The Family Business with Cathy Carroll

george grombacher 0:02
Carol is a leadership coach for family businesses. She is speaker. She’s the author of hug of war, how to lead a family business with love and logic. Welcome to the show, Kathy.

Cathy Carroll 0:13
Thank you, George. Pleased to be here.

george grombacher 0:15
excited to have you on. Tell us a bit about your personal last more about your work and why you do what you do.

Cathy Carroll 0:21
Personal life I grew up in the Chicagoland area. I currently live in San Antonio, Texas with my husband and my stepson who’s just about to start at LSU Go Tigers. In the fall, my work as you said, I’m a leadership coach. I specialize in family business leadership. And why I do what I do is a little bit of a longer story, but I’ll make it quick. I grew up in a family business. My grandfather was the entrepreneur and our family. And when I was a kid, all I saw, frankly, was drama in my father’s generation. So the thought of joining the family business held very little appeal, I went corporate for 20 years I was a pension actuary, got an MBA, then joined the travel industry and in 2009, my father, it’s like a godfather story. He sucked me back into the family business. And and I left the corporate world to run my father’s rodeo equipment manufacturing, because yeah, I have to say that slowly, because a lot of people say wait, what? Yeah, we make rodeo ropes and saddles, and training equipment for Team ropers. Which is actually a different business for my grandfather’s business. But boy, I have a perspective as a third generation family member and as a second generation family member. And that is was an incredibly rewarding any more honestly challenging leadership experience working for my father. And I after three years, and I’m happy to say a successful turnaround of the business I left and and I found a real deep passion for wanting to support other family business leaders in the incredibly unique and complex challenges of leadership and family business.

george grombacher 2:04
I appreciate that. So how does one become a pension actuary?

Cathy Carroll 2:09
Well, you have to really like math. I was a math major in college and, and I was pretty good at it. And so when I graduated from school, I was I was a French major as well, when I graduated, I thought you know, I’ll probably be able to earn more if I leverage the math than if I leverage French. And at the time, actuaries were one of the best jobs like high pay and low stress. And I thought, that sounds good. So I did it and actually had a blast. I love actuaries. They’re hilarious, entertaining, witty, humans in general, overall, compared to all the other experiences I’ve had, I had more fun working with actuaries than anyone else. Funny.

george grombacher 2:50
So that’s high pay low stress. And then sometimes family businesses, the opposite of that.

Cathy Carroll 2:55
Well said, Very well said, although that the pay in my experience, pay in a family business falls into two buckets either overpay or under pay. Very few family businesses pay sort of the Goldilocks market wage. But yeah, well said and a lot of stress for sure.

george grombacher 3:16
So love and logic. I am a parent to three children. And I’ve got all sorts of love and logic books. It’s not dissimilar, I imagine dealing with family business than dealing with children.

Cathy Carroll 3:28
I would agree actually. And what’s so interesting is how we bring all of our childhood stories into the workplace every single day. And there is a live in our bodies as they were when the when the stories took place for good and not so much for good. But what I also love about what you highlighted is how one of the or polarities and I’m going to use that word polarity intentionally and I can describe it in a second. But people will understand it when I when I talk about it. That is the parenting choice between strict and nurturing, right? Like it’s a constant struggle as a parent, when something happens with a child, do you lean in and draw a strict boundary? Do you lean in and draw supportive approach and either one in its extreme can cause problems if one of the parents only strict can cause real problems for the child and their development? If the parents only nurturing can cause real problems in the developed development of the child? So that is my first introduction to the concept of polarities, which is really the dominant theme of tug of war. It’s all these opposing opposites that feel like either or question, Should I be strict or should I be nurturing but in reality, you need both strict and nurturing you need to challenge and support children and employees as they grow. So long segue but thank you for that transition.

george grombacher 4:55
Yeah, not at all. I mean, that’s that right there is that’s the The problem is, it’s really hard to thread that needle while running a successful business. And being a parent or a son or a daughter, whatever. Yeah,

Cathy Carroll 5:10
yep. Yep, you said it? Well, it is. It is a challenge. And it’s what I am excited about sharing with the world is the innovative way to address these opposing opposites. When you’re making a decision as a leader, and this is one that will resonate with you with your financial advisory background, a lot of parents who are managing who have built substantial wealth in a family business, they start working on their estate plan. And the big question that they get stuck with is, should I reveal my estate plan to my children? Or should I conceal it from children? And estate planners really struggle with that question? Because there’s no right answer to the question, there’s value in revealing the estate plan, it actually supports the growth and maturity of the child. And there’s value in concealing the estate plan, because it can be really overwhelming to know that you’re going to be inheriting a substantial sum of money at a young age. So what polarity thinking does is it highlights what are the benefits of revealing? What are the benefits of concealing? And then how can you do both over time in a way that’s really supportive of the child and their development. So you may choose to reveal a little bit early, and then more later, for example, as a way to manage the tension between these two opposites instead of I’m going to choose one or the other. Right? That’s the easy answer. I’ll choose one or the other. But it’s actually ineffective because you need both. And it’s a changing answer over time.

george grombacher 6:42
nuance,

Cathy Carroll 6:43
yeah. Did you have you experienced that? I mean, in your financial advisory services, and do people come to you with questions like that?

george grombacher 6:49
I think I think that it’s it’s very, it’s obviously very human nature of us to, to want to think and operate on that, that polarity, that that that you’re talking about are those polarities? And I think it’s, I think it’s, I love everything about it. And I don’t know why. I haven’t necessarily thought of it like that to reveal or to conceal to, to lead with love or to leave with logic. And it’s just obvious that the answer is it’s not one or the other. It’s it’s both. But really, is that why is that so hard for us?

