ILMA Compoundings September 2016 - 31

FAMILY BUSINESS

taking care of the family and meeting the needs of the family.
Successful families will build on their ability to know when they
need to lean toward the family and when they need to lean
toward taking care of the family.
So, how can we as advisors help our clients deal with this growing
complexity? How can we help them keep up with the pace
of change? How do we help them leverage the competitive
advantages of a family firm - the patient capital; the long-term
thinking; the quick decision-making and lack of bureaucracy?
The answer is that business success and succession planning are
not enough.
To achieve the goal of continuity for a family business across
generations, and to manage the tremendous complexity they
face, we need to shift from succession planning to having
a family strategy for unity and cohesion. It is the unity and
cohesion of the family that will sustain the business across the
generations, not the success of the business. The business
success is necessary, but not sufficient.
So, what do I mean by family strategy? A family strategy is an
articulation of the vision of what a family wants to accomplish
together across time, and concrete goals, strategies and
objectives that will lead to the fulfillment of that vision. Up
until now, our field has centered this conversation around the
business, but our vision of success as a family should be much
broader than that. Our vision of success as a family should
recognize that we as a family are deploying more than just
financial capital in the world; we are also deploying our human
capital, our social capital, our spiritual capital. The focus of our
field on the business(es) does not give us the context to allow
us to engage in the conversation of what is it that will keep us
unified as a family across time, beyond the money, beyond the
specific business that we are in today.

that will allow us to build a cohesive group of family committed
to achieving our vision.
I look forward to the day in our field when we have embraced
the realities of the complexity of the family business system and
realized that if a family can define a vision of success as family
that keeps them unified across time, then we can build the family
strategy to achieve that vision.

Keyt is executive director at the Loyola University Chicago Family
Business Center. He is also president and founder of Keyt Consulting,
a private firm that assists family enterprises with succession and
strategic planning, dealing with family conflict and communication,
working with adult sibling/cousin teams and executing emergency
management transitions. He will be the featured Family Business
Session speaker at the ILMA 2016 Annual Meeting. He may be reached
at info@keytconsulting.com.

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Shifting our focus to building a family strategy allows us to enter
into this conversation. Our family strategy will allow us to share
a common vision for the future of not just the business, but a
common vision for how we will nurture the unity and connection
within the family across generations.
The outgrowth of this conversation is our family strategy.
A successful family strategy should make it clear for family
members "Why do we want to stay connected?" It should
articulate a common sense of purpose and values. It should
articulate goals and strategies for communication, governance
and decision-making, wealth management and business planning

Compoundings September 2016 * 31 * Vol. 66 No. 9

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ILMA Compoundings September 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of ILMA Compoundings September 2016
