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Steve Legler on Transitioning your Legacy on to Future Generations: The ROI Online Podcast Ep. 87 · The ROI Online Podcast

• 0:04
  Steve Legler: But often families don't get out in front of it soon enough or early enough. And then they end up doing a transition in a crisis when someone has a health event, or someone gets divorced. And now there's new ownership structures and, and new things come into play. So I always try to help people get a longer term perspective on things and be objective and sort of look at it and plan it on a longer term basis to make sure you get and you alluded to it earlier, you talked about transitioning the leadership and the ownership.
• 0:36
  Steve Legler: And those are two different things. And they don't always happen at the same time. And that's another thing people don't always realize.
• 0:43
  Steve Brown: Hi, everybody, welcome to the ROI Online Podcast where we believe you, the courageous entrepreneurs of our day, are the invisible heroes of our economy. You not only improve our world with your ideas, your grit and your passion, but you make our world better. I'm Steve Brown and this is a place where we have great conversations with winners just like you while we laugh and learn together.
• 1:16
  Steve Brown: Steve Legler, welcome to the ROI Online Podcast.
• 1:21
  Steve Legler: Steve Brown, thank you for having me. It's always good when there's more than one Steve.
• 1:26
  Steve Brown: Right? More Steve's more better.
• 1:30
  Steve Brown: You know, the folks that listen to this podcast, they're obviously it's just part of the deal, that they're wondering why they should invest in this episode. Here's something really struck me. I wasn't aware that 90% of the businesses in the US specifically are family owned.
• 1:47
  Steve Brown: And I didn't realize that there are about 5.5 million family owned businesses. And that's crazy when you think about the perception that most people have a business is like these big, giant, evil, faceless, greedy organizations, right? And the truth is, no, it's a bunch of families doing the best they can. And yet you deal with probably the thing that I would want to avoid the most is how do you transition ownership or leadership in an organization that's family ran? I mean like, Dad, come on, let put me in charge. Please no, Steve, we've known you since you were like a little kid, and this is what you. I can't imagine what it's like, Why in the world, would you choose to plant your flag in the middle of that chaos?
• 2:47
  Steve Legler: Steve, you've brought up so many points that I could riff off of. But yeah, I have chosen to plant my flag into what we call, some people call the family circle. So there's, there's this model of family business that came out of Harvard back in the 1980s, John Davis came up with the three circle model. And it's basically there's the business, there's the family, and there's the ownership, and they overlap, and some people are owners, and they work in the business, but not family, some people are family that you know. So there's seven different places in those three circles. And that's what makes everything interesting. And when I got into this gig of working with families, I actually decided consciously to plunge directly into the family side of things, in the family circle because I realized that it is the most important circle in many, especially when there's upcoming transitions from one generation to the next. And also, it's the most neglected side, like every business will have their lawyer their accountant and other people that are outside advisors to help them with that. And they don't often think that they want help or know where to find help on some of the more family stuff.
• 4:00
  Steve Legler: And so I've gotten into the whole coaching and mediating game on that score, because I grew up in a family business, so I have the lived experience, and that was a perfect connection from the early part of my career to this later part.
• 4:15
  Steve Brown: And you wrote the book on this.
• 4:18
  Steve Legler: Yeah, well, I did write a book called SHIFT Your Family Business back in 2014.
• 4:20
  Steve Legler: This was geared to people like my father, who was an entrepreneur who had started a business. Yeah, and also my father in law who had started a business, and I often find basically something you were just starting to hit that is like sometimes people say, Hey, Dad, you know, give the business to me or whatever, is that transitioning from the first generation to the second is really tough. And often that the wealth creator, the entrepreneur, the one who caught lightning in a bottle is very reluctant to want to leave. And so the shift your family business, the letters in the word, shift are actually an acronym for a process that I was laying out there. So the S stands for start, H stands for help, as in get help get a guide to come and help you. I is for invest, invest the time and some money in it. F is for flexible, you've got to remain flexible and not think you're going to put this plan together. And it's going to work exactly as planned. And T is for talk, it's actually could have been C for communicate. But shifc doesn't make a very nice word, and most of the important communication in families is talking so that's what it ended up being.
• 5:41
  Steve Brown: Well shift from the C would be more like German or one of those Nordic languages, right?
• 5:46
  Steve Legler: And believe me, I've had people say, What if you remove the F for flexible? What will you end up with? I'm big on the bathroom humor too, but not for the name of my book.
