It’s time to transition your ranch from being a family first business to a business first family. It took me awhile to understand what this meant. I thought, of course we put our family first in any situation. But with the help of a great mentor, I eventually understood that putting the business first and taking care of “the hard stuff” allows a better opportunity for healthy family relationships to flourish.
So many of us have this backwards. We think that by not discussing “the hard stuff”, we are preserving family relationships. In my own experience, and with talking with many other ranching families, you are bound to do far more damage by not discussing “the hard stuff”, than you are by just ripping off the Band-Aid and getting it all out on the table: sooner rather than later. Adult children who are in the dark about their future on the ranch often become resentful. They start making assumptions about what you are thinking, and this never leads to a good outcome. Employees who don’t know what is expected of them will always fail you no matter how hard they work.
Here is a guide I have developed to help you transition to a business first family. I will go into more detail in further posts.
Create a mission and vision statement. Involve all stakeholders in this process. A facilitator is very helpful with this step. I recommend John Coleman Locke.
Develop a current organizational chart as well as one for how you would like the business to look in ten years.
Create position agreements with each person who is actively involved in ranch affairs. This can simply be a list of expectations and results.
Secure your will and communicate it to the shareholders. Do NOT, I repeat do NOT, let there be any surprises (regarding the ranch) to family members after you pass on. (Now, if you personally plan to give them $1,000,000 upon your death, you are welcome to keep that private. We don’t want you to end up on an episode of Crime Junkies. 😉)
Communicate your transition plan. This involves how assets will transition, buyout offers, as well as how management will transition. If you have no plans of retiring and plan to be the manager of the ranch until you die, you need to communicate that to younger generations.
Create a disaster mitigation plan. Consider the 5 D’s: death, divorce, disability, disaster, and disagreements. You simply cannot make a contingency plan for every possible scenario, so don’t over think this part. But have an idea in place, especially for the first three D’s. This might be an evolving process, so be patient.
Schedule weekly or bi-weekly meetings to discuss ranch business and make plans for the upcoming two weeks.
There, that’s it! Haha. I know, that’s a lot. It won’t happen overnight. Our business has been at this list for two years and we are still working on some things. But I believe that everyone involved in our business feels a sense of relief simply knowing what is to come, even if they don’t particularly like it. I promise you, it will be worth it to get this taken care of proactively rather than reactively.
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