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My Experience Joining the Family Company · The Twenty One Clear Podcast

0:06
Adam Hatcher: Hey there.
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Welcome to the 21 Clear Podcast where we talk about anything to
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help you chaos proof your inner family business so you can build a
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great company with a strong family.
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I am your host, Adam Hatcher, and I founded 21 Clear after a successful
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career scaling my family's company to work with other families who want
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to get their company somewhere and.
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Keep their family together.
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Today we are gonna build on the last three episodes of the podcast.
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In episode four, I outlined the chaos proof framework.
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This is the idea that we organize this podcast and all of our
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different resources around.
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And that includes the book that I'm publishing next year,
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the Chaos Proof Framework.
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What do you work on as a family to help you manage the tension that
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is inevitable when family works in and owns a company together?
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In episodes five and six, we explored one part of the chaos proof framework,
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and that is how do you hire family members well or not hire them?
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What are some processes, exercises, and rules or guidance around hiring?
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Well, what we didn't really talk about across those three episodes is when you
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join the family company, what is it like?
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Sometimes it's helpful just to hear someone else's perspective so we can
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help shape your experience or the experience you create for your family.
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You might be considering joining your family company.
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You may be considering hiring another family member soon, or it might be on
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the horizon, or you may have started in the family company recently or
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in the last year or two, and you're trying to figure out what is it
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exactly that you're experiencing.
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I was recently a guest with Andrea Carpenter on her podcast Next Gen Friend.
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Andrea is the president of Transition Strategists, and they specialize in
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working with family companies who are leaning into transition and transitioning
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the company, whatever that may be.
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One thing I like about Andrea's approach is that she specifically focuses
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on the next, the rising generation.
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What are their experiences?
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And helping them ask the question, how do I want to interact with this business?
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Do I want to be in it around it adjacent to it?
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And then how do I go about that?
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Andrea and I.
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Did two podcasts together and had a wide ranging conversation.
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I have the link to that conversation in the show notes and in our
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conversation there was a part of it that dovetailed nicely with
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these last three episodes, Andrea.
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Asked me about my own experience joining my family company.
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We're gonna pick up in the interview.
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She and I have talked about the idea of hiring family well, having family
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hiring criteria, something we talked about here in episodes five and six.
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You'll hear a little bit of that in our conversation, but I wanna jump right
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in to where she asked me about my own experience joining the family company.
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We're gonna take an excerpt from the podcast.
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I hope you enjoy it.
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And with that, here is Andrea and me.
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Obviously there was ultimately this general counsel position.
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You decided that that was a good fit, you met the qualifications and um, felt ready
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to come in, and then what did it feel like once you kind of landed into the business?
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What was that?
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Growth, like what was the relationship like with your dad and your grandpa?
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You said you worked with him for a couple years, so walk us through
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like that first two, three years inside of the family business.
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Let me go back and answer the question I accidentally skipped.
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'cause it comes into that.
4:30
Mm-hmm.
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How, how old am I?
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So 2000, I joined in 2010, so I'm 29 years old, so I would've
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gotten the letter at about 25.
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So it was around four years when I got the letter, four or five years.
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When I got the letter in school, worked for three years outta
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school and then ended up joining.
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The step I skipped over was after I told my father no, what changed?
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I, I went and I don't remember why.
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I don't remember if it was his suggestion or I thought to do
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it or if it was a discussion.
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I don't remember why.
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I went and had lunch with three other family business members, people
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that were working with their family.
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They were third or fourth gens.
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They had about a 15 year age range between them and their
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tenure in their family companies.
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They were all at least 10.
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One was.
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At the time, over 20 years, these were not people that had
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just started in their families.
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And so I went to and had a long lunch one-on-one with all three
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of 'em over a period of time.
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And if I were to roll up the advice that they gave me, it
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would synthesize this way.
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Adam, you are 29 years old.
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You're not 50.
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Your son is six months old.
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Your wife has a job, you have a law degree and have proven that you can practice law.
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There is an opportunity to join the family company and it is not chief
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waiting for dad to retire officer.
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It is a real job that requires a professional certification
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that you hold and have shown you are capable of performing.
6:28
Mm-hmm.
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You don't know what it's going to be like.
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You might've interned there a couple years.
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You might've been around these people for a long time, but you don't know what
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they're gonna be like when you get there.
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You don't know what they're like to work with.
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There's a lot you, I would tell anyone that there's a lot good
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and hard that you don't know about your family until you step into the
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company with 'em for a little while.
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Hmm.
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Go through a recession together.
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Go through growth together.
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Go through a lean year.