• 5:58
  Steve Brown: Well, me too, as the name of my book. So that's a universal way.
• 6:02
  Steve Legler: Exactly. I can you can put my book in your toilet and yeah.
• 6:10
  Steve Brown: Well, then, give us some backstory, because all right, you grew up in a family business. Was it that bad that you thought I gotta go and change the world?
• 6:19
  Steve Legler: No, oh, no. So my dad was an immigrant entrepreneur who had arrived in Canada in the early 50s. And about 10 years later decided to start his own business after working for somebody else, he became their biggest competitor.
• 6:35
  Steve Legler: So that was the early 60-63. I was born in 64, business was a year old. I have two older siblings, but they're both sisters. And this was a steel business, steel fabrication so it was a dirty business, it was the 1960s so I was immediately viewed as the heir apparent, my father finally had, you know, the person who's going to take over his business, and guess what his name was Steve? His name was Steve so I went through most of my life as Steve Jr. And so from my earliest memory, the expectation was clearly drawn out for me that you will come and work for me, and you will join the business. And so in high school every summer, and you know, right through to through college every summer, what did I study in, in college business, because, hey, well, I was basically told this is what you're gonna do. And it was like the path of least resistance for me. So I did that went to work for the company for three years, right after getting my bachelor's degree, and then it was time to go do my MBA so I went off to do my MBA and came back and an interesting thing happened on my first day back when I walked by my dad's office, and he said, Steven, come here, sit down, close the door. And I had no idea what was coming, and he said, you know, the last two years, you've been gone, the business has been going downhill, we've been losing markets here and there.
• 7:57
  Steve Legler: So we're probably going to have to close or sell or merge or do something. And I would like, Okay, look, if that's what you got to do, I've been planning to come back here, but it's certainly, my heart hasn't been set on it. And so long story short, six months later, we've gone from 250 employees down to four. And two of us were named Steve Legler. And I ended up as we might call it now managing a small family office. But nobody knew what a family office was in 1991, least of all me. And I mean, even today, most people don't know what it is but it's basically I was managing the affairs that the family owned, because we still had some real estate, we had some patented products that were licensed that we had some money from the sale of the operations to invest. And so that became my job, totally unexpected, and not what I was, you know, what I really wanted to do, but there was too much to walk away from and not enough to get excited about.
• 9:00
  Steve Brown: You know, the typical image of the son who's going to take over or the family who's going to take over is like they don't deserve it. They haven't worked hard, they're not bought in I think of Caddyshack movie where the lazy son I forget what I don't know if it's Danny Boy or I'm trying to remember his name, but that's usually the image of who's going to take over and often there's some version of that going on where the the energy and the original drive doesn't exist.
• 9:34
  Steve Brown: But yet the father or maybe the starting one, like you said that had the lightning in a bottle, they feel somewhat obligated to pass it down, even though that maybe the horsepower doesn't exist in the next heir.
• 9:51
  Steve Legler: Exactly. And in fact, for me, it was probably a blessing in disguise because I really didn't have the entrepreneurial spirit that my father had. And, you know, he had, by that time, he had already sort of moved himself up to like Chairman and CEO, and then hired a professional president, because I was coming back and I was 27. Even if the business had stayed really viable on its own, he had already hired someone to be the president, my role was to shadow him and be the Assistant to the President for a few years, until I was old enough to take over.
• 10:26
  Steve Legler: But, you know, many families don't have that all figured out that way, right. And so just helping them, what I do now is I help families look at that whole process on a much longer term basis than they probably are. So a proper transition from one generation to the next should be like a minimum of five years, if not 10 years in the planning, but often families don't get out front of it soon enough or early enough. And then they end up doing a transition in a crisis when someone has a health event, or someone gets divorced, and now there's new ownership structures and new things come into play. So I always try to help people get a longer term perspective on things and be objective and sort of look at it and plan it on a longer term basis to make sure you get and you alluded to it earlier, you talked about transitioning the leadership and the ownership, and those are two different things. And they don't always happen at the same time. And that's another thing people don't always realize.
• 11:33
  Steve Brown: Wow, you know, so many hurdles that businesses face just to stay in business.
