Good morning,

We hope you are well.  Our theme this month is "letting go" and our lead article outlines the five essential steps required to make the transition from one generation to the next.  We are also excited to include Martin Stepek's "Reflections on my Father's Life and Business". We hope you find these compelling reading.

If there is anything we can help you with, you are welcome to contact us here or call us on 0141 222 2820. 

Very best regards,
The FBS Team

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Retiring, and letting go of control and ownership of the family business is for many owners the hardest job of all. Emotionally it can be very difficult for a number of different reasons, such as:

• worrying whether the next generation is ready, able and willing to take over,
• having to “choose” among their children,
• a reluctance to face up to retirement  coupled with fears about death, and loss of control and identity.

A recent survey found that six out of 10 family business owners aren’t going anywhere, with the majority saying that they would be working beyond the age of 65. A significant number of those indicated that this was a sore point in the family.

Yet given that the average age of the owner is now 58, it’s clear that letting go one way or another will happen – often in circumstances beyond their control. Some will die with their boots on, while others may be laid low by illness. The  “shock” departure of the owner can have a catastrophic impact not just on the family but also on the business.

Letting go gracefully not only reduces the potential for tensions and conflict in the family caused by the uncertainty of the owner’s future plans, it also provides certainty and stability for the business and other interested stakeholders such as the employees.

In their book, Family Business Succession: The Final Test of Greatness, Craig Aronoff and John Ward identified the steps required to make the transition from one generation to the next. These can be summed up as:

• preparing the owner
• developing the next leader of the business
• preparing the business
• preparing the family
• preparing the new ownership team.

Read the full article here

1. Heritage

My father, Jan Wladyslaw Stepek, was born into a land-owning family business in Poland in 1922. At the age of sixteen he became a student at agricultural college but this was interrupted the following year when Hitler's Germany invaded Poland from the west, followed two weeks later by Stalin's Red Army from the east.

In February 1940 the family, except for his father who was in hiding in the resistance, were removed from their home by Soviet soldiers at gunpoint and sent to political labour camps in Siberia. After eighteen months they were freed and had to make their way to freedom in Persia, modern day Iran. By the time they arrived my grandmother was so malnourished and exhausted she died of starvation in Teheran, where she is buried.

Dad survived typhus, two bouts of dysentery and six months with malaria in 1942. He joined the Polish Navy and served for the rest of the war. On being demobbed in Britain he discovered that his father had died in 1943, of cancer. The Soviet Union now occupied Poland and had annexed the Eastern half where Dad had lived. His family home had been destroyed.

So at the age of 23, in a four year period Dad had lost his two parents, his home, and his country.

He never let go of his Polishness or his love for his country. But to cope with the sheer scale of his loss he devoted his new life in Scotland to ensuring that his new family - he married a young Scots-Irish woman Teresa Murphy from Cambuslang - were safe and secure. Business was the way he intended to achieve this.

Read the full article here

Two major family business conferences are being held in Edinburgh on 25 April and in Inverness on 9 May. These events are being put on by The Goodison Group in Scotland (GGiS) and its strategic partner Scotland’s Futures Forum, in collaboration with the Scottish Family Business Association, Bank of Scotland, Strathclyde University, Queen Margaret University, University of the Highlands and Islands, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Wright, Johnston & Mackenzie LLP. 

By way of background, GGiS is a charity primarily funded by Lloyds TSB Scotland, but also by Scottish Power and The Royal Bank of Scotland. It brings together people from education, business and government and one of its aims, amongst others, is to create a culture of enterprise in Scotland.

George Stevenson, the managing director of FBS, is on the steering committee and has been instrumental in putting together the conference programme.

The purpose of the events is to examine, through some brilliant short pieces of drama, specifically created for these events:

• the range of  issues that are  unique to  family businesses;
• how these issues impact on the family  and the business; and
• the consequences of those issues for the families, the businesses, their communities and by extrapolation, Scotland as a whole.

At the end of the two events there will be a shaping of what Scotland's family businesses really need, and how government might help make that happen. The Goodison Group is highly influential in government circles and hopes to be the force to make the major breakthrough family businesses need. Another hoped-for outcome of the events is to have a clear set of objectives with which to go for major European funding in order to get the resources to deliver what's most needed.

If you would like to attend ones of these free events please send an email to enquiries@twobridge.co.uk. Further details will be forwarded nearer the time.

FBS was established in 1996 by two of the world’s leading practitioners in the field of family business consulting.

FBS has developed a consulting service that is unique to FBS and that enables FBS to provide help to families in a consistent and cost effective way. It is tried and tested, and more importantly, provides a safe framework within which families can discuss and resolve the issues they face.

This month -

Susan Hoyle is speaking at an event in Dumfries on 24 April. The event is being hosted by Business Gateway Dumfries & Galloway and the topic is “Nothing Succeeds Like a Successful Succession”. Contact Susan

George Stevenson and Liam Entwistle are speaking at the Law Society of Scotland conference on Navigating the Family Owned Business on 24 April. Contact George

Liam Entwistle is recording a talk on 8th April for the Solictors’ Group called “Is Nepotism a Dirty Word? Employment issues in the Family Business”. Contact Liam

Meet the FBS team here

Contact FBS here or call us on 0141 222 2820 to arrange a meeting to discuss your requirements.