The Twenty One Clear Podcast

The script flips. After two episodes of Adam interviewing Norm Smallwood — co-founder of The RBL Group and Adam's collaborator in restructuring his own family's company — Norm turns the tables and interviews Adam. They cover why Adam started Twenty One Clear, the inner family business hiding inside every family company, why succession is nothing like a baton handoff, and the two words Adam gives every family that works together: Do Not Drift. The episode closes with an impromptu case study from Norm's own consulting work, where an HR leadership succession project took a sudden inner family business turn.

21C links


Bumper music: "Still Hot" by Nic D, Connor Price © Lossless, 2023

Episode produced by: https://snapmarket.co

Chapters
[00:00] Welcome and Setup — Adam flips the script: after two episodes interviewing Norm Smallwood, Norm interviews him
[02:29] What Makes a Great Family Company — Full valuation for your size and industry, plus real impact, at any scale
[03:48] Why "Twenty One Clear" — A 70-year-old family company, and mixing the unconditional with the conditional
[08:00] The Question Behind the Firm — Why some family companies seem chaos proof and others lose value and relationships
[09:31] Inside "Chaos Proof Your Business" — Who the book is for and the question it wrestles with
[12:00] The Inner Family Business — One box inside another, and what the Chick-fil-A thought experiment reveals
[13:54] The Hardest Management Job on Earth — Why a family exit is fundamentally different from any other departure
[15:17] Norm's Case Study — A chairman's succession plan for a son who never wanted the job
[17:56] Succession Is Not a Baton Handoff — Two archers, 50 yards apart, and why the arrows must meet mid-air
[19:08] Do Not Drift — The one concept Adam gives every family company
[19:39] The Family Is a System — How one raise reaches every family member, inside the company and out
[21:47] The Headlines Exercise — Surfacing unsaid expectations before they walk into the boardroom
[23:30] Twenty One Clear in Five Years — The roadmap families need and the chaos proof framework
[26:37] Why a Template Is Not a Facilitator — What AI can draft and what it can never do in a family meeting
[29:12] Final Advice — Do Not Drift, and open the lens as wide as you can
[30:20] The Third Word — What Adam's sister and the family council gave back to the company
[33:31] Closing — Continue to write your story

Creators and Guests

Host
Adam Hatcher
Family Business Consultant

What is The Twenty One Clear Podcast?

The benefits of working with family include mutual trust, a shared long-term outlook, and quick decision making. However, your inner family business relationships can also cause chaos for the company and family.

What can you do?

Join us as we explore chaos proofing your family business so you can build a great company with a strong family around it.

21clear.com

14 The Company and Your Inner-Family Business: Norm Smallwood interviews Adam Hatcher
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[00:00:05] Adam Hatcher: Hey there. Welcome to the Twenty One Clear Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Hatcher, the founder of Twenty One Clear, a family business consulting firm. And with this and all of our other podcasts, we wanna provide resources to you that help you think about your inner family business, the unique way your family works in and owns your company together.

[00:00:28] This episode flips the script on the last two episodes. The last two episodes, I got to interview Norm Smallwood, the co-founder of Results-Based Leadership, an unbelievable human capital and strategic consulting firm based out of Salt Lake City, working with publicly and privately held companies around the globe.

[00:00:50] I interviewed Norm, and we talked about this paradigm of the four stages of leadership, and then we applied the idea to family companies. If you haven't [00:01:00] listened to those two episodes yet, I encourage you to go back. Some of the things that Norm shared in there I learned in working with him in my own family company, but I wish I had known from day one, and I hope they're helpful to you.

[00:01:13] In this episode, we turn it around. Norm interviews me, and what's fascinating about this episode is you're gonna hear some of the differences between how Norm and I approach business. Now remember, he and I worked together in restructuring my family's company. You're gonna hear some of that, and you're gonna hear a juxtaposition between the work I do with family business consulting and the work he does, but how both of them, when they are aligned, give families both rocket fuel to propel their company forward and peace in managing the tension of working together with family.

