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| Building Your Family's 100-Year Plan: The Series |
100 Year Plan Part IV: Commerce and Consensus
Dwight Cass
03/01/2004
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An inflexible family creed will serve succeeding
generations poorly as it becomes increasingly irrelevant or restrictive. Indeed,
the key to success of any business is flexibility, and the family creed must
provide latitude for change, especially if it is meant to function for
generations. The EGW family creed, for example, explicitly notes that it may be
revised by a two-thirds vote of the family council. “Where you can go overboard
is having a document that dictates too much rather than being a guiding and
flexible document,” Murak points out. “That’s the beauty of our Constitution.
The successful family creed helps you build a framework, but doesn’t give you
every nail.”
The Business of Families
Overlooked in many case studies of successful
family business control transitions is the important role of the family itself.
Wach notes: “One of the things I really believe is that if you want to have a
good family business, it’s important to have a good family!” The Wach family
meetings involve some time for everyone to blow off steam, have some fun and
catch up. That time is especially important because two of his sons live in
Buffalo and two live in Raleigh, where the firm has its North Carolina office.
It may seem obvious, but given the often-fractious state of many families,
the health of a family’s relationships is the crucial factor in the success or
failure of any family business. If, for example, the Molina family was not a
cohesive group of individuals who respected one another enough to listen and
consider different points of view, assembling the consensus necessary for its
most recent transition—into a public company through one of the first successful
initial public offerings of 2003—would have been all but impossible.
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