Tag Archives: entrepreneurship

Family Business and Tough Love, Something to Be Grateful For

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by Be Yourself, English • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

I’m the middle kid in my family. I have an older sister who is much prettier than I and a younger brother, who was a dream come true for my father, who always wanted to have a boy to carry on the family name, so it’s no wonder that I’ve always been the rebel, the troublemaker in the family. I suppose that I just wanted attention, but I also had a strong desire to live my life my way.

Growing up with a strong-minded entrepreneur who had a very clear idea in his mind about what was best not only for the company but for every single member of his family was not easy for me. I imagine that dealing with a strong-minded child was not easy for him, either.

My father’s biggest loves in his life are his kids and his business, so he has always tried to keep us together. We started working in the family business as children helping out on the weekends. Later, as teenagers, we rotated through different positions giving holidays to employees and working part-time during college managing one of the service areas of the company.

I loved it. I hated it. I loved the learning, the responsibility, and feeling useful and proud of my family. I hated the lack of freedom, feeling that I did not have a say in what I wanted, and how demanding and difficult to please may father could be.

When we had arguments, my father would end the discussion with, “You don’t understand how much a parent loves a child until you have one.” I think I understand now that I’m also a parent.

My father asked us to take on jobs such as waiting tables, pumping gasoline, and cleaning cars. His expectation that we would work as hard in the business as he did was his way of loving us and teaching us the value of money, appreciation for what we had, humility, and respect for other people regardless of their background. Our successful company was not a present; it was the result of hard work and dedication.

My father did not make things easy for me. I had to fight hard for want I wanted. This was also his way of loving me. He just wanted to protect me, but his strong desire to control my life was my biggest motivation to be brave, follow my instincts, and not settle for less than what I wanted.

Today is Thanksgiving, and I have many things to be grateful for: my family, my husband, my kids, my friends, my wonderful life… But what I have to be the most grateful for is growing up in a family business with a strong father who cared deeply about me. Thanks to him and to all the good and bad moments we have gone through, I am who I am and I have the life I have today. I couldn’t be more grateful for that!

Thanks, Dad, for being the wonderful father you are. I love you.

Happy thanksgiving to everybody!

Written by Carmen Lence, Family Business Consultant and coach

www.nextgenfamilybusiness.com

Entrepreneurship from the Point of View of a Next Generation Member: Edouard Thijssen from TrustedFamily on His Quest to Make a Difference in the World.

by English, Entrepreneurship, Next Generation Interviews • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Edouard Thijssen is a 5th generation member of the Belgian group Aliaxis, a company in the plastics and transportation industries. He is also an entrepreneur in his own right and the co-founder of TrustedFamily.

Edouard met his business partner Edouard Janssen, a 6th Generation member of the Solvay family—an international Chemical and Pharmaceutical group of the same name—at a FBN meeting. After talking for a while, they realized that they both had the same unanswered questions about their families and businesses: How do you keep the small, close family feeling between family members in a family that has over 100 members? How can everyone keep in touch with one another and feel like they are an important part of the family group? How do you keep those family members that are not involved in the management of a family business informed and feeling that they are a part of that business?

Together they solved these problems by creating TrustedFamily, an online secure networking platform that offers similar features to Facebook, but is specifically designed for family members to share information about their families and their businesses. It started small, but today TrustedFamily has more than 50 clients scattered over 15 countries. The platform serves families of all sizes, from just 10 members through to those with more than a hundred and offers a super-customized service that is tailored to their client’s needs. This is how it all started:

  • How has growing up in a family that owns a business affected you personally?

It’s hard to say. I had a relatively normal life; I went to a normal school… normal everything. I think my parents did a great job with my education. That has helped me to become an entrepreneur. My Dad always told me: “You can do whatever you want in your life, but make sure that what you do has an impact on the world.” By this, he meant that, if you think about something, just don’t do it on a small scale; start small, but make sure that it is something that you can grow and that it can have a big impact. It’s a great value perspective and I think it’s a very powerful way to see the world.

  • Tell me a bit about your journey on the road to becoming an entrepreneur. Who has inspired you?

My father was involved with some entrepreneurial activities, but actually [my entrepreneurial career] started at high school. I was part of a program call “Mini Enterprise”, where over the course of a year, I worked with a team of classmates to create a small company. I really enjoyed it. It was my first experience of what life as an entrepreneur was really like.