• 11:37
  Steve Brown: And then you add this additional layer of complexity on top of it. There's a lot of things against a business, and then they have the family component on top of that, seems like a big minefield that you have to navigate. So help us envision what would like the, first of all, who is it that finally says calf rope? That's a Texas term, okay? Finally says, Hey, we really need to address this, we've been avoiding it for a long time, you know, the elephant in the room, so we need to address it. Who is it? Is it the mom? Is it the kids? Is it the dad, who is it that usually brings it up?
• 12:24
  Steve Legler: It can be anyone.
• 12:24
  Steve Legler: I like the fact that your first one was the mom, because I still remember one of my first meetings with my first major client, it was supposed to be with the mom and the dad and the accountant. And I showed up and the dad didn't show up, because he had to put out a fire at work or whatever. So there I am with the mother and their trusted advisor. And, and the mother says, I've been thinking about this for 10 years, and I've been talking to my husband about it for five years. And now we're finally doing something. And so often the mother will have that CEO role as a chief emotional officer. And this was a particular case where the mother had seen how having this business in their family had adversely affected her husband's relationship with his siblings.
• 13:19
  Steve Legler: And she had basically said, damn if I'm going to let that happen and let this business screw up my kids and their relationship amongst themselves. And so they got out in front of it, and hired someone, me, to work with their sibling groups. So here was two brothers, two sisters, in their late 20s, early 30s.
• 13:39
  Steve Legler: And I just worked for them for four years, helping them to learn to work together, because that's what it is like, people don't think, they think of the business itself, and how the business will survive. And I always try to gear them towards, well, don't forget the family along the way. And so this particular business had three of the four kids worked in the business and one didn't and so you have that one outsider. And there's this whole imbalance, an information asymmetry, I call it and you've got to work on that you can't have somebody feeling left out. So we worked on, I coached them and facilitated with them, that they took for them to learn to work together as a team because as I explained it to them, Look, fast forward a few decades, your parents are no longer in the picture, who's looking after this? It's not him or her, it's all of you. And if you only start to work together after a funeral or after something happens, you're not going to be able to figure out how to work together as a team and learn who can play what role well and how to relate to each other to keep this whole big train on the track because there are a lot of obstacles. And you really don't want the family relationships to become the obstacle that derails the train.
• 15:04
  Steve Brown: So seems not only that, here's the hurdle that I imagine that you encounter is that you're not only need to understand business succession, but you have to be a therapist in some way because I imagine there's a lot of times where you're being lobbied for some sort of influence on, you know, somewhat one of the siblings wanting to get you to sign off on them. And they're missing the point of the bigger conversation. How do you avoid that? How do you resolve that?
• 15:44
  Steve Legler: It's, it's not easy, and the first step is, you need to figure out who the client is. And for me, the default is, my client is the family. It's not Dad, it's not the person who first contacted me, it's the whole family. And it's not, I mean, it's easy to say, it's not always as easy to do, right? But I need to come in there and have everyone like me and trust me enough, and respect me enough that I can deal with them, and it's could be theoretically really easy for me to screw that up. And if I screw it up with one person, I've screwed up the whole thing. Like I've I've put too much salt in the soup that you can't take out after as soon as I do that. So I'm very, very conscious of it.
• 16:33
  Steve Legler: I have a network of people that I know that do similar things that I've met through an organization called the family firm Institute. And we have like an online study group where we compare notes and talk about this kind of stuff. But when you say that, you know, you almost have to be like a therapist. And it's true. And there are people who work in this field as well who do have on their business card, Dr. So and So PhD, I don't consider them necessarily my competition, because I like to hope that only the families that have really gotten into the deep end will be calling them. But it's interesting that a lot of the things I deal with are more of the personal nature, and that's why I did the one of the first things I did when I decided to go down this road was to start taking coaching courses, and getting a coaching certification, to learn how to listen to learn how to facilitate, to learn how to play that interpersonal role. And like I said, you know, there is the business circle, which for the first, you know, four decades of my life, I thought the business circle was the only circle and certainly the most important circle. And it was only later on that I realized that it's the family circle, where the interesting stuff takes place.
• 17:57
  Steve Brown: Hey, I wanted to pause right here and tell you about a book that you need to get today. It's the funniest book on marketing. It's called The Golden Toilet, stop flushing your marketing budget into your website and build a system that grows your business. And guess who wrote it? That's right, I wrote it, and I wrote it just for you because I want to help you get past the last hurdles of setting up your business and getting it squared away. I wrote it so that you can avoid time wasting time wasting money, wasting frustration, get the book on Audible, you can get it on Kindle, you can get it on Amazon, but get the book take advantage of the insights in there and let me know what you think. And now back to this excellent episode.
