Families are complicated. Farming is complicated. Family businesses are complicated. So family farm businesses? One might say they’re the most complicated.

Tom Hubler is a well-known expert in family businesses: he's appeared on television and has been quoted in places like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He lives in St. Paul, MN, and we were fortunate to have him present at our 2020 Customer Summit.

Welcome to 2020! To celebrate the new decade, we’re pulling a meaty tidbit straight out of the heart of The Soul of the Family Business by Tom Hubler and learning Hubler’s five secrets of highly successful family-owned businesses. While obviously these are not the be-all-end-all of success (these tips occupy merely a few pages of a lengthy and insightful book), they are fundamental lessons that can be taken alongside more detailed explanations and strategies found within the rest of the book and this website. For more information, consider picking up The Soul of the Family Business, but without further adieu, here are five secrets of highly successful family-owned businesses:

Tom recently presented Creating A Common Vision for a Family Enterprise at the Restaurant Finance & Development Conference in Las Vegas, NV. To listen to the audio session, please click play below.
​For the accompanying slides, click here. 

“What is forgiveness?” Yes, this sounds like a silly question, doesn’t it? Many of us would immediately respond, “jeez, the answer is so obvious,” but before you write off the question, really think about it. Is it as obvious as it seems, or is forgiveness a concept that is more than a bit tricky to put into words? For our purposes, we like Dr. Frederic Luskin’s definition from his book Forgive for Good.
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Forgiveness is the feeling of peace that emerges as you take your hurt less personally, take responsibility for how you feel, and become a hero instead of a victim in the story you tell. Forgiveness is the experience of peacefulness in the present moment. Forgiveness does not change the past, but it changes the present. Forgiveness means that even though you are wounded, you choose to hurt and suffer less. Forgiveness means you become part of the solution. Forgiveness is the understanding that hurt is a normal part of life. Forgiveness is for you and for no one else. You can forgive and rejoin a relationship, or forgive and never speak to the person again.

Thank you to Nancy Meyer with WeMentor for inviting me to discuss family business ownership,  building a family legacy, the Top 10 Obstacles in Succession Planning, and of course, The Soul of Family Business on her "WeMentor Mondays with Nancy" podcast.

I am honored to have been featured in two episodes of WeMentor Mondays and hope our discussions help the family business owners or members  who listen.

​“Forgiveness can seed a new beginning in our relationship with a betrayer. Forgiveness allows us to understand that “to be wrong is nothing, unless you remember it,” as was so wisely stated by Confucius. Forgiveness helps clean the slate for you and others. Because family members love one another, forgiveness is essential so that relationships can be renewed after a betrayal.” –Tom Hubler, The Soul of the Family Business

​Last week we broached the sticky subject of betrayal within family businesses. We covered how the overlapping circles, interconnected responsibilities, and sometimes unclear expectations that come with working alongside family can make family businesses a landmine of potential betrayal, both intention and accidental. But while the best medicine for betrayal is avoiding it in the first place, today we’ll discuss how to overcome betrayal once it’s already happened, which means jumping into the process of forgiveness and Family Forgiveness Rituals™.

The Soul of Family Business by Tom Hubler is being promoted in Brazil's Revista Empreendedor. 

​Founded in 1994, Revista Empreendedor is based in Florianópolis, Brazil. The business magazine aims to promote entrepreneurship and to support Brazilian entrepreneurs by presenting business opportunities and best management practices for innovation and sustainability. ​

Author Tom Hubler explains how it helps both the business and the family.
By Chris Farrell, Unretirement Expert

Most family business consultants talk about the nitty-gritty finances of running an enterprise successfully. But to Tom Hubler, a St. Paul, Minn.-based pioneer in family business consulting, it’s all about “soul.”

A former therapist, Hubler is a founding member and fellow of the Family Firm Institute in Boston, which is now international, with over 10,000 members. For more than a decade, he has taught family business management at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. Hubler, 77, recently published The Soul of Family Business: A Practical Guide to Family Business Success and A Loving Family and I met with him at a St. Paul coffee shop in St. Paul to discuss it. Highlights:
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Last month, we started our discussions of Inside-Out Succession Planning™, a framework for creating plans to move the business from a current (and often original) owner. Transferring a business from a founding generation to new ownership is a hurdle at which many otherwise successful businesses fall. This is not necessarily due to incompetence on the part of either the new ownership or the founder, but rather a failure to take into account all the complexities involved in smooth, financially and emotionally healthy transfer of power and leadership.

Not many would argue against the idea that a funeral home’s history and its values are central to the firm.
That history and those core values are also central to the experience you offer families, too, says Tom Hubler, a sought-after family business consultant with about 40 years of experience in helping family-owned businesses overcome obstacles and thrive.

One of the single hardest aspects of maintaining a successful family business is transferring it from one generation to the next. Only a third of family-run businesses will survive the transition from the first generation to the second, and while this is often attributed to the founding member’s singular vision, singular leadership style, or singular business mindset, the truth is that many of these failures are not due to a new generation unable to live up to the founder’s ideals but rather the founding generation failing to adequately create a smart succession plan.

​Far too often, businesses become “family” businesses without much prior thought: “A small business needs new employees to expand, so why not hire the kids?” “We have a new role to fill, and our cousin seems good at that, so it just makes sense.” “My business is my life, so of course I’ll make it a part of the family; why wouldn’t I?” Decisions like this are often the default position, and it’s easy to see why. We know our families. We (generally) understand trust them, and even if they aren’t perfect, we’re used to dealing with their faults. Hiring outsiders can be a long, stressful, imperfect process and as the old adage goes, “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

Thank you to getAbstract for selecting The Soul of Family Business as their Editor's Picks Abstract of the Week!  View the abstract and recommendation below.

We’ve discussed nepotism—the act of those in power favoring friends and family members when hiring, promoting, or building a business—before, but now it’s time to talk about the flip side of this phenomenon: entitlement. While entitlement can exist in senior generations of a family business, it’s most commonly associated with younger generations, where younger-generation family members feel entitled to certain rolls or positions of power or authority in a business by virtue of simply being related to the business owner or leader.

As a fan of classic films, I am always searching for films that apply to family businesses. I recently viewed the 1936 film, Dodsworth, that stars Walter Houston in the title role, as well as Ruth Chatterton and Mary Astor. Dodsworth, an entrepreneur, owns an automobile manufacturing company, who sells his company and retires without a plan for his future—not unlike many real-life entrepreneurs.

As soon as Dodsworth retires, his wife, Fran, begins to plan their extensive trip to Europe and throughout the process both Dodsworth and Fran encounter differences in their expectations for the trip. Their differences are similar to what my former colleague, Jeff Rothstein, referred to as “What’s the Deal?” Jeff’s assumption was that all couples have an implicit “deal” that is never spoken about and governs how they interact with each other. Jeff posited that when couples move into their 60s, they begin to discuss and question their expectations for their golden years. From Jeff’s perspective, this is an opportunity to dialogue and recalibrate your expectations and come to a common understanding about your future together.
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Nearly all couples have implicit, unmentioned, assumptions about their marital relationship. As couples get older and consider retirement or changing their work relationship, many have not considered a plan for the future. They have no resources, no practice, no roadmap, and when they look ahead, they feel adrift.

Read the rest of the article at StrategyDriven.