Transitioning Family Business Wealth

We had the pleasure of recently hosting our first live webinar! Darrell interviewed Dr. Tom Deans, The New York Times Top-Ten author of Every Family’s Business. With more than 1 million copies sold, it remains the best-selling family business book of all time.

Dr. Deans has delivered more than 1000 keynote speeches in 26 countries and he discussed how his family successfully transitioned three of their public and private businesses. If you have seen Dr. Deans on CBC or BNN you’ll know that he delivers a fast-paced, entertaining and informative message.

Also part of the conversation was Erica McGuinness. Erica is a Vice President with Sequeira Partners, where she provides transaction advisory services to private business owners and entrepreneurs. Since its inception in 2010, Sequeira has completed over 55 transactions with a combined enterprise value of over $3 billion.

The webinar focussed on the following topics

• transition a business to family or outside the family
• protect family wealth in an operating business
• begin important family conversations about estate planning

If you are interested in learning more, please watch the above clip for a teaser and click the following link to watch the full video:

Here are the timestamps of some of our highlights:

2:45 – Is the subject (Transitioning Family Business Wealth) as well talked about now as it has been in the past?

6:05 – Your book offers 12 common sense questions a business owner needs to ask. Can you give an overview of 2 or 3 of the most important questions?

9:45 – Is it the problem of the business owner not wanting to ask, or the next generation not wanting to answer these questions?

14:29 – Darrell’s favourite question from Tom’s book, “Is there sufficient valuation being done and how are they funding the tax consequences?”

20:05 – Erica shares an example of a family business with an initial failed transaction & the pre-sale process to fix it.

25:56 – A lot of our clients have built a real estate business or investment business, do the same principles apply?

28:00 – Erica builds off of Tom’s comments and shares another example of a family business transaction she’s worked on.

33:25 – Tom discusses teaching the next generation to explore and that failure is okay with the capital they gain from selling businesses.

36:44 – “Creating generational wealth is a different goal”

38:50 – Fear of “founders syndrome” – being defined by what you do or what you did.