Patricia Annino
When someone’s in a crisis, the line between family and business can be very blurred. People don’t want to deal with things that they feel they might not feel they have control about, or things that might be unpleasant in the future. People don’t want to deal with uncertainty, with death, with disability, with succession planning, especially founders of businesses. They like to believe that they can’t take themselves out of the picture, they can’t themselves out of the equation, and so motivating that type of person to do what they need to do proactively can be very difficult. I can think of a family where the father who had been in charge forever had a massive stroke, and lived, but was no longer able to function. The question came in, who’s going to be in charge, what authority is, and it was a very scary case to the family because he was still communicating with them. So it wasn’t like he was completely taken out of the picture, he was sitting in a chair, watching the dynamic, although a shadow of his former self. When there’s uncertainty, about the health and recovery of someone like that, and you’re the son or the daughter or the wife, and you’ve been living with an authoritative figure for a long time, for you to now find the will in the middle of a family crisis to come in and say it’s going to be up to us to figure out how to deal with this without direction from him but while he’s watching is an incredibly difficult discussion. The reality is, and this is what I was finally able to get through to them was that whether he recovered or didn’t recover, somebody needed to be in charge now, and somebody needed to step in and take the authority and deal with the company as it’s currently going and if he recovered, they wanted to believe that he would recover, things would change again. My role would be to have a family meeting and open up the discussion about what this means, and then bring in the right team of advisors to be able to deal with those questions. I would only be one member of that team. If I had come in to aggressive at the beginning, the process would have stopped. So by saying to them, where are you now as a family, dealing with this business, let’s just take one step. Let’s go in on an interim basis, let’s do what we need to do and understand it’s not the final step. He may recover, he may not recover. I can't tell you that. But I can tell you that I think we need to make this next step. And that is what is really important as an advisor, to be an active listener. To understand what they’re trying to tell you and be where they are. You can push them but you can’t catapult them, it doesn’t work. Because when you’re dealing with the family and the business component, there’s a pace that gets set and it’s your job to work with that and keep advancing, as you can, to move the whole situation forward.