Find chances to work together
Your family company provides opportunities to build trust, clarity and communication ... if you pause long enough to see them.
Welcome to the June Newsletter! I want to explore an idea from the end of May’s podcast. If you still need to download Episode 2 of the podcast, Building a Family Company Without Regret, click the tile above!
In the closing moments, I touched on looking for chances to work together, and want to revisit that here.
Working together
When you choose to work with family, you need to look for opportunities to work together.
While recording the most recent podcast, I remembered, and regretted, a missed chance to build a family business connection with my siblings. Let me quickly share the story.
A family business miss
My father and I transformed the future of the company together in 2016.
Over a few months, we debated whether the company should chase a big financial goal or continue to invest in sales and accept growth as it came. He and I challenged ourselves to 7x the organization over the next 11 years.
The company then expanded its sales team, motivated organic growth and bought three businesses.
Despite the success, I missed a tremendous opportunity to also improve the inner family business. I missed a chance to work with my brother, sister, mother and father, together, in changing the company’s future.
“What’d I miss?”
My dad and I changed more than company strategic priorities.
We affected ownership goals.
Owners get to prioritize growth, liquidity, and control. They pick two and trade them off against the third. Here is a quick explanation:
For example, our company prioritized control. The family owned the company and worked to minimize debt (bank control).
The day my father and I set the 7x target, we prioritized growth alongside control, meaning we traded it off against owner liquidity. The decision affected the shareholders, and, looking back, I wish I had involved the ownership group in the conversation.
Setting a big, hairy, audacious goal moved the company forward, but when you work together with family, you’re doing more than building a great company; you are also running a healthy family business. That takes its own work.
Every inflection point, like changing owner priorities, is a chance to build family trust, clarity and communication, and perhaps to collaborate as well.
In that instance, I wish I had called a family business meeting to explain the idea and ask for feedback, wisdom, challenge, and support.
Eight years later, as I overhauled the organization’s strategy, structure and leadership, the family owners vetted the overall direction before launching it, even reference checking consultants together.
We then used quarterly family meetings to share major updates with the family owners and receive feedback. I remember my sister finding a key leadership competency that we were struggling to name.
Different from eight years before, those sessions balanced a great company with a healthy family business.
Strengthen your family business
Looking ahead in 2025 and on to 2026, you can find opportunities to work through company issues with your family owners and family employees.
Maybe the organization needs a $350,000 investment, or to make two key unbudgeted hires, or is having a tough year that jeopardizes distributions, or even a few cousins are getting within 5 years of possibly joining the company.
Any of those moments provides an opportunity to build trust, clarity, and communication.
You could call an annual meeting, host a quarterly family workshop, or send a detailed email with an optional follow up call. Regardless of what you choose, when you slow down enough to communicate and work together, you improve the health of your family business.
Kennesaw State University Webinar
Hiring a family member can feel like a natural next step—but without clear criteria and expectations, it can also invite unnecessary chaos.
Kennesaw State University’s Family Enterprise Center invited me to share practical ways to chaos proof the hiring of family members. I am excited to go live with them on August 5th!
Click the tile above to register!
Wrap up
Till next month, as my grandfather would say, thank you so very, very much for reading,
Adam Hatcher, for 21 Clear