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When someone is in a crisis, the line between family and business can be very blurred. People do not want to deal with things that they might not feel they have control about, or things that may be unpleasant in the future. People do not want to deal with uncertainty, with death, with disability, with succession planning, especially founders of businesses. They like to believe that they cannot take themselves out of the picture, or they cannot take themselves out of the equation, and so motivating that type of person to do what they need to do proactively can be very difficult. I can think of a family where the father who had been in charge forever had a massive stroke and lived, but was no longer able to function. The question came in, “Who is going to be in charge and what authority is?” And it was a very ... View More scary case to the family, because he was still communicating with them, so it was not like he was completely taken out of the picture. He was sitting in a chair, watching the dynamic although a shadow of his former self. When there is uncertainty about the health and recovery of someone like that, and you are the son or the daughter or the wife, and you have been living with an authoritative figure for a long time, for you to now find the will in the middle of a family crisis, to come in and say, “Ok, now it is going to be up to us to figure out how to deal with this, without direction from him but while he is watching,” is an incredibly difficult discussion. The reality is, and this is what I was finally able to get through to them, whether he recovered or did not recover, somebody needed to be in charge now, and somebody needed to step in and take the authority, and deal with the company as it is currently going and if he recovered, they wanted to believe he would recover, things would change again. My role would be to have a family meeting and open up the discussion about what this means, and then bring in the right team of advisors to be able to deal with those questions. I would only be one member of that team. If I had come in too aggressive at the beginning, the process would have stopped. So by saying to them, “Where are you now as a family dealing with this business? Let us just take one step. Let us go in an interim basis, let us do what we need to do, and understand it is not the final step. He may recover; he may not recover. I cannot tell you that, but I can tell you that I think we have to make this next step.” And that is w
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