Thursday, September 06, 2012


Grow and grow

As the children get bigger, and the twenty somethings turn into thirty somethings, we wouldn’t be human if occasional thoughts didn’t turn to our own mortality. But it doesn’t have to be like that with the business.

So many family businesses can take off and fly through successive generations. One engineering company dad said to me recently, “Well I am so lucky to have my son David and daughter in law Jane to carry the business on.“ I replied, “Yes John, and they are so lucky to have such magnificent parents that started this business 35 years ago.”

Another seventy plus parent who founded a nursery that now employs one hundred people said, “I’m just the delivery driver here, you need to talk to Jessica, if you can catch her!” And the mother of a long standing retail business said, and she is eighty this year, “I just come in and open the post.”

But all these people actually do so much more with their presence, their experience and their wisdom. And as far as the business is concerned senior players are continuing to add more and more value, providing that they themselves want to carry on learning and developing, providing that they know how and when to hand over the reins.

I am facilitating the appraisals of some seventy year old directors today. So never mind all the siblings, let’s hear it for the elder statespeople that are still in there, doing the business.

 

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home