation on promoting family and hiring new family members into the business. Most families start with who they want to bring in to the company. Rather, lets flip that around and think about what the company needs. When you use this lens, everything else will take care of itself. Issues of favoritism, poor fit, entitlement, etc. can often go out the window.

That's all for me today. You can find our handout for this session below. Let me know if you're interested in involving the UNI Family Business Center in a conversation about succession planning for your family business.

Dan Beenken