The term family business started being used to signify that a business is more about values and what it’s doing in the community. I tend to find that family businesses usually have a much longer vision of the business, they have an intergenerational thing.

I had been arguing with the folks for weeks and weeks about what type of technology we needed in the school, what courses we needed to be running, how we were marketing, and everything else. We argued because I had a different, more long-term vision than they had. Only later did I discover that this is a really interesting dynamic that is a natural part of succession planning.

The biggest pros of being in a family business is that there are shared values like you're working with people who you have a long-term vested interest in.  I suppose the con of that is you never really get a break.

The Five P’s of Successful Succession is a framework for family businesses. The P’s are purpose, pick, prepare, promote and patience.

Many family businesses fail at the second generation, not necessarily because the second generation is not good enough but because the first didn't plan for succession. A lot of the time it’s because the culture of the business was not set up in a way to actually handle the stress of a change of direction or a change in leadership. It was stuck in the old ways and that's why it isn't able to adapt.

We did an exercise where we asked our team what the core values of the business were. I was really curious because these are different people from different businesses in completely different industries that we were involved in. Turns out, the core values were the same. The first one is do the right thing, the second one is humbly proud and the third one is inclusively empathetic.

By talking about values and purpose, you can attract the right talent - people who are attracted by something more than just the bottom-line money. Those are the people who can really get involved and help you at an early stage.

Hogan Assessments identify six different types of leaders, ie, the results leader, the process leader, the data leader, the thought leader, the social leader and the people leader. The question is what type of leader do you need for the next five years, 10 years, 15 years, and then where do you go from there? And that's all built around the purpose.

The transition period from one generation to the next should not be longer than five years. The biggest thing is for the current generation, especially founding current generations, is to let go.Once you've decided to step out, you can't reach back in.

A lot of family businesses, especially the bigger ones that employ a lot of professional staf, will have a family constitution. They will have a proper document drawn up, agreed to by the family, which states what the family is going to do.