How to Start a Family Covenant?

Listen to Lena as she explains the development of a family charter. Though developing a charter proved to be challenging, as elements of the business are constantly changing, it is important in a family business to create a project that all members can be involved in.

Making this first book, or this edition of the family charter, it took us almost, I think, one year. Even if we thought we had it all in the paper, but when we started working, we realized that at every point there was a new question, “hey what does this mean? What does this mean in the future?” And at some point we got really frustrated, we thought, ok, when we are done with this, everything has already changed. Or, when we were just about to print it we realized that ok, there’s a lot that maybe has already started changing. Then we just decided, so, we’ll do this, the process was the most important thing, because the process involved everybody, so we as the family council at that point took it part by part and then we sent it to everybody for comments. And somebody chose to say “its fine for me”, and some other people wanted to get a little bit more involved, even if they were not in the family council, and they came back with comments and that’s how it was really a great process and we realized this is what we need to do, so after three years actually we decided to do the second edition and it grew, so now it’s not so small anymore.