[00:01:59] It was a fun [00:02:00] chance for Norm to ask me questions, and at the end of it, we actually do an impromptu case study of a family that he helped through a HR leadership succession project that all of a sudden took an inner family business turn. And so we go back and analyze this case together. I hope you enjoy it.

[00:02:26] Here is Norm Smallwood interviewing me

[00:02:29] I work with families who want to build a great company while they stay together, and great companiestend to be two things.

[00:02:39] One, you don't have to become Marriott or Walmart or Chick-fil-A or Mars Incorporated. You don't have to become these multi-billion dollar publicly or privately held companies that are international, to be a great company. I can tell you about a great family company here in Augusta that's got three [00:03:00] Mediterranean restaurants and a food truck.

[00:03:02] But if they sold that business in the next year, as best I can tell, for a company of that size in that industry, they would get or be getting close to top value. That's a great company. It doesn't matter how big you are. But then the second thing is you wanna have an impact, and you don't have to have a particular faith set or belief set or core values to have an impact.

[00:03:26] And families measure their impact in all sorts of different ways. It can be wages you pay, charitable contributions, community impact, jobs given, scholarships, whatever it may be. But a great family company tends to have two things: they are reaching for or at full valuation for the size and industry they're in, and they're having an impact.

[00:03:47] Norm Smallwood: Nice. So you named the company Twenty One Clear. Tell us a little bit about, why Twenty One Clear? What does that mean? And, what does your company do? What's your value proposition to the [00:04:00] kind of family businesses you work with?

[00:04:03] Adam Hatcher: I was sitting with a family here in the Southeast, and they are a 70-plus-year-old family company.

[00:04:12] They're responsible for employees and customers that stretch the entire country, and they have multiple generations working together and a couple handful of family employees, and there was some tension in the family. Here's what I learned, Norm, that when you work with family, you do this weird thing.

[00:04:29] You mix the unconditional nature of family with the conditional nature of business. So I told you about my wife, so I think about our wedding and my wedding photo, and there's a spot in my wedding photo that is for my father-in-law. And it's unconditionally for my father-in-law. No matter what our relationship is, no matter when one of us dies, that spot in that pho...

[00:04:57] by the way, I have a good relationship with my father-in-law, [00:05:00] if Dan's listening. Like, just saw him two weeks ago. Love you, Dan. But it doesn't matter if we're doing well or if the relationship's strained, if it's distant, if we see each other all the time, if one of us has died. That spot is unconditionally for Dan, my father-in-law.

[00:05:20] Very different. There is nothing, you and I know as entrepreneurs, there's nothing unconditional about business. Your company is conditioned on adding value to clients, pricing things correctly, marketing shrewdly, controlling cost, market trends. It's very conditional. So when you work together with family, you mix the conditional nature of family with the unconditional nature of business, and Norm, those two things are at odds with each other.

[00:05:56] And it creates a tension, and so this family that I was sitting with, this multi-generation, [00:06:00] 70-plus-year-old family, the family CEO stood up, and we had a meeting. It was all the family members who owned parts of the company, and they owned different parts, or who worked in the business, and we all sat down, and it was the first time they had sat down without any other non-family leaders in the room.

[00:06:19] And he looked at the room and he said,

[00:06:21] "The way we are working together is costing all of us money, and it's costing me sleep at night."

[00:06:29] 'Cause here's what happens, Norm. When you work together with your family, it doesn't matter how well you do it. That unconditional conditional is there from the instant you work together, and it creates a tension.

[00:06:41] And it's not about eliminating the tension, it's about keeping it from becoming chaotic. And that's what he was telling the family. They had let things sit and fester and drift along for a few years, and it was finally not only showing up in their relationships, but it was showing up in the business and was hitting them at [00:07:00] times where they had critical business decisions to make, and it was clouding judgment.

[00:07:05] And when I started Twenty One Clear, 'cause I know this work, I mean, I've done 20 years of my own family meetings. There are times where I've sat between a board and executive team, a strategic planning session, and a family council, and been the thread that pulled through all of those. That when you do that well with a family company, when it's clear, when people are aligned, they communicate, they trust each other, you really can...

