Every Family’s Business
Tom Deans (Canada)
12 Common Sense Questions Could Save Your Family. Forever change the future of your family business. Every Family’s Business challenges the idea that successful family businesses must keep family issues and business issues separate. Tom believes this separation is impossible and that most family businesses are set up from the beginning to fail because they attempt it. Tom offers a compelling argument for why families should be clear about when they will sell the business and to whom. Families that are upfront and realistic about their goals for transitioning ownership of the business can avoid jealousy, sibling rivalry and regrettable inter-family lawsuits. Tom has designed the 12 Common Sense Questions offered in Every Family’s Business to start a conversation among family members with the view of protecting wealth and relationships.
A succession plan must be more than naming a beneficiary; it must be a thoughtful, well-communicated plan.
Owners who maintain ownership control of their businesses while delegating management to someone else, whether family or professional managers, assume extraordinary risks. When a business owner dies and gifts his or her shares to a surviving spouse or children without having a detailed conversation about who will own what and how, family discord and wealth destruction are almost guaranteed. If no plan is in place, feuding siblings, parent-child estrangement and disgruntled professional managers will continue to make litigation lawyers the only beneficiary of broken family business dreams. Abandon the concept of “gifting” your business and replace it with clarity about who will buy your business. Every Family’s Business gives owners permission to sell their businesses to their children – or anyone else. Struggle, risk, failure and adapting to change are what distinguish business owners from employees. Businesses gifted to the next generation, who have risked nothing, will ultimately join the 70% of businesses that fail when passed to the second generation.