• 18:49
  Steve Brown: So you know when you're navigating, so a lot of folks, you're not the only one that navigates very dangerous waters.
• 18:58
  Steve Brown: I mean, being in your positions, almost like being a an executive director of a nonprofit, you could be fired. And you know, the decision makers change often or maybe flow and you'd be fired on him on a whim of someone who wasn't in the conversation at the beginning came along later, didn't understand where you going and is not clued in. But I think one of the things that enlightened about the way that you're approaching this is you have a framework that you've identified and codified called SHIFT. So I think that affords you or brings you authority, and brings you respect that shows that you have a process and it takes you a lot of just you and what your whims are that date added the conversation when you're focusing on a process with steps.
• 19:54
  Steve Legler: You know, you're bringing up an interesting thing about that, what I call the difference between art and science, two different extremes of one continuum of what this work is, and I almost prefer to think of myself more as an artist of that I do this very intuitively and I flying by the seat of my pants, and I'm not sure I could train someone to do it. But the difficulty with that is, you know, it's very hard to define what the deliverable is, when I meet with a family like my deliverable is that on Christmas day, when Uncle Bob pulls up to grandpa's house, if he sees aunt Sue's car in the driveway and says, You know what, let's come back a bit later because I don't want to, you know, that's what I'm trying to deliver family harmony. Now, how do you put a deliverable on that? That's the difficult part.
• 20:48
  Steve Legler: And there are more and more now structured ways that people are coming up with to sort of say, this is what you need to do. But it can be a little bit dangerous there, there's a whole area of what people call a family constitution. That sounds like a really sexy thing for a multi generation family to have. And so some consulting firms have decided that, you know what, if family businesses want a constitution we'll sell them a family constitution. And they'll hire people to write up this big document. And they do it and they have the consultants and the professionals do it. And the family has very little input.
• 21:30
  Steve Legler: And you can guess what the value of that document to the family will be afterwards, if they've had no input into it. It's zero or less, right? It's like, Yeah, but I never signed that bs that piece of paper, right? So yes, family constitution makes sense for a family that's been in business for a few generations.
• 21:50
  Steve Legler: And they need to sort of, you know, codify all their guidelines of how they've agreed to work together. But any family who says, Oh, let's start with a constitution, oh, my god, no, I just wrote a blog recently that talked about a family's declaration of interdependence.
• 22:10
  Steve Legler: So the family needs to come together and declare that they are interdependent, and that they want to work together. And then what was, how many years between the declaration of independence in the US 1776, the Constitution wasn't till more than 10 years later. So yeah, you can have a constitution. But that's not where you start, you start with figuring out how you're going to work together, and start to figure out your family governance, which is a kind of an ugly word that people don't like the word governance, I've learned to start to like it. But I've kind of defined it in ways that are easier to grasp about how you make decisions together and how you communicate together.
• 22:50
  Steve Brown: Yeah, I think that constitution would be important, but it's my overarching theme in my book is, it's not one silver bullet, it's not one tactic, that's going to resolve a very complicated issue. But there's a lot of risk if you don't get this right. And it's more of a comprehensive system. And so that's why I was attracted to that you had a process that you can go step by step, and come up with a more healthy, comprehensive resolution for a very complicated issue.
• 23:23
  Steve Legler: And every family is going to do it differently.
• 23:26
  Steve Legler: And what I also try to reinforce is that this should evolve very slowly. It should be co created by the family members who are affected by it. It's iterative, you have to keep going and come back and have a meeting, figure out what you've done, what you want to do next, come back three months later, have another meeting, talk about what happened. Things change, people need time to absorb and digest different changes, people have to learn how to react to each other. And as I was talking about earlier, having siblings working together on things where they're forced to work together to organize things, and then they learn which siblings they can count on to respond quickly, which ones are always going to need a reminder. But all these things are very important for them to learn to do so that they learn how to behave as an interdependent group of people.
• 24:21
  Steve Brown: So that's an excellent segue to introduce your other book Interdependent Wealth, and I would imagine that the genesis of this book came from your insights after applying your your insights from your first book, no?
• 24:41
  Steve Legler: Yes, and the biggest thing, that the Interdependent Wealth book, so it's got a long secondary title.
