I’ve shared my sense of serendipity succession on this blog before — see the category family business — so I’m very happy to see Sabrina’s view of that in How our Succession Strategy Worked on the bplans.blog yesterday.
I feel like it completes the picture. Like Paul Harvey used to say, "the rest of the story."
Do you own a business? Do you have kids? Do you want them involved in your business? Do you want them to run it one day? Oh, and by the way, do you get a day older every day? 
This came up in conversation the other day, talking to women who will be on a panel with me next month at the Women’s Congress in Miami. My daughter is CEO of my company now and two other daughters are among the 40 employees.
The question was whether I did that on purpose, or what did I do to make that happen.
Ironically, given that I’m a planner by profession, this was not the result of long-term planning, at least not exactly.
It took me years to connect in my mind my entrepreneurial business plan software business, Palo Alto Software, with the idea of family business. Even as several of our five children, then in their early teens or preteens, spent Sunday mornings sticking product labels on plastic floppy disks. Even as they took turns, as teenagers in high school, at answering the telephone in the office, it didn’t occur to me.
If you’re thinking to yourself, as you read this, that I must be pretty dumb, I say yes, that’s true, but on the other hand, this was a software business started in the heart of the Silicon Valley during the first PC boom, by an entrepreneur with a Stanford MBA degree. It wasn’t the kind of thing people normally associate with family business.
And also it took me years to recognize that exit strategy or succession could be relevant. I’ve loved the business for so long that it had become second nature. The thought of retirement was horrible, but I didn’t realize that I didn’t have to retire, just change jobs.
As it turned out, what did happen was the gradual recognition that I could change my job and put somebody else in charge, without retiring. I blog now, and speak and write and teach, while Sabrina runs the company. I work more hours than ever, but it’s a different job now and I love it. Nobody reports to me. What a great change. What a relief.
So, happily, things worked out right for me and my company. I love my new job and my company is growing, and the succession move has worked. So that’s why I want to share.
It’s scary to give advice about things like this to anybody, so I do so reluctantly. I hope I’m not one of those people who gets lucky and then takes credit for it.
The tips here come from experience. They are not from academic study. When I was in business school we weren’t talking about family businesses. We did have a family business counselor for three years, and she helped us. However, some of these rules contradict what I think is standard wisdom on succession and family business. For example, I think many family business counselors advise against talking business at home. And I think at least some experts on succession would recommend a longer and more explicit and more shared process for succession. But I’ve talked this over with my wife and several of the five grown-up children involved, and they agree that this is what we’d say, industry wisdom or not. So here’s what we come up with.
This is life, not just business. Even if you think you’ll never sell your company or go public, you’re not going to run it forever. So think about exit strategy, whether you like it or not.
This is a moot point of course if you’re both doing the same thing, but when it’s just one of the two parents doing the business, it’s still much better if two parents deal with children’s involvement, deciding how and when. In our case it was my business for the first decade but became our business as it grew. Even in the old days, though, when it was just my business, my wife was always in favor of the kids understanding where the money came from. And of course we recognize that you don’t always have the luxury of two parents of the same mind. It’s a luxury, not a necessity.
They’re supposed to do what they want, remember, not what you want? Or are we still in the 19th century (and it didn’t work that well then either)?
Trivia contest: name a major movie in which a central character was supposed to go into his or her parents’ business but didn’t. Answer: lots of right answers. It’s an archetype. It goes back to Abraham trashing his father’s store in the bible. Jesus was nicer about it, but he didn’t end up a carpenter. In Godfather, Don Corleone wanted Michael to be a senator, not the next don, but Michael made that decision, not his father. And for a more recent example, take Hiro in Heroes.
You have to hope they want to get involved, and maybe they will. Freedom to choose is essential. Working in the business has to be their choice, not yours.
You want your children studying what interests them, not what interests you or what you think is good for the business.
I’m talking higher education here, of course, not Mrs. Johnson’s reading class in the fourth grade. Let them study what they want and let those chips fall where they may. You don’t get good education by forcing it, and good education is way more important than the right subject. I hope you think that’s obvious.
Despite owning my own business and having my MBA, I encouraged my kids to major in things other than business. They should get an education first, learn business later. It’s a trade, not a discipline. Of course I’m biased on this, my first degree was literature, my second one was journalism.
My kids had to spend occasional weekend mornings putting sticky Palo Alto Software labels on floppy disks. It didn’t hurt them to know where the money (what there was of it in the beginning) came from. My wife and I shared the work. We walked together to the post office when I was starting a newsletter business, checking for new subscribers. The kids came too. None of that hurt.
We like these people we raised, we’re happy to have them involved. Whenever we could we tried to make the workplace a pleasant place to be. This of course means everybody, in our case of a 40-employee company that includes the 37 who aren’t our grownup children.