[00:07:31] My dad and I quadrupled the business in seven years. Went from regional to coast to coast in seven years, 30, $40 million in acquisitions, scaled the culture. That's the kind of things you can do that your non-family competitors will envy when it's going well. But when it's not, when it starts to go the other way, it starts to feel not just tense, but chaotic, and that's what that CEO was saying.

[00:07:59] [00:08:00] And so when I stepped out of the family company I was fascinated by this question: Why do some family companies seem chaos proof and others seem like they are losing value in relationships? And that's the question that I set out to answer and ultimately start Twenty One Clear, which that word clear in there is helping people provide clarity.

[00:08:24] I remember once talking with a family, and after about an hour on the phone, and you probably have this with your clients, they said:

[00:08:31] "Oh, that's why our sons don't like each other at work." But you have to have that moment and have someone normalize that there is tension for them to just take a breath and say,

[00:08:41] "Oh, we're not strange. We just work with family."

[00:08:46] Norm Smallwood: You know, when you talk about the dynamics, it's easy to forget the conditional nature of business with the unconditional sort of love of family. What, what a great way to frame [00:09:00] that, right? 'Cause it's hard enough with, just people you know, people you hire.

[00:09:06] Like, I think about that. I imagine if, the folks I work with at, RBL, and we have family members that have come in, but it does add a dynamic, right? If somebody's a low performer or if somebody, heaven forbid, does something unethical or whatever, right? You gotta deal with, that tension between conditional and unconditional.

[00:09:30] What a great way to frame it. So, your book, "Chaos Proof Your Business," I wanna go back and forth between the book and the consulting work that you do. But in the book, "Chaos Proof Your Business," describe what's in there, and if I had a family business, what I would find there.

[00:09:48] And if I don't have a family business, is that a book that might be useful for me as well, or is it really targeted only to family businesses?

[00:09:59] Adam Hatcher: If I can be [00:10:00] audacious and analogize myself to how you and Dave write, having read some of your books, you all write typically for executives and your work resonated with me as a human resources professional.

[00:10:13] But if you're in a company and have aspirations, if you're a leader in any other department, what you all write in a way that anybody who's trying to improve human capability can read it and take something from it. So the book is mostly for people who work in family companies. My hope is if you're a trusted advisor, a CPA, a wealth manager, or a non-family leader in there, you can maybe read it and go, "Oh, that's why my clients act that way."

[00:10:42] I don't wanna touch any of that. The book, Norm, wrestles with the question that we were talking about a minute ago. Why is it that some family companies seem to do really well, and then others are those horrible headlines that [00:11:00] we read about, where the family quits talking to each other, they don't go to each other's funerals 'cause they're mad, the business loses value.

[00:11:08] Why is there a difference? Because in the same way you all believe that you can bring human capability out and maximize it for people's career benefits and shareholder benefits — you can do that. I believe that tension does not inevitably become chaos. I remember talking to a, a matriarch in a family company once, Norm, and they were in a tough spot, and she just said:

[00:11:33] "Why do all family companies end up this way?"

[00:11:37] And I know what she meant. 'Cause when you're in it... like the CEO I told you about, when you're in it, it feels like you're just falling underwater, and you feel like you're the only one it's ever happened to. But what's been interesting, both in my own experience and every family company I've met, and Norm, that's from a few million dollars top line to tens of billions of dollars in valuation.

[00:11:59] It doesn't [00:12:00] matter the size or the industry that you're in. It's a matter of whether you focus on how you work in and own the business together. That's what I found. So what is the difference between the companies that do well and the companies that risk chaos or devolve into it? It's that they realize that the way they work in and own the business together is actually an inner family business.

[00:12:27] I said this to someone once:

[00:12:28] "You know you don't have a family business."

[00:12:30] He said, "What are you talking about? Yes, I do."

[00:12:31] I was like, no, no, no. You have a company. And your company is owned by someone, and that's you and your family, and you and several of your family members work there.

[00:12:43] Your company is that outer layer that everyone sees. You brought up Chick-fil-A, and that's for our listeners, probably all of us have our favorite one near our house. Right? So the outer-facing business sells chicken sandwiches and delicious waffle fries that you need to eat in [00:13:00] the restaurant 'cause they get soggy on the way home, let's be honest.