Cathy Carroll 7:27
I love that question. Because I don’t know. But I have a theory. So my theory is this, I think as humans, we have the ability to hold up to three things in our head, like when I go to the grocery store, I can remember three things. If there are more than three, I have to write it down like this, right. And so when you’re managing a polarity, you’ve actually got four things to hold in your head. At the same time, you’ve got the upsides of one pole, like for let’s pick, let’s go back to a state planning. And I’m trying to decide how to pass my business to my children. And I have three children. And I’ve got two who are working in the business and one who’s not, do I give all three of them equal shares a third, a third, a third, or do I do it differently. So it’s a tension between same and different. Alright, so now, with these two poles, same in different, there are upsides of doing things the same. And then there are some problems when you when you do things the same. Similarly, if you do things differently, there are some great upsides to doing things differently. And there are some challenges with doing things differently. Those are four different buckets, you have to hold in your head at the same time, that make the polarity management just a little extra complex, just a teeny bit more, our brains are wired to do plus I also think that the training the education the the way we live in the world is sort of reinforces this either or way of seeing the world. It’s either this or that it’s either that or this. And it’s it changes, it’s requires a really innovative way of thinking to think in the terms of both. And so when you start to hear questions, either this or this, I start to say, Well wait, is it truly an either or question? Or do we have the ability to to get the best of both? And that’s what polarity thinking introduces? Yeah.

george grombacher 9:16
Tension between same and different, reveal or conceal. These are, these are wonderful thought exercises. And then when the rubber meets the road, it’s not a thought exercise. This is this is my business, and it’s my kids, and I don’t want to screw this up, or I don’t want to screw it up anymore, rather. So how does one engage and start this process? If that’s the right term? Yeah.

Cathy Carroll 9:42
Well, it actually I think starts with having the brief conversations. And what I have noticed in many of the family businesses I work with, is that so many family businesses are conflict avoidant. They don’t actually talk about the real stuff because the rules of the family, or that you’re supposed to be in harmony, you’re supposed to be happy this is this is your place of love. Right? This is where things are about fairness and sharing and unconditional belonging, right. So we don’t want to disrupt all that yummy, warm feeling of family, right. But business has different set of rules. Business is about logic, business is about competition and profits and meritocracy. And you need to have those really hard conversations in the business world in order to get the best outcomes. But so many of us conflate task conflict, which is really important and robust and healthy with relationship conflict, which is emotional and destructive to actually good decision making. And so in tug of war, I talk about the distinction between task conflict and relationship conflict. And I’ll credit Adam Grant from the book, Think, again for helping me see it in this way. But then, on top of that, there’s a third form of conflict, which is this polarity conflict. And I’ll pick another polarity. To give an example, let’s say, let’s pick include an exclude for inlaws. So the big challenge is you’ve varied someone, do you include them in ownership? Do you include them in the family meetings? Or do you exclude them? Again? an either or question. And I would argue the wrong question. But here’s what happens, you end up with some members of the family, adamantly supporting include, and they talk about all the benefits of including and the overuse of excluding, and then you’ve got other members of the family, who talk about all the benefits of excluding and all the overuse of including. And what they do is, if you think about that, in a map, they argued that AG and was like, imagine a big X on the screen, you’re arguing the diagonals. It’s the same argument that Congress has, with liberals and conservatives, the liberals argue the upside of liberal ideology and the overuse of conservative conservatives argue the upside of conservative the overuse of liberal, and you get force against force and welcome to gridlock. So in a polarity in a family business, it’s that same concept, when you are just arguing the upsides of your preferred pole, and then the overuse is of the opposite against the corresponding point of view, you go nowhere, you just end up with gridlock. And you end up with these impossible situations that become very fraught, very emotional. And the best way forward is to use this polarity thinking in order to find a path forward.

george grombacher 12:37
And as all that’s happening, we still have those, as you said earlier, those stories alive in our bodies from when I was a kid, whatever, yes.

Cathy Carroll 12:48
And that’s what makes so much of the family business enormously challenging. The experiences that we have in childhood that both positive and negative, live in our bodies, as if they are happening in this moment. And so when there’s unresolved childhood issues, it can really undermine the dynamic for healthy communication in our adult business relationships, which, from my perspective, makes leadership and a family business double black diamond hard, right? Because when you’re working at another company, let’s pick and pick any public company. We’ve got our childhood stuff, but it’s not getting triggered in the same way that it is getting triggered in the family business.

george grombacher 13:38
And so when we’re sitting down, and we’re trying to make a decision about about all this stuff, I bet, I bet it’s easy to fall in the trap or to utilize, what is the successful transition look like for and what is a failed transition look like? And I want a successful one. But it’s going to be somewhere in the middle.

