What I Learnt From My Family Business

Scott Carr talks about the three lessons he learned from growing up in a family business.

I don’t think any of us see it as a safety net, because I don’t think any of us look at it being like, that’s what I want to do for the rest of my life is do the family business of a flower shop. I think we each have our own ambitions, our own goals, what we’ll end up doing, who knows, maybe the four of us will end up going into business together and open Carr’s Flower Shop chain. But I think more than anything it’s taught us really important life lessons. Things that maybe it’s our parents that taught us through the family business, but I guess the three big lessons that we learned was number one, people who understand people tend to go a lot further than people who don’t. My father is very much someone who is compassionate and really understands what people care about very quickly and he kind of taught us that, to a certain extent, and taught us the importance of that in life. The second thing, the second lesson I guess that we learned was look at it from the bigger picture. So when it’s your family business, you can’t just look at one thing and how to improve that thing, you have to look at all the consequences of each and every single action that you take on the bigger picture. And then when you go into either a small organization or a big organization, all of a sudden, it’s not about your job, it’s about how what you do impacts everyone else around you. And it goes back to really understanding the big picture. If you understand the big picture and you’re constantly working towards improving the big picture, you tend to get a lot further. And lastly, I guess it would be work life balance. When we’re young we have a tendency to want to work, work, work, but at the end of the day, if there’s one thing that he’s taught me it’s that you need to take the time away from work also. So take those family vacations, take that time to really spend it with the individuals that you care about around you because you won’t get that time back, so enjoy it.