The Twenty One Clear Podcast

Adam Hatcher: Hey there.

Welcome to the 21 Clear Podcast,
where we talk about anything to help

you chaos, proof your family business
so you can build a great company

with a strong family around it.

I'm your host, Adam Hatcher, the
founder of 21 Clear, and today we're

gonna follow up on our last episode.

In that episode I laid out.

The family business framework, a framework
for running your family business meetings

and putting important elements in place
with trust building in the center.

To let you chaos proof
your family business.

And recently Sarah Davis, who
was our guest in episode three

and is the director of Kennesaw
State's Family Enterprise Center.

Sarah invited me to give a webinar
on a part of the framework.

We covered chaos proof hiring with 13
years as a leader and executive in our

family staffing and recruiting company
is something I was quite familiar with.

And so, this episode and the next
episode, we're gonna take that

webinar and break it into two parts.

Today we are gonna explore the
first part of chaos proof hiring.

So there are four elements to it.

Gonna lay out a case for intentional
family business hiring, and then lay out

the first element with an example, and
then in the next podcast we'll take the.

The end of that webinar and we'll
lay out the last three steps for you.

So if you didn't hear the last episode
on the framework and you want a bigger

picture, just walk back to episode four
and episode five is gonna be the beginning

of chaos, proof hiring, and then part two
of Chaos Proof Hiring will be episode six.

So let's jump right into the
webinar and I hope you enjoy.

Today we're gonna touch this idea of
how you hire well, or we would say, how

do you chaos proof your family hiring?

Because the only way you have a family
business is if you've hired one.

After the founder,

once you have a family business, you hire.

My grandfather hired my grandmother
on the first day that our

family's company was started.

There wasn't really a process, and
I'll spare you the story for today,

but that employment lasted one day
and there are lessons in both hiring,

leaving, running the family business,
working well and building trust in

their single day of working together.

But what is interesting to me
about hiring well and doing it

intentionally, it is the opposite.

The opposite of drifting into
your mom and dad's company.

I live here in Augusta and I was
on the driving range one day.

And there's a guy, we will call
him Victor, here on the webinar.

But Victor was hitting next to me.

We hadn't met, and I asked Victor what he
did and he said, you mean what did I do?

Well, well, tell me about it.

He said, well, my brother Mo and I took
20 years to build a company together.

I said, oh, well, and
how's the company going?

He said, well, I don't work there anymore.

So I asked him what happened.

He said, well, my nephew, my brother
Mo's son, he wanted to join the company.

And I told him that kid
didn't know a thing.

I told him he didn't work hard.

He'd always been lazy and
I wasn't gonna have him.

I was interested now, and he
said, well, we got in an argument.

And after a couple of weeks, my brother Mo
finally said to me, you know what, Victor,

if we don't see my son the same way, then
we don't see business the same way either.

And that was the end.

They didn't have a way to establish
whether or not a family member was

qualified to work for the company.

And also to working together well, they
didn't have a way to resolve conflict

with each other outside of the business.

And I tell you all that story, because
the end of it actually broke my heart.

So the brother Victor ends up leaving.

Mo hire's his son.

About a year later, Mo tried to get
Victor to come back after firing the son.

Victor had moved on with his career.

He came back and helped with one customer
that was key to him, but never returned.

And then Mo the brother died.

Leaving his widow with a company
that was not well run with a family

that was strained and a son who
was estranged away from them.

When I say it's not a problem, it's chaos.

When they say that chaos can
get into a family company and

rip up a company and a family.

That's the stakes when we work
together that we're playing with.

And that's why focusing
on hiring is so important.

'Cause every one of us that has
a family company has to do this.

So lemme give you, in this family business
framework, four steps, and we promised

at the top you were actually going to be
able to get better at hiring family today.

So my encouragement to you, I believe
Kathy Milton, who's on here, is

around a bunch of other people.

Kathy, you may not wanna do this on
a sheet of paper in front of other

people, but if you have a sheet of
scratch paper, put it out to the side.

'Cause there's gonna be a couple
opportunities for you to draft,

ways that you can think about
chaos proofing your hiring, right?

So you have four things to
chaos proof family hiring.

The first one is family hiring criteria.

Then it's a commitment to match
family members to actual jobs.