[00:13:04] And if the Cathy family sold Chick-fil-A tomorrow, if they did that, all of us could still go to that favorite restaurant of ours and buy a delicious chicken sandwich and eat the waffle fries. The outer company would stay the same, but what just changed? It's the ownership. It's the heart of the business.

[00:13:27] Imagine two rectangles. There's the outside one is that company that sells sandwiches. The inside one is every way that they work in and own that business together, and the way you work in and own the company together is its own inner family business. And that is why family companies are the hardest management job on earth.

[00:13:51] And I can tell you this having done it. You are running two businesses at the same time. [00:14:00] You are both running the company and you are running this inner family business.

[00:14:06] I had a CEO patriarch ask me,

[00:14:08] "Well, what's the difference with that?" I said,

[00:14:10] "Fine. Tell me your top performer."

[00:14:12] And he named his vice president of sales.

[00:14:15] I said, "Well, what would happen if,"we'll call him Dave here. I said, "What would happen if Dave left tomorrow?"

[00:14:21] He goes, "Oh, that might be hard to explain it to the customers, and I don't under... yeah, but we could get over it." He said, "A lot of those customer relationships are mine. I could go back and get them."

[00:14:32] He said, "I've got these two people that Dave's been training, and I could put them in. We'd be fine. It'd be hard, but we would be okay."

[00:14:38] All right. He worked with his daughter as well. I said, "Well, what happened if your daughter left?" And he paused. He goes,

[00:14:46] "Why would she leave? Do you know something I don't know?

[00:14:50] Why would she ever leave? Do I need to go talk to her right now?"

[00:14:52] In a completely different emotional reaction. So he didn't name her as the top performer in the business, but the [00:15:00] moment we talked about a family member exiting, he could instantly feel that a family exit is fundamentally different than any other employee.

[00:15:10] That's the difference between a company exit and the inner family business.

[00:15:15] Norm Smallwood: You know, a few years ago, I worked for one of the really big Asian family businesses that I won't name, buteverybody would know this company. And the CEO, chairman, he'd gotten there in two generations, saw his son as being the future CEO, and just saw the family needing to have a family member become the next CEO.

[00:15:48] So the project that he asked me to do was to, how do we prepare son to become the chairman? And, so I laid out a [00:16:00] plan working across the various groups and, big PNL, turnaround, transformation, cross-cultural... The kid was probably in his mid-20s at the time. And so had the project all ready to go, talked to the son, and he said, "I don't want to be the next CEO. I mean, I have no interest in that at all. None."

[00:16:27] And the father had always just had these expectations for the son, and you saw, where that was gonna go. I mean, just really kind of a tragedy in terms of the father not even asking the son, right? Just expecting the son to take on this huge responsibility, which, would've been all-consuming, and the son just not having any interest in it.

[00:16:53] But, that's kind of an example of, I think, what you're talking about. And then this father was [00:17:00] totally disappointed in the boy, and man,I wouldn't have wanted to be involved for the next period of time, right? It was, it was just almost tragic, right?

[00:17:11] As it kind of fell apart.

[00:17:13] Adam Hatcher: And you hear that... okay, I just gotta let the heartbreak set in...

[00:17:21] From one generation you completely understand, I want to see the next generation, and this is the person I think is right, and hey, I've built a successful company that everybody knows.

[00:17:33] Clearly, I've made a lot of right decisions. There's no way I could be wrong about that one too.

[00:17:38] And then from the next generation, that feeling of disappointing an expectation that you never wanted. I remember talking with someone about succession in a family company, and they talked about it like a baton, handing a baton off.

[00:17:53] And having been in a family company myself and then working with others, I said, "Oh, no, no, no. No, no, no." If you [00:18:00] hope a family member succeeds, you've instantly shrunk your talent pool, and your pool of people who may actually be interested in what you saw, the expectations of that job.

[00:18:11] It's more like putting two archers 50 yards apart and having them shoot arrows in the air and making the arrows hit, because you both have to have a role that the next generation wants and is qualified for, and they have to be interested and qualified at the exact moment the controlling generation is ready to let go.

