Episode 73: Peter Jaskiewicz on Family Enterprise Legacy and the Psychology of Ownership

This is the pre-succession problem, which is multifaceted, especially when you're selling or have a crisis.

The pre-succession is critical with both practicalities, legal and communication practicalities, but also emotional intelligence and the softer side of communication and transparency.

So it's not just one ticket for a solution for this succession to prevent succession crisis, right?

Absolutely.

So you are head on.

And that was also my first realization.

I realized that you had a charismatic founder or leader and various family members involved, but it was all based on that charismatic, amazing leader.

But there was no formalization.

It was all informal.

So when you remove that person from the board, right, there is no structures, there's no protocols, there's no plans, right? And like so many other family business, we didn't have a succession plan.

And maybe why would you have one when you're in the 50s? So the family was not prepared for contingencies.

Neither was the business.

And that was also my starting point, you know, to look into governance.

into the formalization and then also professionalization, then hopefully institutionalization of governance.

So the enterprise and also the group of owners, right, it's not dependent on a single person, but they have in place what they need to move forward in case something happens.

In a way, we've talked about the succession with several elite people in the industry like yourself.

We've talked about it with...

Wow.

I mean, Emily Bouchard and Martin Rohl and Alfredo de Massis, Massimo Baud, Jennifer East, you name it.

And the succession planning, it's very hard.

It's very important.

But also in terms of legacy, I think what we often talk about is Think about is this respect for legacy.

After discussing this complicated topic of succession with so many guests on the podcast, also reading more about legacy and about next gen in today's world, there's this less spoken matter of the respect, taking care of the legacy, respect for the legacy through the succession planning.

And that succession planning is not just a tactical thing.

practical thing to do or that people tell you to do but it's actually protecting respecting the legacy shareholder agreements governance advisory board experts documents charters communication vulnerability these things all can protect the legacy of the company or the wealth of the family and the company and this is really why i think the this is such a such a complicated topic And related to the broader enterprise, where if the family looks at the legacy as their North Star, essentially, then it would force them to be more prepared.