Family Business Dynamics, with Savannah Suttle

Do you want to grow and scale a family business, but family business dynamics are getting in the way? 

Unlock the secrets to harmonizing family business dynamics and business operations with Savannah Suttle from Schema Consulting to reveal the powerful impact of psychotherapy and marriage and family therapy techniques on family-run businesses. You’ll learn how to navigate the complex interplay between evolving family roles and business practices, ensuring a cohesive approach to tackling both personal and professional challenges, especially during generational transitions.

Discover the keys to balancing business needs with employee well-being as we tackle the intricacies of role reassessment and transparent communication. Savannah shares her wisdom on creating win-win scenarios where individual growth and business success go hand in hand. We discuss the critical importance of addressing difficult decisions head-on, fostering a culture of open dialogue that prevents fear and conflict avoidance, and underscoring the necessity of placing the right people in the right positions for maximum team morale and efficiency.

Finally, we explore the essential strategies for scaling family businesses, emphasizing radical transparency and effective communication. Savannah guides us through the pitfalls of over-relying on long-standing employees without proper succession planning and highlights the importance of nurturing the next generation’s authenticity and innovation. From strategic leadership transitions to fostering a shared vision, this episode equips you with the tools to ensure your family business remains vibrant and appealing for future generations, creating a lasting legacy of wealth and collaboration.

So, if you want to discover how your family businesses can navigate complex dynamics and turn challenges into opportunities to grow your reach, impact, and team … tune in now!

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How Behavior Therapy Leads to Family Business Dynamics

While now Savannah works with family businesses, she got her start in behavior therapy, specifically marriage and family therapy. What’s unique about this field is that it’s a structural form of psychotherapy—if you can change the structure of the family, you can change the dynamic of the family. So changing one piece of the system will change the whole system. 

This structure is very close to, and even overlapping, with business structures. And if you have a family business, the dynamics are even more entwined. What Savannah found is that some of her clients who had family businesses had cemented some of their family dysfunction into their business operations. The problem is that at one point the dysfunction was actually functional, and served a positive purpose at one point. But then, over time, the business/family outgrew those roles or procedures, and yet they left them baked into the process. Those dysfunctions are then difficult to remove because the family has not come to terms with who they have become and what they need. 

 [04:53] “Who you were when you started the business is probably not who you are now. And what you needed then is probably not what you need now.”

Navigating Family Business Growth

One of the ways in which family businesses may fail to adapt is how they scale. It’s one thing to manage a team of 10 people—especially when you know and love them—and another thing to manage a team of 150 people. The challenges of a team of 150 are different even from a team of thousands. 

[09:32] “The problem is when you start scaling and you’ve got a lot of people now, it’s usually a matter of headcount. Then all of a sudden you only have 24 hours in a day and you can’t talk to everybody and build relationships with everybody.”

When you start a small, family business, you typically know exactly who you’re working with and how you’ll be working with them. However, as you continue to grow, you cannot expect these same systems to work with the same results. 

One solution is systematizing your structures so that you’ve got efficient communication in any business structure you may have, rather than having endless catch-up meetings and making people chase information. But if that worked for you with a small team, it may be baked into your business even as it grows, causing some real miscommunication and struggle. What you cannot do is just hope it will get figured out—it won’t. You’ve got to create the structure so that people can fit into it.

Making Tough Decisions

In addition to building your team as you grow, you also need to build the right team, in the right ways. Sometimes, this means that you need to approach certain problems in a way that keeps morale high and strengthens bonds. Other times, this means you need to transition away from people who are not working within your team anymore. This is difficult as a business owner, especially if you have had a long relationship with someone. 

[14:29] “The decision itself is often scary. It’s scarier more than painful… It’s only scary because you think there might be a possibility of a bad outcome. Okay, great—let’s design outcomes that work for everybody. And I know that sounds easier said than done, but it’s actually pretty doable.”

If a team relationship is no longer working for your business, you’ve got to make a change. And you can focus on having positive outcomes and communication through it all. How can you as a business owner get what you need and want, while also having a positive transition with the person in question? 

[16:51] “I think a lot of times people end up getting pretty conflict-avoidant, and conflict avoidance is a recipe for being taken advantage of in business. And that’s true whether you’re the owner or the employee.”

By avoiding what needs to be done, all you can do is stagnate.

Passing Businesses from Generation to Generation

If you’re building a family business, there’s going to come a time when you pass the reigns to the next generation, whether that’s your children or other relatives who have expressed interest and competence in the field. This can be a tricky transition even when it seems like there’s a desire from the next generation because you’re not just handing over a fortune. You’re handing over processes, procedures, employee relationships, culture, and so much more. If the next generation has been involved with the business before transitioning, this might be an easier process. However, even that is not without its challenges.

This also means that right now, if you’re building a family business, you’ve got to start thinking about these things. How will you involve the next generation now? How can you pass on the things you’ve learned, as well as the context in which you learned them? You have got to prepare your family to take over the business if that’s what you wish.

[32:47] “This is a relay race, it’s not just a solo marathon. I mean it can be if you want it to be, if that’s how you’re going to participate in your life. But if you expect that you’re just going to solo marathon it and then somebody else is going to solo marathon it and there’s not really going to be an overlap or a clear baton pass, you’re setting yourselves up for failure. Because what happens is that the first generation will pave the way, build the things, and kind of hoard all this tribal knowledge and context. They understand how and why they built the things they did, they made the mistakes. Then they have Gen Two come along, who takes over, and if they have not done a good enough job of passing along a lot of that context… Gen Two learns that they are not supposed to make mistakes and they are not supposed to change anything… [they] just need to keep the wheels on the wagon.”

This may not seem like such a bad thing until you consider the NEXT 30 years. When Gen Three comes along, if nothing has changed, it’s going to seem terribly outdated and there are going to be so many questions and hurdles that could be impossible to overcome. They might not even want to take up the mantle. And so while the business lasted beyond you, it still doesn’t have lasting power.

[35:18] “The vision itself is not sufficient. You have to allow for people to step into their own authenticity within a framework of collaboration. They have to figure out how to continue working as a team. They have to figure out how to incorporate change.”

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