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A major capital allocation, you'll learn new things about each other.
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I said, you don't know what it's gonna be like, but at 29 you're
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stepping into an actual job.
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Two years later, if you don't like it, you're only 31.
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Mm-hmm.
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And you find a successor and you leave.
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And the story is, I never thought I was gonna work in the family company truth.
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They called me.
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There was a need I was uniquely capable of filling.
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I stood the legal office up.
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It wasn't the right thing for me.
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I found a really good person, backfilled myself and left
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him better than I found him.
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Hmm.
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I said, that's a good story.
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And your son's only two by that time, two or three years old.
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Mm-hmm.
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If you don't do it, you will always regret that you didn't try,
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and if you wait till you're 50, it has to work.
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Yep.
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At 29 or 30, it doesn't have to work.
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Mm-hmm.
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And that combination or synthesized advice led to my dad and I.
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We took an, we went away for one or two nights together, had a couple of dinners,
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a couple of conversations, and decided that we would take the chance together and
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that I would start as the general counsel.
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One thing I didn't realize about the five part hiring criteria
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he gave me, and I don't remember when he explained this to me.
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Hmm, but why did he require graduating from college, graduate school
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work experience somewhere else?
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None of that is unique, by the way, in family companies.
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I've seen lots of companies that do that.
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Writing.
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It's a different thing, but lots that do that.
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And why did he require getting promoted?
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He told me either before he, he hired me or sometime in my time there, he
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said, Adam, the only person who ever promoted me was my dad, or because
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I purchased something from him.
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I graduated from the University of Georgia on a Friday.
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I went to work for my.
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Father with my brother on a Monday, and that's the only person who ever
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moved me up in the professional world.
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He told me, son, I want you to know you have value and skill outside of
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my eyes worth, outside of what your dad thinks, and that you have value
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and options outside of this company
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looking back.
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That made joining easier and more independent and freer, and I could
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have never put words on it back then.
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Mm-hmm.
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Mm.
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I there's a lot of, a lot of freedom in that and a lot of wisdom.
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And I'm also wondering, like a lot of that comes from his second generation.
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Experience having actually lived it.
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I don't know if he would've been able to craft that type of
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scenario or those reasons for the exact example that you gave.
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Right.
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Of him.
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Not only ever being promoted or only ever working inside of the family
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business, you don't have to come from a great story to create a better story.
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I was just reading, there's a Swiss chocolate f.
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Company later act.
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They're a third gen family company.
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The succession story is so good.
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Hmm.
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It was 2021.
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The second generation
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leader finally steps away, turns it over to his three sons after
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a three year transition period.
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You go back, that's 20, 21.
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You go back to.
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2006, he hires a managing director of the family company and says, your job
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is to increase the brand until the third generation's ready to take over.
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Then all three of the sons go to university and they have different
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experiences, and then they rotate through the company and then he
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turns it over and the board is now non-family with some family and
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the executives or non-family with.
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Some, and it's just, it's the kind of thing you look at and it's kind
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of intimidating as a family company.
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Like, wow, that's great.
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Well, you wanna know where he started?
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His name's, uh, rg, JURG, uh, RG the sec, the second generation.
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He is a missionary in India with his three young children.
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His father calls him this, this, this is not a family action meeting.
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If dad calls him out of nowhere and says in 1994 and says the company.
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Is going to fail.
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Um, I would like you if you would come back to help, try to
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save it, but you don't have to.
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I know you're in India and you're a missionary and I'm,
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you know, I respect you.
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Um, that's how he started and then he did something much different.
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Yeah.
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And my father, likewise, Friday to Monday, did something fundamentally different.
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Yeah, for me.
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Yeah.
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So it doesn't matter what the previous generation has done, you
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can build on the platform, you, you can steal the good things they did
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and then build on top of the chaos.
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Mm-hmm.
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And I think I hear this a lot.
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So let's, like, let's shift a little bit into like actually working in
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the business and actually scaling it.
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'cause there's that tension of being a rising gen and you start to get more
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responsibility and you're stepping more into leadership and it's like.
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Do I actually have authority to do this?
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The, the people who did this before are still around, they're still leaders.
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Like did you have any of that tension and what did that, what
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did that look like for you?
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How did you navigate that?
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No, we didn't have any tension at all.
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I don't know who does that.
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Probably just the weak ones, right.
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I wish.
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Oh, wait, so I, I'm sorry.
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It was a joke.
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It was a joke, everyone.
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Oh, that's right.
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Not everybody can see my, that's right.
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If you're watching this on YouTube, you saw my eyes.