• 24:50
  Steve Legler: It's How Family Systems Theory Illuminates Successful Intergenerational Wealth Transitions. So that's a mouthful, well the key is family systems theory. So when I first got into this area, I kept hearing about how there's something called Bowen Family Systems Theory started by Dr.
• 25:14
  Steve Legler: Murray Bowen back in the 50s in the US, and I kept on stumbling across little things that said, you know, if you're working with families that are in business together, it's really good to know this Bowen Family Systems Theory stuff. So I said, Okay, let me hop on Google and just start, I want to find a book that's going to explain to me what it is about this Bowen family systems theory, that's so interesting are so important for people working with business.
• 25:40
  Steve Legler: Well, guess what, I did not find a book that did that. There were books about Bowen Family Systems Theory, but there wasn't anything that was to answer my question. So I decided to learn about it enough and then four years later, I wrote the book that I had been looking for. And so what I discovered with the Bowen Family Systems Theory, the people who live in the Bowen Family Systems Theory world that I was exposed to through my Bowen training, I would say more than half of them are therapists, so they are social workers or other kind of masters in social work, and or clinical psychologists that use Bowen Theory, then there's another group, that's maybe 30%, from my just guesstimate that our clergy people, okay, so so I was training at the Bowen Center at Georgetown, and I was sitting in a group where everyone was part of a church either as some kind of Rabbi or Minister or something else. And I was sitting there thinking, you know, my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, who lived with us, when I was a kid, she used to tell me, you should become a priest, you should become a priest and I would just laugh at her. And here, I was, like, 40 years later, and I'm sitting there, and I was the only one who wasn't from a church. I fit right in with these people. But so anyway, the number of people in the Bowen world who are actually have the overlap with the family business space is actually maybe five or 10%. And so what I realized was I'm in this minority place. But having learned about family systems theory really helps me when I sit with a family, and I have to be that independent outside person who's not part of their family system, I'm coming in and observing their family system. And I don't want to change. But as soon as I'm there, I'm modifying the system in a certain way, even though I'm trying to stay on the outside. And I have to be very conscious to stay on the outside and observe it. But it allows me to look at the relationships between the people and that I wrote the book for other people who do this kind of work to sort of help them understand some of the things I've learned from this systems theory. And so that they could have a basic education and maybe it's enough or maybe they you know, what their beacon said, Hey, you know what, I want to learn more about this, and then they can go and find a training program to learn some of it themselves.
• 28:15
  Steve Brown: So what are some statistics? How many families actually take advantage of this type of planning in transition or transition planning? It seems like it'd be an extremely competitive advantage.
• 28:30
  Steve Legler: You know, you're good. I like that question because I actually, usually hate questions where people ask me what are the statistics? But Craig Aronoff is a man who founded one of, he was one of the founders of The Family Business Consulting Group, which has been around for 25 or 30 years. And it's like the top Bain family business consulting group, although I know people that work in a lot of the other top ones as well. But he was giving a presentation once and he mentioned that his estimate was between two and 4% of family businesses hire a consultant.
• 29:10
  Steve Legler: And he said, he looked at, I really liked the way he said it, he looked at it as someone as the ones who would hire a private teacher. It's like, if you want to learn to play a musical instrument, you can just go to YouTube and find some lessons or you can buy a book to learn certain things. But for having private lessons, now you're engaging, you're going to another level. And so he was saying only two to 4% so that's one out of every 50 or one out of every 25. Now most are too small, right? Every the mom and pop shop is a family business.
• 29:46
  Steve Legler: And I have that problem too, right? People say well, who can afford to hire someone just to come and look after their family stuff? And you know A family that has a business that's doing a million dollars a year. I don't think I fit in their budget, you know, add another zero starting to get there. Add another zero, yes, of course, you really should be thinking about at certain stages in your family's lifecycle. It really makes sense to bring someone in, who's going to be objective and help guide you through all the important parts of this transition.
• 30:25
  Steve Brown: Yeah, it's more than just the family, the clerical thing, you need to have an understanding of actual business you need to actually have been in, there's a lot of insights that you can't, it seems like one of the dilemmas would be for the one that was convinced they need to implement some sort of transition plan was, who do I pick? Because if I pick a dud, that's going to be a waste of time and money?