People don’t always find their best place right away. Don’t push them into corners, let them experiment. Let them work with who they want, on what they want, and eventually they’ll end up in a good place.
Ultimately what’s at stake here, if things work out right, is you can end up with well educated hard working people who know where the business came from, and why, and want to take it to the best place for its future. That’s really a good thing.
Looking back on this, and reviewing my tips, I can see of course that not everything here applies to everybody. Also, that I’ve probably left some key elements out, although not on purpose.
Furthermore, I’m embarrassed to seem to be recommending against planning. But in this very special case, planning is too much in danger of becoming pushing, as in pushing your children, forcing your dreams down their throats. So you can’t really plan on this, you have to just work on making the conditions right, and make it happen.
The Wall Street Journal has a story today on my decision to name Sabrina Parsons CEO of Palo Alto Software and dedicate my time to blogging, speaking, and my next book. It’s nice to get press notice, and Laura Lorber did an excellent job boiling down 75 minutes of interview to a few hundred words.
This may have started with Steve King’s story, Baby Boomer Un-Retirement over at Bizlabs, which was related to my post The Ideal Job on this blog, and one last April when I announced the decision.
I emphasized that this isn’t retirement, it’s a delightful new job. "He wasn’t — and still isn’t — interested in retiring," Laura wrote, and that’s important. "Now blogging full time, he posts up to 10 times a week to more than three blogs, including blog.timberry.com."
I’m a bit embarrassed about the King Lear references. Laura reported that accurately, but I really don’t spend my time reading Shakespeare classics (talk about out of date!). I looked up Lear after a reference in a conversation, and it seemed interesting because of the old guy and his three daughters. For the record, though, I also mentioned Christopher Buckley’s Boomsday, which is about baby boomers getting out of the way, and about blogging as well.
I also talked about how I never really liked the management side, but stuck with it for 19 years because this was my company, my work, and I felt that I had to run it or it wouldn’t be run. Then I turned around and saw that there are others around here who can run it as well or probably better than I. So I get back to my writing. During that long interview, Laura asked me about career paths. I mentioned how I gave up the VP spot at Creative Strategies to do the work myself instead of managing others, which I described as First Day of a New Business in a previous post on this blog.
If my wife and I raised well-educated, hard working children, who believe in our business and carry it forward, is that bad? At one point, years ago, we had preteen kids putting sticky labels on floppy disks in our living room. We had teenage kids going to the office and answering phones for the business after school. Our son managed our Internet presence from 1998 until 2001, and our daughter and her husband built our UK subsidiary and then managed our marketing for years. Three of our daughters work for our company, Palo Alto Software. One of those three runs it.
Is that bad? Apparently some people call that nepotism and that sounds ugly. In Nepotism vs. Family Business over at MommyCeo, Sabrina Parsons objects:
We can see that family businesses are extremely important to the US economy, and are part of what makes America what it is today. So, how do you reconcile a family business and these negative attitudes towards nepotism? You can not see a family business from one generation to the next, unless family members work and run the business. Family succession planning is very important to the health of a family business. Good family succession planning means the difference between a healthy business that keeps growing and running from one generation to the next, and a business that burns out and fails, or worse gets sold out of the family (often times for bargain price to be dissolved for assets).
She has good reason to be angry. She’s responding to a Harvard Business Review post, picked up by NPR today, that seems to assume family members are by definition incompetent. That’s a dumb generalization, a sloppy stereotype.
In fact, the real definition of nepotism is favoritism and unfairness, not just family. I looked it up. Google gives me 7 definitions of nepotism, 6 of which incorporate unfairness and favoritism, leaving one outrider that assumes nepotism whenever there is a family tie in a business. Wikipedia, the best of them, clearly defines it as favoring relatives because of their relationship rather than because of their abilities. That’s one of the points Sabrina is making.
So let’s clean up this sloppy thinking up. I expect better from NPR and HBR. Passing leadership on to smart, hard-working, and committed family members isn’t bad. Sharing DNA doesn’t lower ability. Don’t talk about nepotism without making this important distinction.
I had a nice note from Steve King of Small Business Labs in my email today. The question was, "where do you find the time?" I enjoyed answering that, because we undervalue family business and success and such. So much so, in fact, that I decided to (with apologies to Steve) post that answer here.
Some people misinterpret where I am as "retired" since I named my daughter Sabrina Parsons CEO last Spring. Actually I’m still president here, but not running the company; I have carved out my ideal job, which is speaking, teaching, blogging, and writing about business planning, small business, startups, etc. I do a lot of webinars too, for example four in the two weeks ending today. This is really fun. It’s the job I always wanted. Ironically I think I’m spending half again more hours than before, but Sabrina runs the company, I just think, write, speak, etc. Nobody reports to me. And with Sabrina in charge, the company is refreshed, renewed, growing, and very well managed.
And Steve, thanks for asking.
–Tim
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