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No, I didn't have words for this until about 12 months ago.
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Somebody said.
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Y you know why family businesses are hard, why working with family
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and a company that you own is hard?
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Oh, I don't know.
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Tell me.
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I did it for 13 years that, because what you've done is you have mixed
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the unconditional nature of family with the very conditional nature
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of a for-profit corporation.
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And I thought about that and went, huh, okay, so think about your wedding photo.
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I think about mine, there's a spot in my wedding photo that is
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unconditionally for my father-in-law.
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And it doesn't matter what happens in our relationship.
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We have a great relationship, but even if we didn't, if it were
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strained, if it were broken, mm-hmm.
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It doesn't change that.
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That spot in that picture is unconditionally for my father-in-law.
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Even if he's not in it, like there's always a spot for it.
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Mm-hmm.
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That's the unconditional nature of family.
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It's set at birth, it's developed in family systems, but business
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is not like that at all.
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I don't think business is the other side of the coin.
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It is diametrically opposed and intention.
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It is conditioned on competitive advantage, market forces,
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tariffs, leadership capabilities.
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The marketplace will decide conditionally about the company.
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And when you work with your family, you take these two
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things and mix them together.
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The unconditional nature with the conditional nature of the business.
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Why did my grandmother walk out on my grandfather?
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She was not qualified to be a receptionist.
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It had been over 20 years since she had taken shorthand, which
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was a way people took down.
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Dictation back then to then turn it into a letter.
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She did not tell him that she had forgotten how to do it.
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He dictated a letter to her, he left for lunch, came back, she put,
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it was pretty much gibberish on his desk and then he having very
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little tact as a professional said.
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Marian, what were you thinking?
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The response back?
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Uh, would make most HR professionals blush.
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And then she finished it by saying, and Bill, I quit.
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Okay.
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What happened there?
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I mean, it's funny we've told that story.
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He loved her till death did them part.
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Mm-hmm.
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And the company is at 52 years now.
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It's funny, but what happened there?
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They brought their unconditional marriage in and put no formality
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in rules around how they work together, how they resolve conflict.
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How they talked to each other, what the qualifications for
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their jobs were or their roles.
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And then when an inflection point came, there's tension there all
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the time, and without any sort of governance rules around it.
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It blew up into chaos.
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And my grandma walked out.
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Mm-hmm.
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Yeah.
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And that's not a, somebody asked me, they said, when, when I started 21, clear to
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work with families who wanna get their company somewhere and stay together.
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'cause that's what my experience was with my family.
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Are you, do you do succession?
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I said, well, I mean, that's part of it, but that's only
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one part of the life lifecycle.
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In fact, a succession event's only gonna happen.
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Ever two or three times for a family company, most of them
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will never get to the fourth, and a lot of times that's okay.
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If you wait till succession, you might never get there because
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that tension, just like with my grandparents, exists on the first day.
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Mm-hmm.
17:02
Yeah.
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And so the, like as you moved up in your role and you start helping scale the
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company, did you ever feel that that tension moment of like, my ideas or what
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I'm bringing, like feels a little bit bigger or they're not moving fast enough?
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How do you balance some of, some of those things in, in the business?
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Mm.
17:27
I'll tell you a moment.
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Let me, let me think.
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I'll tell you a moment that was difficult and one that was great.
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Okay.
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My belief is when you work with your family in a company, and that's my
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perspective, 'cause that's what I did.
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I was a NextGen who chose to work in the company.
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We have not formally established a family office.
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It's not.
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There is asset, there are assets in real estate to manage, but that's not
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where the majority of the energy was.
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The energy of the family and the family employees was in the growing of the
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core staffing and recruiting business.
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Mm-hmm.
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I remember once working with my father to help.
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As the head of corporate strategy create a tighter strategic calendar
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to run the company on, uh, calendar based on the budget cycle and general
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client demands nowadays trying to help our strategy meetings and thus the
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board meetings, the family meetings.
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All aligned with creating priorities for the next year.
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Worked with a consultant.
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Came up with a really great proposal.
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My dad and I figured it out together, and I forgot to go bounce it
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one-on-one off of my other non-family executive peers before the meeting.
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Hmm.
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So instead we present it to him in executive meeting.
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Well, we had acquired a different business line by then that ran
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on a totally different schedule.
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Not a completely different, but different enough, and had their own
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schedule and had been very successful.
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Several other executives with far more tenure than me who were caught
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off guard by this presentation, a new calendar they had to follow.
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And so they all pushed back, which is pretty normal.
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Mm-hmm.
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And it ended up getting pushed to the side for.
