NewsBeat

14 NewsBeat July 2017 Back to the Future - of your family business few years back, I worked with a client who was struggling to make some strategic decisions for his company. He had just taken over his family's business and, as is the case with many family businesses, was dealing with some challenging family dynamics set in motion well before he'd come aboard. Even though the defining event — the sudden exit of one of the principles years before — had happened when he was a young adult, the ripple effect of that event was still impacting the family's choices and direction for the future. This got me thinking about the paths family businesses choose, leading me to ask myself, "Are family businesses often forced down a path as a result of past unresolved conflict in the family?" As I thought more about this, I suddenly remembered the scene in the movie "Back to the Future II" where Doc Brown is explaining the space/time continuum path to Marty McFly, and how his going back to 1955 in the first movie disrupted the universe: "Our only chance to repair the present is in the past, at the point where the timeline skewed into this tangent."You may be asking yourself, "What does this have to do with family business?"It's my contention that unresolved conflict in a family business acts very much like Doc Brown's disruption of the space/ time continuum; causing what I call a break in the family/time continuum that influences all subsequent decisions, affecting the path and direction of the family business going forward — and not always for the best. But if the family can "go back in time" in a sense, to resolve or at least honestly address this past conflict, it provides them an opportunity to make strategic decisions based on what is best for the family and the business, rather than having those choices dictated by an unresolved event in the past, as illustrated below. Case Study –— Mismanaged Expectations A good example of the damaging aftershocks created by a break in the family/time continuum was the Payton family, which had started as a mom and pop service business and went on to become a multimillion-dollar enterprise. The parents worked closely together, and all three of their children grew up to join them in the business. But when Dad unexpectedly died of a heart attack, Mom was left vulnerable and lonely – and fell in love with a man who had worked with her for years. Not surprisingly, her adult kids didn't take it well. Her oldest daughter, who was the heir apparent, was especially hurt and angry about what she saw as her mother's betrayal. This had happened five years before they called me in for help, a call that was precipitated by Mom's announcement that she and her new spouse were going to start a competing company, as he had left the family business because of the strife it caused with her kids. She'd delivered an ultimatum; either her new husband would be welcomed back, or she'd move on. What made it even more unwieldy was that she was still working with the family even as her new company was gearing up – and they were competing for the same clients! Now her daughter, who'd been in talks to buy her mother out, was caught in an untenable position between her siblings and Mom, stuck with the fallout of her mom's choices and her own unresolved anger. That's when I got the call. In a meeting with the whole family (including Mom and Mom's new A By DAVID KAROFSKY

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