Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 171 | The Impact that Family Businesses can Have on Society

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Ep. 171 | The Impact that Family Businesses can Have on Society · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  How do you develop a family legacy that actually spans the test of time? Hey guys, welcome to the 5-Minute Fatherhood Podcast. I'm your co-host, Jeff Bethke, along with my friend and mentor, Jeremy Pryor. Join us Monday through Friday as we chat about quick tips, skills, and ways to help equip you on your journey as a father to build your multi-generational family team on mission. Stay tuned. Welcome to the 5-Minute Fatherhood Podcast.
• 0:30
  What's up, guys? Welcome to another 5-Minute Fatherhood. We want to talk about the impact that family businesses can have on society. So one example of this that gets a lot of press, obviously, is the company Chick-fil-A. And what we're talking about today isn't necessarily...
• 0:47
  Having a political conversation, I know that they've waded into those waters. What really fascinated me, what I wanted to tease out, Jeff, get your impression on, was when I discovered that Truett Cathy, who started Chick-fil-A, actually had a covenant that he insisted that his children sign in order to get access to the business. So let me read a little bit about this. This is, according to Business Insider, Chick-fil-A founder S. Truett Cathy wrote in a memoir titled, Eat More Chicken.
• 1:15
  So,
• 1:32
  Wow. We will be faithful. This is a quote from the covenant. We will be faithful to Christ's lordship in our lives. Kathy's covenant stated, as committed Christians, we will live a life of selfless devotion to his calling in our lives. We will prayerfully seek his leadership.
• 1:49
  and all major decisions that impact our family and others. Our family roles as spouses to our lifelong mates, parents to our children, and loving aunts and uncles will be our priority. So, you know, I love the idea of multi-generational family businesses. That's awesome.
• 2:08
  One of the things that that really stands in contrast to is public companies that, because they are financially, there's actually laws on the books where they have to do what's in the fiduciary interest of their shareholders. In other words, they have to prioritize the financial interest of the shareholders above oftentimes personally held values. There isn't a way for there to be strong enough values to overcome a lot of those things that take companies, corporations down a path
• 2:36
  where they basically don't have any values besides making money. And one of the great contrasts to that are the possibility that privately held family businesses can, especially multi-generationally, represent values that are different than necessarily the cultural values. They represent those families and the values that they have multi-generationally. And I think this is a really interesting idea. It's something that I'm really interested in. It's very difficult to do, by the way. I mean, for most family businesses, they do tend to fall apart in the second or third generation.
• 3:06
  But how do you develop a family legacy that actually spans the test of time? I'm very interested in watching all of these examples, especially ones that play out over multiple generations. And so I was really fascinated. Jeff, I'm curious what your thoughts were that he actually had a covenant and that the covenant was somehow how this asset got passed on generationally. What are your thoughts about that?
• 3:29
  I love it. I mean, I think especially, and you have to kind of know where you're at in the generations, I think, but with particularly high level visionaries, I think you need to use that gift by making sure a vision can kind of be heated through generations. And especially if you're the one responsible for inventing or starting something, I don't think it needs to be overbearing. I love that. It's really just a couple things, right? It's like, don't go public.
• 3:49
  Don't open on Sundays and we'll be really generous with this. It's not like, you know, make every sandwich this way, this way, this way, and all these different things. It's not micromanaging with the vision, but it's a high level vision that he wants to push forward. And like you said, every company has a vision, whether it's for the shareholders, whether it's just the mission statement of making better products or squeezing out profit margins or whatever. So everyone already has one, but usually that's coming from like the boardroom, not from the father. Yeah.
• 4:12
  And so I love that picture of like, yeah, what would it look like to actually, because it's at one level, like you said, a family can actually be the strongest glue to hold a vision. Because what happens is in a normal business, because we just kind of rinse and repeat, or we just get a new person or whatever, there's no, there's a disconnect on the new eras of the business, because they don't really even know or care about the person that came before them that started the business. And if they do, it's not as strong as a bond. But man, if you are, if you're stepping into something of like, oh, I'm stepping into my father or my mother's legacy.
• 4:41
  And it's my job to pass that down. It shouldn't be a burden. It should be a gift. And I've seen a ton of ones where it is a gift like Chick-fil-A. They're doing it well. I think I've told the story before of this awesome winery we went to in Sonoma where it was like the seventh generation family owned winery where every generation then, you know, someone takes the baton. And that's like, if you think about that, that's incredible that you can last that long and do that. But it comes down to vision, casting and passing. And it comes down to discipleship. What you notice in a lot of those companies is it's not just passed to the person when they're 40. They're not just passed to the person when they're 40.
• 5:10
  those people are working in the fields at age 10 or working in the back at age eight or like kind of understanding, like they're saturated in the vision. And so I think that's really important too, that like the parallel or the metaphor we're talking about here is every family. You don't have to go build some business empire, but every family, I think you need to understand that your values
• 5:30
  you should disciple your family in them and saturate them in them from day one, because that's what they'll be able to feel and absorb to pass down to the next generation in those values. Hopefully, if you're building a strong family team should be that Jesus is king, he's Lord, he's coming to bring new creation, his death and his resurrection are the good news. And that's really, really important. So yeah, I love this one.
• 5:53
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