Talking Business & Values at Family Firm Institute’s Annual Conference

I was privileged to be a featured speaker at Family Firm Institute’s 26th Annual Conference in Brussels, Belgium this month.  This was my twenty-third year presenting at the Global Conferences of the Family Firm Institute (FFI)!  Throughout my career, I’ve always enjoyed connecting with audiences through these speaking engagements.

I presented my session with Dennis Passis, owner of Gate Enterprises Inc., a mid-sized family business.  Passis and I met at last year’s conference and our conversations about professional orientation led to the joint presentation.  Our talk, “What Informs Your Work with Family Business?,” resulted in a lively, 60-minute interactive session with the audience.

Jesus Casado, FFI Board member, said, "This was the best session in the entire conference!"

During our session with the audience, we spoke about how the values and fundamental beliefs of family business counselors provide the foundation for their work with family business clients.  We discussed how those beliefs set the quality and tone for client-consultant engagement and become a determining factor in creating successful outcomes for the family business.

Thank you to Family Firm Institute for once again bringing together such an interesting group of experts, as well as owners and members of family businesses from around the world!

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Creating the “Elegant Agreement“ for Family Business

In my last post, which you can read here, I gave the background of the Yost family, with whom I worked as a consultant.  The Yosts own a group of successful car dealerships.  Brothers Alan and Charlie make up the third generation of this family business, and both worked in the business.  Alan is determined to find the easy way through everything, and he never excelled in the business.  Charlie, on the other hand, transformed the dealership into an award-winning business with great profitability through 20 years of hard work.

When Charlie reached the breaking point and decided that Alan had to leave the business, it created a contentious situation that threatened to tear the family apart.  The brothers had a buy/sell agreement that stated that Charlie would have paid Alan just under $10 million for his share of the business.  Alan wanted more than the buy/sell would give him.  He hired an adversarial lawyer who worked on a contingency and promised Alan he could “get a lot more.“

I worked as an advisor with the Yosts to help them make their way through this buy/sell agreement.  In my meetings with the Yosts, I discovered that one of the most important core values of the family was their commitment to function from a place of integrity.  This principle was demonstrated by the actions of the brothers’ grandfather, business founder Fred Yost.

Integrity: Firm adherence to a code of especially moral values, incorruptibility.

Alan had a wonderful, loving relationship with his grandfather.  During Fred’s latter years, he and Alan had lunch once a week.  In those lunch meetings, Fred told Alan the stories that only a founder of a business can tell.  Those stories all contained a […]