If you have family criteria and you have
a family member who is qualified for an

actual job in the company, then I'm going
to tell you the next step is to say no.

Meet the family criteria, pair up
with an actual job, but then say no.

And if you get over that third point,
that third objection, then it is

not just drifting into day one, it
is actually vigorously onboarding

family members in a way that is
dissimilar to how you onboard family.

Alright, so family hiring criteria.

I want to tell you all a personal story.

I was at my maternal
grandfather's funeral.

My paternal grandfather started our
family's company, so different one.

I was at my maternal
grandfather's funeral.

We were at the reception after my
grandfather's funeral, and one of his

friends who'd been in a civic group
with him who was older, talked to me

in the line and I asked him what he
did and he had spent about 35 or 40

years scaling a business with his son.

And so I asked him, what's going to
happen for your family company next?

He told me that he was so proud of
his son, said he went to Georgia

Tech and he got an engineering
degree, and they were an engineering

firm, and said Georgia Tech,

and he's worked with me for 25 years
and he's learned all the different

functions and my clients love him, the
employees love him, and he's really

let me become chairman and I am just,
I look forward to turning it over.

We hadn't quite worked out the
ownership yet, but my son can take

over and I was, again, remember I'm
at my grandfather's funeral just

getting appetizers off of a buffet
and I said, wow, you are so fortunate.

That is not the story for so many people.

That was a mistake to say, because then
he said, oh, well yeah, it's not all

that good because my son wants to hire
my grandson, and that kid's an idiot.

He said, he doesn't know anything.

My son's gonna hire him one day and that
boy is gonna tear down everything that

we have spent three decades building.

And I took a breath and thought about
this idea of family hiring criteria

and I said, well, let me ask you, have
you and your son ever sat down and

made a list together of if any family
member ever wants to join the company?

What they would have to do
before they were even considered.

He said, no.

I said, well, lemme tell you this.

I said, in my experience with family
businesses and family owners, I can tell

you this, family owners don't like making
lists and they absolutely don't like

being governed by the lists they make.

But it's way better to argue about bullet
points on a criteria list than it is to

talk about the intelligence of a grandson.

So what I encouraged him to do is
first what is family hiring criteria?

It is a written list

that is for family members, before they
can be considered for the job, any job.

So note this is not I was hired into our
family's company as the general counsel.

This never asked the question, is
Adam qualified as an attorney to be

the general counsel of the company?

It's a prerequisite list and whatever you
put on the list, the two most important

things in creating it is that first
you actually do it, and then you're

as specific as you possibly can be.

So I want to pull back our
curtain and show you the list

that our family company had.

I wanna tell you before I do
though, my father wrote this list

when the company was at about $50
million top line and was regional.

It was increasing and it was an
increasingly complex organization.

I joined in 2010, so when he created
this, we had not gone through 2008

yet, or we're just in the middle.

I'm sorry, we're in the middle
of the 2008, 2009 crisis.

So he's writing the list in that.

But he knows that the company's gonna
bounce back and he knows that the demands

of the company, the customers that it
sells to, were global and publicly traded

clients, meaning the sophistication and
the demands were gonna keep going up.

And so if the grandfather I had
been talking to at my grandfather's

funeral made a list, his list and
our list weren't gonna be the same.

So I'm gonna show you
ours, just as an example.

So I am in law school.

My brother is in college, my sister
was in high school, and we all got

the same letter from our father.

And it said, I don't know if the Lord
will ever call you back or you'll ever

feel a call to join the family company.

But if so, five things have to be true.

First, you have to graduate from college.

Second, you have to have a degree
from graduate school, not a

specific type of graduate school.

My brother got an MBA, I went
to law school, but you have

to have a graduate degree.

You have to go work somewhere else.

That is not unique in family companies
requiring working somewhere else.

However he added to that, you
must get promoted somewhere else.

And then lastly, he said, your life needs
to be reflective of Christian values.

Now I want you to read
into that real quick.

What he was doing, the company is a
for-profit, privately held company that

holds itself out as being faith-based.

He wanted to make sure that any
family member that joined could work

in a company that held itself out as
having particular faith principles.

And so that list isn't gonna be your list.

You have a different family,
you have a different company,

you have different customers.

But there are three things.

If I broke his list down, it
really had three things in it.

First, it had education requirements.