• 30:51
  Steve Legler: Yes. And so we were talking before about people who have like a psychology degree. Okay, great. But you know, I've been to, there's another organization I'm a part of called The Purposeful Planning Institute. And I was at one of, the first time I went to one of their meetings, and we were doing an icebreaker thing around the table. And it was that question where, like, if you had a magic wand, what would you fix? And this woman who was a psychologist said, If I could wave the magic wand, all psychologists would be financially literate. And I was like, Wow, what? And then I realized, you know what, some of the people with whom I'm competing for a seat at that family table, don't really know the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars.
• 31:38
  Steve Legler: And you know, there's a big difference. And it's not just the three zeros, it's in what, and so someone who does not have that ability and shows up at the table, will not be able to get the respect of the people around the table. And so I talked about my willingness and my desire to work in the family circle.
• 31:58
  Steve Legler: Luckily, for me, I have some credentials on my business card, that allow me to go through the business door to get to the family. So I have an MBA, I have a CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst), so I can talk to the person who may not want someone to deal with their family, but I can earn their trust by being able to talk business with them, and then work my way into the family system issues later on.
• 32:25
  Steve Brown: That knowing or needing to know have a financial acumen, I think it's so undervalued and missing in most of these business coaches that you see packaged everywhere on LinkedIn, it's something that even I'm in sick, I run a business, right? For years and it's an area that I wouldn't ever present myself as someone that's an expert in financial stuff, but let me tell you, if you miss leave that component out in the planning and what you're doing the year, you're really, you're setting a trap that you're going to step in later.
• 33:08
  Steve Legler: But the other thing is, I always like to say that if someone had met my dad at the time, when we were planning a transition before we sold out, and if they had said, Oh, I got this perfect person you should talk to to work with your family. And they say, here's this card is so and so Dr. So and So PhD, you know, my dad would have said, EFF you, we're not crazy, we don't need a shrink. And I think a lot of people would would feel that way.
• 33:39
  Steve Brown: Yeah. So what's it look like, engaging with you, Steve?
• 33:45
  Steve Legler: It's uh, so the the lead time is very long. And that makes sense. And I don't start running a meter, I usually spend, I usually like to say, let's have a quick call, just to get to know each other, then we'll take like an hour to go a little bit deeper. And then like, I have one where I just had a half hour zoom call with each of the four kids. And we have not engaged we haven't talked money, we it's like, let's make sure that you're the right person for us. And then once we figure that out, then it's let's figure out what we can do in a year. And how many meetings that would be and how many zoom calls and then we figure out a quarterly retainer and get to work but that only, that talk about how much and how long only comes after at least two or three calls to make sure that they understand who I am and I understand who they are, and that we are meant to work together. Because I've had clients where they say oh, we need someone to referee our family meetings. And I was like, Oh my god, that that didn't last that long. I mean, I did Help them a bit, but it just, you know, I'd rather, and there are people who do that there are mediators who are specialists in, I prefer not to deal with them when they're already toxic.
• 35:10
  Steve Legler: I've had one that came to me a little while ago. And when I realized I had to refer this guy, tell him to find a lawyer, because he was about to get screwed by his brother and his father. I also realized not only am I handing this guy to a lawyer, I'm, I'm checking out because at this point, I want to help families who want to work together, get through that and work together. If they're already past the point, then there's other people who can deal with them better than me.
• 35:40
  Steve Brown: So I'm, you know, I get asked a bunch, Steve, what kind of, what do you guys specialize in? And it's like they're expecting the answer to be, we specialize in attorneys or age management practices, or whatever. But what I realized was we specialize in progressive minded leaders that have realized they need to take action on this. So they're already convinced. They're already doing research. They're already investigating and reading. And they're like, a beautiful fit for what we have, because they can appreciate and apply their insights faster. And I would imagine it's similar in your case.
• 36:19
  Steve Legler: Well, so yes, somebody in the family has to come to the realization that, hey, there's a lot at stake, we need to do something about this.
• 36:28
  Steve Legler: And on our own, we're not going to get there. And so that those are the people who are searching, and that could be mom, like we said, it could be dad, sometimes it is. A lot of times, I got an inquiry two weeks ago from the guy said, I'm the son and me and my sister, and I talk with my sister about this but my parents don't want to talk about it. Right? And so I've got a call with them next week to see how, so sometimes it comes from the younger people, which is sometimes encouraging and sometimes discouraging, right? Who makes the first call is less important than after both generations are brought together, do they both see the logic and have some willingness to commit to going forward?