[00:18:35] That's not a baton handoff! Maybe a baton handoff if you're getting chased by somebody to tackle you. And that is the value of family business consulting and why I started doing this.

[00:18:49] Because that issue you ran into, in my opinion, that conversation with the father and son... if I could give family companies one [00:19:00] word or a concept:

[00:19:02] Do Not Drift.

[00:19:05] Don't drift into hiring family, drift into paying family, drift into selling shares or giving away shares, drift into succession or expectations or promotions. The more you think and plan ahead of time, the more you have a chance to keep yourself out of chaos. 'Cause when you work, when you have this conditional, unconditional tension, what you've also created, Norm, is a system.

[00:19:33] Family business consulting is systemic thinking, because if you give one family member a raise, the way you give them a raise will inevitably affect every other family member working in the company. Also, depending on how you do it, that will get out into the family as well. I remember working with a family, and you would have been surprised how many family members, who [00:20:00] never worked in the company, knew either what the person was paid or how they were paid.

[00:20:06] There was a particular family member that was paid three times market value because that's what dad wanted. And the entire extended family knew this. And so I think about your your chairman and son story. What I learned is that there's never a meeting with RBL that I was in where it was y'all's responsibility to look at me, my father, my brother, and say,

[00:20:31] "How are y'all working together?"

[00:20:33] "How are y'all owning this business together?"

[00:20:35] Your CPA's not responsible for that either. If you've got wealth managers, your HR department, your CFO, none of these people is it their job to look at you and say,

[00:20:47] "Do y'all have any unsaid expectations between you?"

[00:20:51] And please, please don't do that in a board meeting.

[00:20:56] But Norm, when you have the tension of a [00:21:00] conditional business and an unconditional family, when you have this inner family business, you're running two entities at the same time. And just like when you have a strategic consultant, an HR consultant, and you're restructuring the company, you have to have a series of company meetings and company working sessions, to create the right structure...

[00:21:19] Your inner family business, and this is what's so exhausting, your inner family business has to have a cadence of meetings, a cadence of structures. That patriarch you talked about, Norm, there's anexercise I love doing. I would've loved to have sat with him three years ago. Imagine this, 'cause this isn't a question I've ever heard Dave Ulrich ask.

[00:21:41] Look at he and his son, maybe if they have daughters, other family shareholders, give everybody one sheet of paper and say,

[00:21:48] "I want you to think five years from now."

[00:21:52] "What headlines do you want written about yourself, this family, and this company?"[00:22:00]

[00:22:00] "Each of you just take a moment, take a couple minutes."

[00:22:04] And everybody does it at the same time, so everyone's giving it the same amount of effort.

[00:22:09] "Write down a couple of things you hope to hear."

[00:22:12] And then, 'cause not all of us are productively paranoid, I also ask,

[00:22:16] "And what's one thing you fear?"

[00:22:18] "Imagine a podcast talking about your family company. What would you never want them to say?"

[00:22:24] And you just take a breath, and then you ask everybody to share. Now, to your listeners that work with their family real quick, I wanna let you know this may scare you.

[00:22:36] That's not the opening exercise, okay? You don't start with that one. But that, Norm, that is inappropriate in a board meeting, a senior exec meeting, a shareholder meeting arguably. That is this meeting of an inner family business. And imagine the moment where your CEO client says, "Five years from now, I imagine my son being patted on the back and greeted by the president of [00:23:00] all these different countries where we do business," and the son writes, "I imagine seeing the next CEO, a non-family member, and congratulating them on their success."

[00:23:11] I'm not saying either one's right, but now we got the issue out before it came into the company and it became unsaid expectations.

[00:23:21] That's the point of these inner family meetings.

[00:23:24] Norm Smallwood: Yeah, that's really nice. Okay, let me be really mean for a second.

[00:23:28] Think about, Twenty One Clear.

[00:23:32] Fast forward five years, ten years, what are the headlines about Twenty One Clear?

[00:23:38] What's something you'd love to see?

