Edition 433 – Building a Legacy
Mum & Dad have an established business. It’s been humming along for a while. Mostly good years. Some rocky ones. All up, they’ve built a life, established some private wealth and are doing, on a daily basis, what most people only dream of.
Their dreams are not big ones. Nice house. Nice car. Comfortable retirement nest egg. Holidays somewhere nice, though occasionally, tacked onto the end of a business trip, so busy is the day to day of being in family business.
Lots of Australian family businesses are like this. It’s what keeps this country ticking over, in spite of the noise from Government and large Corporates. This is where economic growth occurs.
Then, there are times in the life of those family businesses when a pivotal moment occurs.
Like the adult child who, after backpacking through Europe for 6 months, not knowing what he wanted to do with his life, returned home and said to Dad, “I think I’d like to come and work with you”. Dad didn’t have lofty ambitions for the business – merely to build a comfortable life for his family. The youngster moves in, starts at the bottom and learns the ropes right at the cutting edge of what happens in this business. It’s not one of those situations where a 20 year is planted in a role, given the title of “Manager” and never gets their hands dirty. This is an apprenticeship where Dad says, I’ll teach you everything there is to know – the good, the bad and the ugly.
Two decades down the road, the business has blossomed. The boy became a man, proved himself to Dad, showed interest in areas of their industry that Dad hadn’t, then proceeded to take some calculated, yet careful risks. Dad loosened the ropes a little, and allowed the boy to, occasionally, fail and eventually, succeed. In every failing, is a lesson that leads to a future success.
The turnover is now 15 times what it was when Dad ran it as a small, profitable operation. 20 people are on the payroll. That’s 20 families that are building their own lives, as a result of the efforts of Mum & Dad, to establish the foundations, and of the efforts of that young man, to build upon that base and drive the business forward, conservatively, into the future.
When we bring the younger members of our families into our businesses, we bring in fresh ideas, fresh perspective but, more than anything, fresh energy. They see what you don’t. Their energy today is the same that you had 20 or 30 years ago. If you’ve raised them right, and let them peek into the happenings of the business during their formative years, they’ll already have one of the best business educations they can earn – learning at the dinner table, at night, how a business functions.
On the face of it, it sounds a simple story, doesn’t it? Deep down, what it truly represents is the building of a legacy.
This Week’s Tip
“It may not be a younger family member that shows interest in the future potential of a family business,
but a younger employee who spurs an older operator on to new beginnings.”