Every Family’s Business: A Blueprint for Protecting Family Business Wealth The book recounts
a conversation between two strangers who meet on a flight to Barbados. Both are family
business survivors who have sold their businesses; one a founder, one the son working in his father’s business. Throughout the course of their conversation, the two discuss compensations issues, performance issues and selling their family business. One of the characters reveals 12 questions that he and his father asked themselves each year to guide their succession plans; 12 questions handed down through four generations of his family.
The questions give families a common sense method for exploring their own succession plan, and a method for updating that plan every year. Every Family’s Business is an unpretentious story that has already inspired legions of family businesses to begin their own succession
planning. With so few families actually formalizing their succession plans, I wanted to offer something completely different that was easy to read, that was both entertaining and informative. A book that every family business, big and small, public and private be they a retailer, manufacturer, a service provider could relate to and discuss among themselves.
For those advising family businesses, the book is a unique tool to begin a conversation with family businesses about the crucial importance of succession planning. If silence is the great destroyer of wealth in a family business, then Every Family’s Business is surely breaking the ice in thousands of firms whose owners have read the book and have started to think and talk about succession with their families and their advisors in an entirely new way. Perhaps the most liberating theme for readers is the notion that family legacy can take many different forms, including selling the family business; that what really matters is that the generations collaborate in developing and maintaining the plan with the view of preserving their wealth.
The notion of longevity of a business as being the only valid succession goal is exposed for the wealth destroying, family destroying idea that it most surely is. Non-family businesses leaders are seldom compensated for maintaining continuity of ownership—their overriding objective is to increase shareholder value. The most successful family businesses understand this; seldom do they confuse their passion for business with their passion for a business –a subtle but crucial distinction required for the protection of family relationships and wealth.
The book’s 12 questions inspire the succeeding generation to explore acquiring controlling interest of the family business at market value, while at the same time giving them an economic incentive to probe the market for its sale to a third party. The book shows family members that these two succession tracks can be pursued concurrently. A pre-condition for this method involves a partnership between the generations based on mutual trust and respect—it is through a declaration of future intentions of both generations that the 12 questions create a succession plan hard-wired to protect wealth through the business’ eventual sale to someone.
If you are in a family business or advising one, you are in this book. As its author, as a past family business leader, the potential of the questions to elicit deeply felt authentic emotions becomes self evident. It’s why the book encourages family businesses to seek the help of advisors who can shape these emotions, who have the skill and capacity to explore the appropriate succession strategy that’s uniquely right for your firm.
Thomas William Deans, is President of Détente Financial Corp, the author of Every Family Business and speaker on high net worth management strategies. He lives in the Hockley Valley, Ontario. To order your copy visit www.ProtectingFamilyBusinessWealth.com