• 37:23
  Steve Legler: Because if they still don't see it then that's a bigger obstacle. But sometimes, the parents might have just been waiting. Right? Like it's a waiting game, the parents don't want to bring it up, because they don't want to set too much of an expectation. The kids don't want to bring it up because they don't want their parents to feel like they're trying to push them out. And so even just asking questions, sometimes is discouraged. And so they sometimes reach out to someone to help them have those conversations, because, you know, we were talking earlier about the statistics of family business survival are really not great. And that's because there are a lot of obstacles, and most families left to themselves only, will not be able to have the kinds of conversations that they ultimately need to have.
• 38:14
  Steve Legler: And so the more that's at stake, because the wealth has grown, and the business has grown, the more complex it is with the number of people and then in laws and their kids and who's expecting what the more complex it is. And the bigger it is, the more I really think you should at least start looking for someone to help you.
• 38:34
  Steve Brown: Excellent. So you have two books. Tell us about your books, your website where people can find you stumble into, you actually initiate maybe a conversation.
• 38:46
  Steve Legler: So I like to say that I have a really good name, Steve legler. It's short. It's not complicated. It's not that hard to spell L E G L E R, but it's not common. So if you just Google me, Steve Legler, I should show up and if you put anything about family business, I'll definitely show up. So the name of my website is shiftyourfamilybusiness.com because that was the name of my first book. So you can find me there. You can find me on LinkedIn, and I accept 99% of my LinkedIn invitations, because there are some that just look too spammy, but most people could, but I don't you know, it's tough for me, right?
• 39:27
  Steve Legler: Somebody hits me up on LinkedIn and they're like, they're remember, they're in the army, like, it doesn't feel like it fits but maybe dad owns a business. So I'll usually say yes, because I don't know. And so LinkedIn, I post a lot on LinkedIn, because I read a week weekly blog, my website, if you're, my website has probably 400 blogs on it now because I've been writing once a week for seven, eight years. I've got videos on there. There's other podcasts I've done. There's all kinds kinds of information. And I know that I'm not the perfect fit for everybody. But I know there's other people out there that don't know me yet for whom I would be a really good fit.
• 40:09
  Steve Legler: And so if you're out there, and you think that's a possibility after having heard this hit me up, but let's start talking.
• 40:17
  Steve Brown: And his books are, SHIFT Your Family Business, startup, you go with this subtitle there, Steve.
• 40:25
  Steve Legler: Oh, yeah. So this, so SHIFT Your Family Business, stop working in your family business, start working on your business family. So that's the two part thing there's the working in and working on that everybody knows about. But then there's the other one is, Are you a family business? Is the business the most important thing? Or are you a business family? And I think that often, as I was saying earlier, that the entrepreneur who starts the business, that business becomes like their favorite child, and they're more concerned about the business and not enough about the family. And so the mental shift that I'm asking these people to take is, okay, stop worrying about making the pie bigger, and start figuring out how this pie is going to get, you know, run by your kids.
• 41:13
  Steve Brown: Awesome. Steve, I'm jealous, your name is Steve, is a great name. I can relate, but your last name is uncommon, mine is common. So I have to like, you know, I'm Steve Brown. And I have to put ROI Online after it so that I can be found.
• 41:31
  Steve Legler: Yeah. Cuz when I when I looked at my calendar, and I saw, oh, I googled Steve Brown podcast, and there's some religious guy that's a years old that said. So I thought. I am talking to that guy? And I was relieved that it was that it was the ROI Online guy.
• 41:50
  Steve Brown: Yeah, me too.
• 41:50
  Steve Brown: Although Steve Brown has got some books out there, too. So yeah, great conversation. You've been an excellent guest Steve, thanks for being on the ROI Online Podcast.
• 42:03
  Steve Legler: Thank you, Steve.
• 42:05
  Steve Brown: That's a wrap.
• 42:05
  Steve Brown: Thanks for listening to another fun episode of the ROI Online Podcast. For more, be sure to check out the show notes of this episode, and feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn where we can chat, and I can help direct you to the resources you're searching for. To learn more about how you can grow your business better be sure to pick up your copy of my book, The Golden Toilet at surprise, thegoldentoilet.com I'm Steve Brown, and we'll see you next week on another fun episode of the ROI Online Podcast.