Introducing the Family Business to the Rising Generation

Listen to David as he shares a personal anecdote regarding the introduction of a family business to the new generation. Introducing the company's history to the new generation can spark passion and loyalty at a young age. This passion is especially important to family businesses who often rely on the next generation as successors of the business.

David Bentall (8) My first memory of thinking about our family business goes back to when I was 10 years of age and my dad came home and he had a box of pins and they had little plastic heads on them. They were all pink – I don’t like pink – but he brought home this box of pink pins, and he said “David, I’d like to begin your orientation to the family business”. And he got a giant map of the city of Vancouver with all the streets on it, and he said every night after dinner, I want to have a chance to orient you to the company. And so every night he’d take out a pink pin and he’d say “David, I want you to find you to find the corner of Berard and 10th and let’s put a pin on there and I’ll describe for you what we did in 1949 for General Motors on that corner. And every night my dad began orienting me to the company. And it was a fun, very intimate time for a father and a son to talk about his life, and what he hoped would be my future. And it was interesting, I was pretty passionate about it, this was daddy time, it was fun for us, he was passionate about his clients and the buildings that he built, so it was a fun time for us. But you know, we ran out of passion long before we ran out of pins or projects to talk about, because he built a lot of stuff.