Second, it had experience requirements.

And third, it worked to have an alignment
with the culture of the organization.

And I wanna touch experience
and education real quick.

And here's something I
love about what he did.

He told me once, Adam, I graduated
from Georgia on a Friday.

I went to work at the
family company on a Monday.

The only person who ever gave me a job
was either my father by promotion or

the day I bought the company from him.

I want you to always know that you have
value outside of this organization and

outside of my eyes when you come to work
here, I also need you to go get experience

that we could never get without people
who have worked outside and brought it in.

And so what he was doing with this
list for any family member who

joined in an increasingly complex
organization, he wanted them to be part

of the future of the company with our
particular clients, but also always

have their own independent identity.

'Cause if you've ever worked with family,
you know how difficult that can be.

So that's our list and that's the concept.

If you have your side sheet of paper,
I want you to try this real quick.

Okay.

So just a grid, we're
gonna work over to you.

So there's those five criteria.

I said he put in a letter, let's
assume your family business is

X, Y, Z manufacturing company.

Let's just give a different example.

So let's say they sent a similar letter.

It might say that before any family
member comes to work for X, Y, Z, they

need to have an engineering degree.

And again, I'm gonna encourage you to
get specific with your criteria, not

just go to college or go to school, okay?

An engineering degree from a
US news, top 100 university.

And then for experience.

You've got to work outside the company
for three years and have become

a manager of at least one person.

See, that's different than the way
my father phrased it for our company.

And then lastly, the cultural alignment.

When we do a reference check
on you, your references need

to talk about your humility.

Let's assume humility is a big part
of the culture of that company, and we

don't want you to have an arrest record.

You can write this in your
family hiring criteria.

Okay?

So you can see what these criteria
do is it communicates to the family,

their education experience, and
cultural prerequisites, and none

of these have anything to do with
actual skills and fit to a job.

So take just a second.

And think about your own company.

If you have someone in your family who
is, maybe you have family who are about to

graduate from college or in high school.

Maybe you have nieces or nephews who
may be in kindergarten, but your cousin,

your sister-in-law, your aunt, someone
has asked you, Hey, might they ever

have an opportunity to work with you?

These questions come up
earlier than any of us think.

So think if you had your way, what
education would you wanna make sure

any family member who joined had?

And then what experiences outside the
organization would you want them to have?

And then think through your core values.

Pick one, pick two, or just the
cultural behaviors your company

and its leaders are known for.

What's one of those?

What's two of those?

You wanna make sure every
family member is aligned to.

Education, experience, cultural alignment.

That's family hiring criteria.

That's the first step in
chaos proofing family hiring.

And now I want to celebrate you.

Okay?

If you took a minute, Kathy
Milton, no matter where you are.

Yeah, Kathy logged in first, so I
just picked on her a couple times.

If you just did this, I wanna celebrate
you because here's what's so hard

about a family business, right?

So I know running an organization
day in and day out is hard.

It's hard to do strategic planning.

It's hard to make the time.

It's hard to have the discipline.

If it's hard enough to
argue with customers,

it's certainly hard to argue with
each other about value propositions.

But this is even harder.

This is doing inner family business work.

And the family business has no revenue.

It has no customers, but it sits right
in the heart of the organization.

And if it's healthy, it can
help the organization reach

full value with a strong family.

And if it's not, all of it
can go away spectacularly.

And so what you just did
maybe for the first time?

Well, not really, 'cause this is the
Kennesaw State Family Enterprise Center.

But maybe for today, maybe the
first time today you've thought

about that inner family business
and taken a step at making it

healthy.

So congratulations to you.

Alright, that's step one.

Now let's go to step two.

That is the end of the first
part of the Kennesaw State

Family Enterprise Center webinar.

In the next episode, we're gonna
finish that and go through the last

three elements of chaos, proof hiring.

I hope this has helped you think about
your inner family business a bit.

This is the kind of topic when you have
family meetings that you both create,

debate, and communicate, and so I hope
this was a helpful podcast for you.

Look forward to sharing the rest
of it with you in episode six.

I appreciate you
subscribing and following.

We do have a monthly newsletter
and post content on LinkedIn as

well that I hope is helpful to you.

I appreciate you joining, as
my grandfather would've said.

Thank you so very, very
much for listening.