Twenty One Clear October Newsletter
How to enjoy family business free holidays
Welcome to the October Newsletter. This month, I want to help you prepare for a family business free holiday season. But to do that, you need to schedule a family business meeting.
What is a family business meeting, why does it matter and what does it have to do with the holidays?
What is a family business meeting?
Family business meetings are where you work out how your family works in and owns the family company together. How does this meeting compare to others? Here is a quick comparison:
Note that each meeting has distinct attendees, topics and authority. In a family company, you likely have overlap between the meetings - two family members may take part in all three meetings, and a couple may participate in just one type.
The family meeting is where a group of family employees, family owners and (perhaps) family members discuss a host of topics, including:
Performance - both of the company and any ancillary assets or investments
Emergency planning - what happens if the majority shareholder(s) dies suddenly
Sale - how are solicitations to buy the company handled
Hiring - what must family members do to join the company
Succession process - what is the controlling shareholder’s timeline and who are the process experts
Resolving conflicts - creating and training family members on a consistent process for family business conflict resolution
Why are family meetings important
When you work with family, you will always experience tension. This is not a bad thing. You have mixed the unconditional nature of family with the conditional nature of business - you carry the dual hope of building a great company with a strong family.
And family business is hard! Tension will spike, and arguments will spill out.
The advantage of dedicated family business meetings is that:
Unlike at an executive meeting, there are no non-family employees. This allows you to keep any family drama out of the company.
Unlike at a board of directors meeting, you do not have to keep minutes. If your brother runs hot for a bit, no one wonders whether to document that in a formal record. Also, if a family member is President or CEO, non-family board members add independent oversight and accountability; like above, do not subject your non-family directors to family drama.
Why do family business meetings matter to the holidays?
Family business meetings are the lynchpin of a healthy family company.
In fact, where best selling business consultant Pat Lencioni wrote Death by Meeting to make company meetings better, we might retitle this (newsletter) Death by Not Meeting. 1
Your family will air out their thoughts and feelings about the company somewhere, or, maybe worse, hold them in. This is how family business issues show up at Thanksgiving, or family members decide not to show up at a holiday party.
Your family business updates and working sessions are how you run your family business in a chaos-proof way.
Once you get going, I can tell you from experience that you will not run out of topics as long as the company continues and the family members keep showing up.
I sat with the family business leader of a $5+ billion organization. She unrolled a triple-wide piece of butcher paper that was big enough to almost cover the six-foot long conference table. On the paper, a spiderweb of connections revealed the linkages between all their family committees, organizations and charitable endeavors.
While you will probably not need to cover a conference table, her overview was a visual reminder that the inner family business is its own entity that takes ongoing effort, time and resources, including meetings.
Twenty One Clear and family meetings
The idea of a family meeting may make your skin crawl. You have never had one, and the thought of gathering your sons and niece, all of whom work with you, feels too uncertain. Maybe you have terrible memories from the last time(s) you tried this. Or you want someone who is not family to facilitate the session.
I founded Twenty One Clear, a family business consulting firm, to partner with families who want to run a predictable, meaningful cadence of family business meetings.
Last week, a family connected with us to schedule their family business meeting in January. Now, they can go into the holidays knowing that there is a place to talk about whatever is on their mind…just not around the Christmas tree.
Click here to schedule a call and brainstorm about your next, or first, family business meeting.
Podcast Update
I hope you enjoy the monthly podcasts. Episode 6, How to Chaos Proof Family Hiring, Part 2, is live and linked below!
Till next month
As my grandfather would have said, thank you so very, very much for reading.
Adam, for 21 Clear
Citations
1 - Hatcher, Adam (2026) Chaos Proof: Your family business framework for a great company and strong family (manuscript in preparation).
Adam, Great idea to have the meeting before holiday get togethers so as to cover family business before you are together to enjoy one another (Without much business discussed). Also the idea of even scheduling it in January is a great idea so if someone brings up something, you can always say, 'we'll add that to the agenda in January. Hope you can be there!"