One of the most valuable benefits that a family business can provide to the entire family, and especially the children, are life lessons. There is no greater learning environment than commencing, building and growing a business. Moreover, the benefits do not stop at the practical experiences but extend into the opportunity to explore and discover one’s life passions.
Active Knowledge Question:
Are you allowing your family members to learn and grow through the family business?
In my recent posting, ‘The Accidental Family Business’, I noted three actions that you should (must) take if you are serious about the enduring success of your family business. They were:
- Build the capital value of your business, and by this, I don’t mean profit, which is an outcome but the enduring drivers of that profit.
- Don’t hide the business and all its challenges from the family. Share the wins and losses with them and let them be a part of this life as well.
- Seed an entrepreneurial passion in both your business and your family from the moment each is formed.
Today I wanted to explore the action of seeding an entrepreneurial passion.
In leading a business, you learn a lot about yourself, others and the way the world works. You learn a lot more than any university, or online course could possibly teach you. You learn it first hand and often the hard way, and that’s by making mistakes. But this learning moulds and strengthens you as a person and allows you to understand who you indeed are. It has the potential to make you the type of independent person that will craft a life of enduring success.
A family business can support a family member to discover their natural talents and passions. And to ignite their entrepreneurial passion. Businesses are evolving and dynamic places with lots of interaction and ideas flowing. Allow family members to explore what a family business has to offer them. Do not allocate them to a task that you feel fits them, or you need to be done, but rather allow them to immerse themselves and find their own openings.
This is about building them for their future, not the business filling a need. It is about discovery, experimentation and failure. An entrepreneurial passion is about discovering a need that exists and which excites you and then stepping into it in a way that makes business sense.
This opportunity to learn through the family business will only be opened if the current generation of leaders engage their families in a way that opens the business and all its workings to them. Remember last week’s blog on not hiding the business.
And the encouragement to step up and explore the possibilities will only occur if the family views the business as part of the family and a place of learning, challenge, freedom to explore and to create their individual life.
Your business can allow your children to create the lives you want them to have. Lives that are independent, fulfilled, purposeful and growing. But it is up to you to open this door and to seed their involvement. And this opportunity will not be there forever.
An entirely new level of performance.
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All the best in the success of your business,
Richard Shrapnel
