About this blog

Seeking Successionsm will be mostly about business succession planning, my passion. I will be discussing the internal and external factors that impact the continuation of a business legacy through the next generation and some of my bizarre experiences as a dedicated family business succession planner. Trust me, if you walked in my shoes you would learn that facts are stranger than fiction. To share with you some thought and philosophy, I believe that family owned businesses are the cornerstone of any economy. However, these potentially hyper productive entities, by their very nature, have unique challenges. In fact, a family owned businesses is monumentally impacted by an internal contradiction: Family is a forum of unconditional acceptance based upon the sperm lottery and business a forum of conditional acceptance based upon “what have you done for me lately.”   With this as a foundation, based upon the combined 100+ years experience within TRG (The Rawls Group) I can further offer this contention that you can not run a family like a business and you can not run a business like a family. The inevitable excitement that I encounter on a daily basis is the unpredictable changes between family and business priorities.   For the sake of discussion, I define a family owned business as one where in two or more people are in business together for reasons other than money.  If you are in business with a partner, you probably know him/her as well as or better than any of your immediate family. My goal for Seeking Successionsm is to build a forum to inform business owners, partners, family members, key managers and vendors on the critical factors that impact Succession Successsm. I’ll define Succession Successsm for you on my next contribution. Furthermore, since most of my clients are in business in which I have a keen interest, I may also write about some of these interests such as automobiles, beer, wine, boating, books, travel or what ever. I’ll be in touch.