[00:23:41] Adam Hatcher: I would love to see a line of family companies who, when we met, there was something keeping them from getting where they wanted. They were trying to get their company somewhere, and they just couldn't, and they were trying to keep their family [00:24:00] together, and something was concerning them either now or on the horizon.

[00:24:05] I talked to a patriarch the other day, or a founder, founded a company, very successful career to this point, would really like to work with his son and his daughter, but called me 'cause he went,

[00:24:15] "I feel like letting them drift into this company after college is not the right way to do it, but I don't know what to do."

[00:24:21] So companies that were trying to get the family and the business somewhere and staying together that didn't have the next step, but together we created a blueprint for them. 'Cause this is what I learned in my own family meetings. Like Norm, we did annual meetings, we had guests in, we had company executives present, we had family consultants, but the thing I always wanted is what you give people.

[00:24:43] And you did this for my family. You helped us build a roadmap for success for our company. Well, your inner family business needs the same roadmap. So when I wrote the book, I created what I called the chaos-proof framework. So when we start with families, [00:25:00] we create rules around how you're gonna hire family, work together, how you exit the business, and then that's anchored in the center by how you build trust with your family.

[00:25:12] And not "I trust you to host a family barbecue." That's family trust. This is, "I trust you as the vice president of sales." My father trusting me as a minority shareholder, or somebody trusting their uncle to be the new CEO of the business and steward it into the next generation. That's what I mean about trust, anchoring, hiring, working, exiting.

[00:25:36] And then around that is the framework of your inner family business. How you all run your inner family business. How you run family meetings. Are they monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, annually? How you do that, what you talk about, what the structure is, how you've structured ownership. That's what I wanna leave people, because when that is healthy, when the way you work in and own the [00:26:00] business together is getting better year after year, and you're doing the smart work to grow your company, I mean, Norm, there are academics that have studied this for decades.

[00:26:11] You can propel your business and your family to incredible places. I would love to look back in decades and see that. And one thing that excites me... I'm going to admit the threat to the business, all right? 'Cause I feel like that's where you were gonna go, so I'll get there. So the threat to the business is the same threat to yours.

[00:26:31] You can go into Gemini, Claude, OpenAI, and you can say, "Lay out a cadence of family meetings."

[00:26:39] I've done this just to see what it gives back, and it might give you a template that you could copy and paste. But what I've learned is that families do not need the same roadmap. There are basic tenets we all need, that chaos proof framework, but what you need and where you are, if someone tries to [00:27:00] sit you in a rigid framework, it's ultimately not gonna work for your unique family and company.

[00:27:06] And even if you get a really smart agenda, when your brother steps out of line in the meeting, do you wanna be the one to tell him?

[00:27:16] The magic of this and what Twenty One Clear does with families is helping them prepare for and facilitate family meetings in the same way you all help people facilitate strategic planning and HR working sessions and company restructuring.

[00:27:33] Don't do that on your own. Use a book to get your head around it and then bring someone in to help. That's what we do, setting families up to have an ongoing cadence of meetings.

[00:27:42] Norm Smallwood: You know, and what comes through as I hear you talking about it is just the empathy that you've got around that tension between the unconditional family and the conditional business.

[00:27:58] That's the [00:28:00] tension and the empathy I don't think Claude's gonna take the place of somebody to give good advice that recognizes the difficulty of navigating that. So- that's pretty tough. So we've gone through your background and what prepared you to do what you're doing today, right?

[00:28:21] With your education, with working as a lawyer, with working inside your family business, leaving the family business to start something that really built on everything that you'd done in the past, right, from childhood, and now bringing that to your clients and helping them to chaos proof their business in ways that you can only be helpful because of all of that preparation that you've had.

[00:28:53] So if we were to sort of end here on, you know, advice to owners of family businesses, [00:29:00] what would you say, right? What would your last words of wisdom be here as we conclude here today?

[00:29:06] Adam Hatcher: Let me repeat one, and thenthe other's gonna be in a story that you were involved in, in our work together.

