Thank you for joining us on the path to long-term family business abundance. This journey may extend beyond your lifetime. But don’t let that stop you. If you see your part through, the rewards for you and your family will be immense.

Powerful families have gone before us, big and small; families have been succeeding together for thousands of years, and they do so to this day. You need vision, strength, and courage to join them, and you will judge for yourself, nearly every day, whether the climb is worth the view.

We believe it is.

We believe that for the right people, family business is the best way to become wealthy, to cultivate human capacity, and to make an impact on the world. It can be incredibly satisfying, and at times, even fun to work with the ones whom you love the most.

Rewarding, satisfying, and sometimes even fun. But not easy.

Your aspirations, your family, and your business. Few things in life are more important. Family business provides the opportunity for you to integrate all three. And if you set the proper foundation in place, you can generate abundance for a hundred years or more.

Do you want to build a successful, multi-generational family business? If so, this book is for you, for the people with you today, and for future leaders, yet unborn, who will carry on your mission with purpose and gratitude in their hearts.

There are two core assertions in this book:

This book is about how to lean in. How to make a family business work. Why it’s worth it, how to make it grow, and how to make it flourish. Because when they succeed, family businesses generate long-term abundance.

Consider this a lifeboat for family business owners. If you resonate with our core message, or even if you’re simply curious, then welcome aboard.

This book isn’t for everyone, and it isn’t meant to be.

Most business owners consider their companies a means to an end, a career choice, a gateway to status and respect. They intend to make a good living and then sell their businesses someday. Cash out. Achieve their liquidity event.

That is a fine perspective. It’s all-American, a cornerstone of the economy.

Most family members share a similar perspective. They’re aware of the company, of course; it is part of their lives, an element of their identities. But for them, it’s a means to an end as well, someone else’s business. The company belongs to their mother, their father, or their grandparents, but not to them; it’s related, of course, but separate from their future lives and careers.

If your goal is to sell your business or pursue a different career, we applaud you. In fact, we believe every owner should run his or her business so it is ready to be sold at any time, optimized for the best price and the most positive legacy. If you’re thinking about selling your company please continue reading, because you will improve your chance to achieve a successful transition. The chapters on clarity and scalability will prove especially helpful as you grow your company prior to sale.

However, please keep your mind open, and be aware that social pressure may be influencing your perspective. Today’s culture, led by the media and countless pundits, expects and encourages business owners to get out. Sometimes it seems like you can’t even boot up your phone without encountering an article, an ad, or an email that yells at you to sell. It’s almost as if retirement, going out to pasture, is the only option we have.

Consider the lawyers, the accountants, the valuation experts, the investment bankers and business brokers who are hungry for their next transaction.

What about the wealth managers, eager to invest the proceeds of our liquidity event? What about the private equity firms who want to control what we have, pay the lowest possible price, and then benefit from the profits and growth we might have achieved on our own?

Come now. Let’s be fair; please don’t get me wrong. There are many wonderful advisors and private equity professionals out there. Many are our friends, and some of them are reading this book right now. If you’re in this game for the right reasons, you should be proud of the value you bring to the world. We mean no disrespect, and we love collaborating with you.

There is a right time for everything, including the sale of your business. But be thoughtful, take your time, and manage the process carefully. If you play your cards right, you will achieve a much higher price. You will avoid unnecessary taxes, and you will enjoy much more satisfaction down the road.

And by the way, when you do sell, you can reinvest the proceeds into other ventures that will perpetuate your success across multiple generations.

This book provides an alternative to the conventional point of view, a voice in the wilderness, for those of us who want to remain entrepreneurial, who intend to build family business growth engines that can enable us to thrive together across multiple generations.

By the way, the “we” in this book refers to a small group of us, growing by the day, who belong to the Featherstone firm and tribe. We are entrepreneurs, business owners, family members, advisors, and friends who believe that the family business journey is worth all the effort. We are intrigued by the notion of a Hundred-Year Family, and some of us aim to make it happen. When you read the word “we” in that context, feel free to consider yourself one of us—or not. Your choice.

Consider these numbers:

Totally doable. It has a nice ring to it, does it not?

One hundred years? Think about that. Imagine the relationships you could build in that amount of time, the experiences you could share, the wealth you could accumulate, the impact your family could have on the world.

One hundred people? Certainly. Given five or six generations, it is entirely reasonable to assume that your family and your roster of key executives will expand to include at least that many folks, perhaps substantially more.

One hundred million dollars? That is a no-brainer. If you, your current team, and your descendants work it right, the math indicates far more than that. We will do that math together in a bit. Meanwhile, remember these numbers:

What do you ultimately want for your family, for your company, and for yourself?

This book presents a management system for family business, a set of concepts, tools, and techniques that can help you strengthen your family and your company, so you can build and sustain both across multiple generations.

On the surface, the Family Business Management System is simple. It consists of three mindsets and three building blocks. The mindsets will give you the perspective you need to focus your attention and sustain your conviction when the challenges get tough. The building blocks provide concrete guidelines and techniques you can use to create a sustainable foundation for your family and your business. We will devote a chapter or two to each.

As our friend Mark LeBlanc would say, “What you need to know, and what you need to do.”

A quick note about stories. Every family and individual has one, and so does every business, including yours. Some of the stories inspire us; others sound a warning call. Some are deceptively simple, while others weave complex tapestries across continents and centuries.