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Further discussion and debate, and I think for most executives that's pretty normal.
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You think you have something, maybe you even had a deal with the CEO.
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You get in there and it goes different than you thought
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and you just check and adjust.
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Mm-hmm.
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Well, in a family.
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It feels like, come on Dan.
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We had this, what?
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What was that?
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I thought you had my back.
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Mm-hmm.
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We both know this is the right thing.
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What happened?
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Like that's not something.
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That is as pers like there's, it's just not as personal.
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I've had a lot of bosses that weren't my dad.
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Mm-hmm.
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You might get miffed or annoyed, but there's not that personal.
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Ooh, do we, do we have each other's back here?
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What are we doing?
20:00
Mm-hmm.
20:01
That's one of the, that mixing of conditional and unconditional.
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Yeah.
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That's one of the hard moments.
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I'll tell you one of the good ones.
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The company was around.
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We were probably around 200 employees, still a regional company.
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I was new into human resources, so at that time I had corporate strategy,
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hr, and, I'm sorry, corporate strategy, legal, and then added human resources.
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And in my annual review, 'cause my father and I did all the normal rhythms
20:36
of the company, one-on-one meetings and reviews, we got to the question.
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Do you have what you need to do your best work?
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And I said, no.
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I said, take that moment in.
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Both the executive in those three combined roles has said, I don't have what I need
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to do, and your son has just said, I don't have what I need to do my best work.
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He said, well, what do you mean?
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Trying to think?
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What have I not given you?
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And I think this is a question
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a family member.
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In my position would've been quicker to ask than a non-family member.
21:14
I'm not certain.
21:16
Hmm.
21:16
But what next gens can do when it's going really well, I said, are you and MaryLee?
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'cause we used first names at work.
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So my mother is MaryLee Are you and MaryLee happy?
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He said, what do you mean?
21:28
Are you and MaryLee happy at the company?
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Was about 200, 200 million.
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Are you and Mary-Lee happy at 200 top line?
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I said, well, why do you ask?
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For the three roles I'm in.
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If you're content here with, again, incremental growth year over year, but
21:45
not an aggressive growth target, if you're happy here, my job needs to go one way.
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But if you wanna take this and try to march it to a billion dollars top
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line, if you wanna break into the top 15 or 20 in the industry nationally,
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that's a totally different job and you're the one who makes the call.
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But I need to know.
22:08
Hmm.
22:11
And the conversations that came after that were interesting.
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And one of the advantages of a family business, because what we uncovered
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is this went all the way back to some of my father's deep seated religious
22:25
beliefs about where you put your identity and if you grow a company
22:28
too fast, how you can become absorbed.
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It's hard enough in a family company not to let it absorb your
22:34
identity, but if you start to have.
22:37
Mar a march of success, how it can double down on that difficulty
22:42
and border on idolatry of a company and what it provides.
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Hmm.
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That's where his lack of setting that call it a big, hairy, audacious goal.
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Thematic goal, one big thing.
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Where his desire to not set one of those came from, and he and I were able to work
23:01
through that and balance both the humility that he wanted to see in the company.
23:07
And the organization's need to have a steady, repeatable forward march.
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I thought back on that example a few years later.
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I didn't realize it in the moment what had happened, but I thought, woo, I
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don't know how many people can talk to their CEO boss, push on their religious
23:26
beliefs and find a compromise that that incorporates all of that and moves
23:31
that organization forward in a way that is consistent with what they want.
23:35
Yeah.
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Yeah.
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So that's the, the difficult part.
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The man, I thought you had my back.
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Like that's the hard side of family business.
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And then there's some really good stuff.
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And then we, what'd we do?
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Quadrupled the company in seven years.
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I hope you enjoyed this preview of the conversation between Andrea and me.
23:56
Please use the link in the show notes to find Andrea.
24:02
The Next Gen Friend podcast, and both the first and second episodes
24:07
with our conversation about being a next gen in a family company.
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I founded 21 Clear with a dream of ending chaos in family businesses.
24:19
We're for families who want to take their company somewhere and keep
24:23
their family together in the process.
24:25
And we do this two ways through resources like this podcast.
24:29
We have a monthly newsletter.
24:31
LinkedIn posts and I'm publishing a book next year.
24:35
The other way we end Family Business chaos is through consulting services.
24:39
You can learn more about those@twentyoneclear.com.
24:44
I hope you enjoyed this preview of my conversation with Andrea.
24:48
I hope it helped you in some way on your own inner family business journey.
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I'll talk to you next time, as my grandfather would've said.
24:59
Thank you so very, very much for listening.