All Blog Posts (130)

On the subject of a culture of tolerance versus teamwork, I am concerned about your “good guy” compulsion to expand the list of family member employees who are effectively, non fire-able employees. You may argue that you could fire anyone, but understand the definition of a non fire-able…

I hope you found our recent Board meeting worthwhile. As I expressed leaving the meeting, I regret the need for my grinding in regard to you establishing and communicating reasonable performance expectations and formal protocols for expenses, 401k match, profit sharing,…

Some clients appreciate what I offer more than others. In many cases this occurs when a very social child follows a task master parent into the CEO position of a business without appropriate experience, effective accountability, mentoring or coaching.



In the absence of working for another business, successors lack the understanding or empathy of an employee. If a successor has never been a common law employee, it is very difficult for them to effectively lead or manage employees.…

As you are most assuredly aware, high net worth estate planning usually involves putting trusts in place to take advantage of tax…

Last year while reading the Orlando Business Journal I came across a one liner that read, “the sign of a good leader is when the business runs as smoothly when the leader is in the business as when he or she is out of the business.” As a succession planning professional dedicated to impacting lives and perpetuating family business legacies, this quote resonated with me. While it occurred to me that the title of this article sounds like a quote from Johnny Cochran, the hub and spoke approach…

One of the great myths of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is that collaboration stems from consensus.



The common approach to collaboration suggests that engagement is not possible unless people have an opportunity to participate in the decision making.  My experience as a Certified Succession Planner® leads me to believe something somewhat different. The behavioral assessments we use in helping select the right people for groups such as operational teams,…

When I think of the word balance, one of the images that come to mind is a gymnast carefully and bravely performing on the balance beam. As a sports enthusiast and competitive person, occasionally when I am channel surfing (which my wife loves), I come across a gymnastics competition and find myself captivated by the athletes and their level of focus, commitment and talent. Although I have never been a gymnast, it is apparent that becoming a successful gymnast and performing well on the…

Trust is the single most critical component of teamwork. Unfortunately, some people are just untrusting and believe in survival of the fastest and the fittest. Employment is just another opportunity to compete, win and validate their belief that they are capable of looking out for number one. Untrusting people expect others to disappoint and their fatalistic attitude generally creates a self fulfilling prophecy to the failure of a team. All forms of personal interaction have one purpose for…

In fairness to the up-and-coming successor candidates in family businesses, it should be mentioned that often times the evaluation of them is not altogether objective or even reasonable. Family member employees live in a fishbowl where nothing they do is seemingly ever good enough. The good stuff they do is seen simply as par for the course. And frankly, that’s often because no one in the organization gets a lot of affirmation for their incredibly hard work, so why should the “heir…

Here’s something that may challenge your current thinking about incentives: Not all incentive programs motivate people towards better and higher levels of performance.  In fact, a good many of these programs have just the opposite effect. They can also serve as a source of motivation for the wrong people or a source of entitlement.



Basically, there are three types of motivation:  Fear (self-imposed or direct threats); Extrinsic (outside programs such as bonuses, special perks,…

Trust is the single most critical component of teamwork. In the absence of trust in owners, leaders and colleagues, members of the “dream” (versus team) are looking over their shoulder and subsequently handicapped in their ability to focus on their assigned task.  Building trust is the first answer to how we convert a “dream” into a team that optimizes productivity and creates the Success Marginsm demanded by business succession.   Trust builds cohesiveness and resilience that are the…

Over the course of the last decade in working with family-owned companies, I cannot tell you how many times I have heard horror stories of family successors driving their family’s business into the ground. Often times, it is our clients’ fear of this happening in their own businesses that motivates them to hire us in the hopes that we can help prevent this tragedy. In spite of situations that I  have been involved in where, after some time, I begin to share the business owner’s concerns, I…

My apologies to Ringo Starr.  In case you’ve never heard of him, he played drums for the Beatles during the 1960’s until that family business came undone.  Wait a minute, you say, the Beatles were not family members.  Well, perhaps not by the traditional definition of family; but remember, we define a family business as two or more people together for purposes other than making money.  Whether you’re family, friends, or strictly business partners, personal and professional partnerships are a…

This past week I was with an auto dealer client, and we spent some time evaluating the progress of one of his children in the family business. It quickly became apparent that this heir doesn’t know his way to the bottom line of the financial statement. In the car business, razor thin profit margins are the norm. In fact, in a well-run store, for every one dollar that comes in, only about three cents finds its way to the bottom line. That’s a remarkable statistic, but even in other industries…