This book is filled with stories, all essentially true, but we owe our friends and clients the debt of confidentiality, so we’ve disguised and intertwined most of them.

What is the story behind your company? Did you launch it yourself? Perhaps someone passed it to you across a generation or two. How does your business saga blend with your family story, with your personal tale? Where is the drama, the pain, the conflict? How about the joy, the collaboration and payoff?

How will your story play out, one hundred years from now? Are you up for it?

Perhaps you’re not interested in an extended time frame. Rather, you may be focused on the here and now. That’s fine. You can employ the building blocks to double the size of your business, while increasing your profitability and enhancing your quality. The management system will enable you to achieve a higher valuation and take-out price, when you decide to sell your business.

If you do decide to build and share an enterprise with your family, one that lasts across multiple generations, how can you stack the deck in your favor?

In this book, we will explore each of these questions. Then we will show you how to develop a Scalability RoadMap you can use to guide your progress.

Successful multi-generational family businesses are rare, but with the right perspective and tools, yours can be one of them.

I am committed to this work. It brings me great joy. This may or may not become apparent to you as the book plays out, but that’s not important. This book is not about me. I’m not interested in a book like that, and neither are you. This book is about you. About you and your family.

Think of me as your river guide, much like a veteran you would hire to run the Colorado river. You could travel it by yourself, of course, but you would expose yourself to dangers and delays—rocks, rapids, waterfalls, poison ivy, mountain lions—that you may not wish to handle on your own. At best, heading down alone would take too long, and at worst, your raft could capsize, causing you to lose everything.

I have been navigating family business waterways for decades. I don’t claim to know every rock, bend, and pool, but I’ve paid attention along the way. I’ve survived steep, narrow passages, led many companies, worked with wonderful people, and learned so many lessons.

Some of the perceptions I gained the hard way might streamline your challenge, so you and I will set aside a bit of space at the end of most chapters. Sub-sections like these, brief messages, from me to you, followed by thought exercises, designed to lock it in.

These are thought exercises, so relax. I won’t ask you to pull out a notebook. It usually rubs me the wrong way when authors do that, and besides, most readers don’t comply even if you ask them to. If you do feel inclined to write a few things down as we go on, please go ahead. You’ll get more out of the exercises than the people who don’t.

By the way, Albert Einstein loved thought exercises. He would close his eyes and revel in them for hours at a time, which is often how he encountered his groundbreaking insights. I am no Einstein, and neither are you, but it’s fun to know he would approve.

In this book, we introduce a comprehensive management system you can employ to strengthen your family and your business. The system consists of three mindsets, and three building blocks. Here are a diagram and brief previews of each:

Please Note: This section provides simple summaries and lists. Each of the Mindsets and Building Blocks will have at least one chapter of its own, and there we will dig into each of the underlying lists in more detail.

Family wealth extends far beyond cars, homes, and bank balances. Our culture tends to focus attention on the money and other assets, but family business provides so much more.

The concept of family business abundance asserts that if done right, your business will generate substantial human capital, social capital, enterprise capital, and financial capital, a profusion of wealth that can span across multiple generations.

Many families experience the world through a lens of scarcity, not abundance. This is fear-based thinking, a perspective that views life mostly as a series of compromises, restricted resources, threats from ambiguity, and unrealized dreams. This is not entirely off base, of course; life is filled with trade-offs, but when feelings of scarcity dominate a family’s collective psyche, sad outcomes often result.

The perspective of abundance is far more rewarding. Families who view life through a lens of abundance experience many benefits, and some of those families sustain abundance for a hundred years or more. These people never have perfect days either; none of us do. Nothing is ever perfect. But if you embrace a mindset of abundance, it is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Your family will benefit; we promise.

This is how the building blocks enter the picture, in the form of a simple algebraic equation:

We will spend most of our time together exploring the Building Blocks and discussing how to deploy them to your advantage.

Most businesses in the United States are family-owned; yours probably is too. Family Businesses are a subset of family-owned businesses. This distinction is important, and whether you decide to embrace it or not, your perspective in this regard will have a significant impact on the future of your family.

In this book, a Family Business (intentionally capitalized) is defined as a family-owned business that purposefully involves multiple family members, always as thoughtful stakeholder owners, frequently as strategic contributors, and perhaps as active operators.

The concept of ownership may involve actual shares, legally held, or it may simply involve an emotional connection. The point is that Family Business can only flourish through intentional group effort, involving many, most, or all key family members. Ideally, this effort spans multiple generations, and it directly influences the way family members identify themselves and define their purpose.

Let’s be clear: When it comes to Family Business, the business is a part of the family; it does not stand apart from the family.

In order to perpetuate long-term abundance, you need to continue to grow over time. Do not make the mistake of thinking that selling your business will provide for future generations. At best, that will lead to a scarcity mindset, and at worst, the money will run out much sooner than expected.

Liquidity events are not growth engines. A large bank balance may cover your immediate needs, and it may even take care of your children for a while after you are gone, but it will not last, because it will not be able to grow fast enough. The math is clear:

If you still have an operating business, you are part way there, but you are not completely in the clear. You must keep growing. Without growth and transformation, your family enterprise is destined to peter out over time; entropy will inevitably set in, and competitors with new energy and technology will eat your lunch.