Later, I went to University at Solvay Business School, and they were involved in a program called “Start Academy”, which was a business plan competition in which you competed by producing a business plan with 3 other friends. The competition was judged by some of the top entrepreneurs in Belgium and they voted on the projects that were presented to them. That was the second event that really influenced me. Later, during my 3rd year at university, I completed a project on social networking and Web 2.0 and there I had the opportunity to meet some very successful Belgian entrepreneurs who had created very large and scalable web and IT companies. Meeting these guys really inspired me as well.

As far as people that inspire me, as a technology fan, I’m extremely interested in all the technology entrepreneurs that have made a name for themselves. I read a lot about them and all their stories make me excited about entrepreneurship.

  • What is the best thing about being an entrepreneur?

Entrepreneurship, in the end, is about changing things. Basically, you have a new idea and you do something differently from how it has been done before. It’s very rewarding to be able to create something that changes people’s lives and how things work. That is the main aspect. You also learn a lot in the process. I like it.

  • What is the worse thing about being an entrepreneur?

Good question! Maybe that the businesses and ideas that you create are in your head all the time. They become a very important part of your life and sometimes it’s difficult to disconnect. You have all these ideas floating around your mind… it’s very exciting, but  they are always there.

  • What do you feel the most proud of in your career so far?

Well, I’m still very young… but if there is one thing to say, it’s that it’s great to feel like I have identified a personal need, solved it, and then realized that a whole bunch of people have the same need and that I have been able to help them too.

  • Trustedfamily was initially founded by you and Edouard Janssen. Later on both your families invested in the company. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using family funding?

If you are an entrepreneur, what you need to be successful is financial resources, business expertise and the ability to add value. We needed some management expertise and some technology expertise, and we found that our families could offer us that, so it was an ideal solution. However, we also took other people on board to bring us other knowledge in areas where we felt we didn’t have it. Raising funds is not only about assets, but also about the expertise that you can get from the investors that join you.

  • How do see you Trustedfamily evolving?

Well, we started from a personal need, now we have proven that it works. We are at the stage where we know that we have something unique, but there are still a lot people that haven’t heard about us. We want to bring the company to the next level to make sure that all the families out there that have the need and believe in our vision, learn about us and use our services.

  • In your opinion, what are the distinguishing traits of next generation family business members that become successful entrepreneurs in their own right?

It’s hard to say… entrepreneurship is like a rollercoaster ride, you go up, down, up, down… I think that entrepreneurship, in the end, is about making sure that you go up on average more times than you go down. It is about persistence and passion… and if you have those, you will be very successful.

  • What is your advice to NG FB members that want to become entrepreneurs?

Start early. The younger you are, the more opportunities you have, and the lower the opportunity cost is. When you are young, you can take a lot of risk. The older you get, the more complicated your life may become, you may have a family, a big job, debt… these types of things make it much harder to take the risk of becoming an entrepreneur. I started right after university. I know many people say that is better to have some experience in a big company before branching out on your own, but I think that is better to start young; if you need experience you can find people that have it and they can help you out. That is what we have done with Trustedfamily.

If you are a next generation family business member and you want to set up a business, you should consider following Edouard’s advice: it has certainly worked well for him!

It would also be great to get your advise on becoming a successful entrepreneur. Please share it here in the comment box. Thanks in advance!

What did I learn about Next Generation at last week’s FFI conference?

by English, Family Business Experts, Succession Planning • Tags: , , , , , , ,

From left ro right: Iñigo Susaeta, Borja Raventós, Neus Feliu, Alberto Gimeno and Carmen Lence

The Family Firm Institute is the world’s leading organization for family firm consultants and this year they celebrated their 25th anniversary by offering a conference that was focused on next generation issues. I really enjoyed the conference and felt that I was among friends. The FFI is a collective of people that work to help family businesses succeed over generations, and they are really passionate about it. I suspect that the main reason for such enthusiasm is related to the fact that many of them come from a family business themselves.