[00:29:13] All right, so first is Do Not Drift. If you are currently working with your family, if you are thinking about working with your family in a company that the family owns, the more time you give to that inner family business and to intentionally building a framework, rules, governance, communication in it, to purposefully working on alignment, communication, and trust between you, the healthier you're gonna be.

[00:29:43] And when you bring in somebody like RBL to really get your company to the next level, you will give it the rocket fuel it needs versus dragging that work backwards. Do Not Drift.

[00:29:53] And when you start with family meetings or having these conversations, we said that the [00:30:00] family is a system, and I encourage families, when you start thinking about the family that is in and around the company, this may make you nervous, but I want you to open the lens up at first as wide as you can get.

[00:30:14] I sat down with a family once, and they had the son and the daughter that were in the business, and the mother and father who owned it, but there were several other siblings who weren't there. And as we went through the first meeting, I asked them to consider for the next meeting bringing all of their spouses and bringing the siblings who weren't there.

[00:30:32] Now, that may not be the answer for every family, but those perspectives are valuable because the decisions you make in the company resonate, and the family can add value. And here's where you came in, Norm. I'd done about 20 years of meetings with my own family, and while you and I were doing work with my family's company, I was the bridge from the company to the family council.

[00:30:54] My sister has not worked in the business. She's smarter than me and my brother combined, but she has [00:31:00] made other career decisions. But she had two decades of family business experience and a multilingual technologist with a Fortune-level company. And you had pushed us to try to distill into three words the leadership brand of our company.

[00:31:16] And through all the work we'd done with the executives and the senior leaders, we had found the first word and the second word, but that third word we just couldn't get. There was a concept, but we couldn't get it. And so I was giving an update to the family council, which includes my sister, and I said, "I just wanna let you know where we are, and this is what we're creating, and this is where we're stuck."

[00:31:39] And my sister had sat with her experience, her education, and her inner family business experience. She thought for a minute and said,

[00:31:47] "Adam, isn't this it?"

[00:31:50] And the word she threw out was just a half step off. You grabbed her word and then found the word we were looking for. It was my sister, not [00:32:00] working in the business, but being a smart and engaged member of the company, that found the third part of the company's leadership brand that then was put back into the business.

[00:32:10] Had she been excluded from family meetings, we would've never gotten the benefit of that. So it's not always the right answer, depending on family maturity and age, but do not drift. And when you start these meetings, open your lens up past your employees.

[00:32:28] Norm Smallwood: You know, I met your sister a few times, and she is pretty good.

[00:32:34] So lucky to have that resource too. Adam, thank you. It's great when you see somebody who's been raised to do what you now do. I mean, everything in your life has prepared you to be an amazing resource to people who have family businesses, who are looking to manage the tension, and who [00:33:00] are, on the business side, able to work with somebody who knows how to do that, who knows how to, have a strategy, build capability for the strategy, and grow the business.

[00:33:11] So, thank you. And, what an amazing story you've had, and you're still writing it, and blessed to have you on this show here today. So thanks so much, man.

Outro
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[00:33:24] Norm Smallwood: listened back through the end of this interview, and --that line Norm says at the end, "As you continue to write your story," sat with me. My hope for you, no matter where you are in your family business journey right now, if you are just starting in the family company, thinking about it, if you are thinking about something new, or you have recently exited, or you're two, three, 10 years out of your family company and continuing on your journey another way, wherever [00:34:00] you are, I hope you have someone saying that to you, too.

[00:34:03] Continue to write your story and continue to move forward. Everything we do with Twenty One Clear is meant to either provide supportive consulting or resources to family companies to help you think about that inner family business. I hope that last story about Norm's client, you got to see the difference and the power when you pair up smart company advice, like what Norm provides, with sh- or with strong inner family business advice that brings in that systems thinking, because you have so many generations and identities wrapped up when there's a family company.

[00:34:43] I hope that was helpful to you. I hope you've enjoyed this. If you haven't listened to the first two episodes where we go through Norm's four stages of leadership, I encourage you to go back and pick those up. I enjoyed them a lot. We hope you will join us next time in the next episode, [00:35:00] and as my grandfather would have said, thank you so very, very much for listening.

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