Over the past four months or so the hugely successful series of Family Business Lectures given by Maitland Mackie of Mackies Ice Cream, Bill Gordon of William Grant & Sons, Hugh Raven of the Ardtornish Estate and Jacqui Walker of Walkers Shortbread entertained and educated several hundred attendees representing a wide cross section of family business members, business advisers and academics.
Looking back, although the businesses were very different, and their family issues impacted in different ways, a number of common underlying themes emerged.
1. Size doesn't matter. When it comes to generational transitions, succession and transfer of ownership, the emotional complexities and inherent conflicts are the same regardless of the scale of the business - the only difference is the number of zeros in terms of wealth or employment at stake!
2. Even when it was clear that family issues and succession needed to be addressed, it was extraordinarily difficult for the family themselves to know how to go about it.
3. Consensus that, for various reasons (lack of appropriate knowledge and skills, not seen by all the family as being truly independent, conflicts of interest etc ), the businesses' own professional advisers were not best placed to provide the practical help and advice needed.
4. Although the solutions to the challenges each family faced were very different, the approach taken was the same – they had had help from a completely independent specialist family business consultant who engaged all the family in a structured process that had clear objectives and was carried out within a realistic but flexible timetable.
5. Recognition that families and their business advisers would be more likely to understand why conflict is built into family business systems, and how to seek out the right help to get organised to tackle it, if they were both better informed and educated about the knowledge and skills needed to govern and manage family businesses. Hence the importance of the hugely valuable ongoing work done in this respect by the Scottish Family Business Association (www.sfba.co.uk ) and the embryonic Strathclyde University International Centre for Family Enterprise.
6. All those who contributed were happy to share their experiences, both bad and good, in the hope that others can benefit - again hugely valuable.
Lessons to be learnt?
By ensuring wider availability of knowledge and specialist support, more of our family business will have a better chance of a prosperous future.
The work of SFBA and ICFE will be crucial and deserve the support of everybody involved in the family business community in Scotland.