I started my journey through the conference by choosing a presentation that reflected on what have we learned about Family Business over the last 25 years. It was called “Persistent 5@25: Key Topics over 25 Tears Through Practitioner and Scholarly Eyes” and was delivered by Jane Hilburt-Davis and Pramodita Sharma. To me, the most interesting part of the presentation concerned the research that indicated that, 20 years from now, there is going to be more female family business leaders than male. That would mean a big jump: at the moment only 24% of Family Business have a female CEO. It was also comforting to learn that there is no concrete evidence in existence that proves that men are better business leaders than women.

The second presentation: “Surviving and Thriving in Narcissistic Family Businesses”, by Michael Madera and Steve Rosenbaum, included a short film that demonstrated the effects that a narcissistic personality can have over future generations. It was actually painful to watch how, despite all the suffering that the controlling personality of the founder had inflicted over his sons, his controlling behavior was something that the children sadly inherited. The 3rd generation approach to deal with their narcissistic parents was to limit their interactions with them in order to protect themselves from their damaging personalities. The advice from the presenters for people dealing with narcissistic personalities in the family business was to “Take responsibility and care of yourself; Establish clear boundaries; Understand the past, or be doomed to repeat it“ and finally, if the misery generated is intolerable, the best thing you can do is to get out of there!

During lunch, Steve Grossman, former President of Grossman Marketing Group, shared with us the secrets for keeping his family business in the family for four generations, and the secret to having a great successful life: “to have a happy life, you have to have a family, a career and give back to the community.” Great advice!

The next presenter I chose to see was Edouard Thijssen, a 5th generation member of the Belgian group Aliaxis. There are about 100 people in Edouard’s family but none of them work on a day to day basis in the family business.  Edouard felt the need to create something that would keep his big family close and in contact and, as no family member worked in the business, he was conscious of the need to keep the “family feeling” element of the family business. So he joined forces with Edouard Janssen, 6th Generation of Solvay, also from Belgium, and together they created TrustedFamily, an online secure platform where families can share information about their family members and their business issues. The company is now working with more than 50 families all over the world. The smallest families they serve have 10 members and their platform is customizable to their particular client’s needs.  Edouard is an inspiration for those Next Generation family business members that take the initiative and decide to create their own business. Well done!

“What’s so Different About Leadership in The Family Enterprise?” by Ivan Lansberg and Wendy R. Ulaszek, was my next choice. Mr. Lansberg explained how the old advice of “ treating your family as a family, and your business as a business…” had proven to be negative for FamilyBiz, as it denied them the use of their competitive advantage of having a family behind the business. In his experience, the most effective leaders for family businesses are the ones that “are able to build ambidextrous capacity, to balance polarizing needs of the family and the business.” One of the examples he cited concerned promoting “nepotism with excellence” which means to, “Invest in the development and mentoring of the next generation of leaders.” I couldn’t agree more.

The panel “Next Gen’s Status in Family Business: It’s Complicated” shared the experiences of John Morris, second generation member of Franklin Morris Associates, Alana Feld, second generation of Feld Entertainment, and Brett Levy, second generation of Riverside Properties, in working for their Family Business. Brett explained how the sudden health problems of his father threw him quite suddenly and unexpectedly into dealing with bigger responsibilities and how that experience made him, and the company, stronger. Alana described how she believes that working in the family business is a “lifestyle” and advised parents to offer their children the right position (avoiding putting then straight into big positions they may not be ready for) to prevent setting them up for failure.  John explained that when he decided to join the Family Business, his father gave him a letter that said “Dear father, I’m leaving the company, no questions asked, no answers needed”, he hopes that he’ll never have to sign it and give it back to his father. It was inspiring to see the passion each of these people had for their business and their willingness to work hard really shone through. With people like this, family business really does have a great future ahead!

The closing keynote by Andrew Lippman from MIT, was not only inspiring but entertaining. Mr. Lippman proved to be quite a showman and threw a few jokes into his presentation that helped all of us to keep focus after such a long day. I enjoyed his explanation about “the rate of change in society is a function of the age at which youth are introduced to the dominant technology of the time”, it made me think about my 3-year-old daughter playing with the iPad… and yes, it seems correct that nowadays the rate of change is at 3 years max…

I learned many things during the FFI conference, but my main take-out is that there is a next generation revolution taking place. Next generation members are, more than ever before, taking the initiative to prepare themselves to become the future leaders not only of their Family Business but of their own companies. Next Generation is not only the future, it is the present!