Cathy Carroll 13:59
Yeah, it’s such an I love that question, George, because it how do you define success? How do you define failure, like just having the family conversation around, the definition of those two words can be incredibly powerful, to helping guide the family towards what it is that they choose to seek, and what it is that they are trying to avoid. But so many families just say, Yes, we’re going to have a successful transition, without a mutual understanding of what success looks like, without considering not just the logic needs, but also the love needs. Not considering the the desire. Here’s another polarity that’s so prevalent in family business. It’s this desire to be independent. And in a family business, we are also interdependent in the sense that any decision I make in my family business will not any but most decisions I make in my family business have an impact on the other members of the family because we’re a system. Right? So you’ve got this tension between independent and interdependent right now I’m getting kind of wonky into unreputable But you get the idea. Like there are so many tensions between these two right answers in a in a family business that make it particularly challenging. Now,

george grombacher 15:11
certainly, it’s fascinating. I’m an entrepreneur. But what I want to have gone into my family business, which is an entrepreneurial venture at the answers probably would have been no, I probably would have would have just wanted to do my own thing, regardless of whether or not my family’s business was wildly successful. So so it makes sense to me, it makes perfect sense to me that my ideas of success and what how the family businesses is wound down or sold, or whatever is going to be different than perhaps my brother is going to be the CEO.

Cathy Carroll 15:49
Yeah, yeah. One of the chapters that I have in the book, I call it responsibilities and privileges. And so often, we think of family business leaders, the way TV depicts them like this, the show succession on HBO, and you see a bunch of really entitled, inheritors, right, who behave in obnoxious ways, in my experience, and that, to me, is the overuse of privilege, right? In my experience, family, business leaders often suffer in the overuse of responsibility, because it’s a heavy responsibility to carry the burdens of of leadership and a family business, because you’re not just doing it for yourself, and your own nuclear family, but your broader extended family as well. And that creates so much pressure and angst and anguish, and leaders and a lot of inheritors, or people who take over their their family business. Many, in many cases do it because they think they’re supposed to. They’ve been told since they were kids, that this business is going to be yours one day, without actually considering do I actually want to set the path for me, is this the right thing that I want to do? Do I want to do what my parents have asked me to do? Or do I want to carve my own path? That tension is really hard? And it’s so misunderstood, because we don’t talk about it? It’s like it’s a tension that happens over a long period of time. Right. But I think that tension between responsibilities and privileges is really acute in the family business space. Yeah,

george grombacher 17:18
I I liked that one, especially I’ve loved all the all the polarities that you’ve shared, but certainly that one, and I mean, heavy is the head that wears the crown. If it’s one sibling that’s running this business, and the other siblings are benefiting from it. Well, my goodness, what a credible amount of pressure that is. And yeah, good luck threading that needle.

Cathy Carroll 17:41
Yeah, exactly. There’s a lot of resentment on both sides of that equation, right, those who have carried the ground of leadership and those who don’t?

george grombacher 17:49
Yeah, so many different things. I think I would I’m really excited to read the book. Number one, I think I would be really I think I would have been really excited to write it. How was it?

Cathy Carroll 18:02
Oh, my, it was 10 years in the making. It took a long time. Yeah, I started by interviewing 70 different family business leaders and bundling the themes. And then I then I had periods of energy and lack of energy. And there’s I don’t know if you’ve ever written a book, but there’s a lot of self doubt that can go into writing a book. And when I started to suffer from self doubt, I would lose passion for writing. And then I would find some sort of excitement about writing and I would regain the energy and then it would rain and then it would wax. So yeah, it was it’s been 10 years in the making. But I’m actually glad that it took that amount of time. Because I don’t think I could have written the book that I wrote 10 years ago, I think I needed my life experience to unfold, I needed a perspective to really form over a period of time, and I needed more client stories to draw from there. There. The book is filled with stories. It’s very, very story driven. And I included a lot of client stories, obviously anonymized and with their permission. But these are all true stories. There’s there’s a lot of reality, the feedback that I’m getting in the book is that it intuitively resonates with people because they can tell that the stories are raw and authentic. And frankly, there aren’t books written about the blocking and tackling of leadership and family business. There’s a lot on succession best practices and governance best practices, and they’re great. But nobody’s talking about the day to day leader challenges and this is the first hopefully the first of many books about that.

george grombacher 19:39
Yeah, I love it. Well, Kathy, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you and where can they get their copy of hug of Worf

Cathy Carroll 19:48
you can learn more about me and my website which is legacy onward.com And you can learn more about hug of war at Legacy unredact comm slash hug dash of gash war it’s available online at any bookstore.

george grombacher 20:03
Excellent. If you enjoyed this as much as I did show Kathy your appreciation and share today share with a friend who also appreciates good ideas go to legacy onward.com and get to know a little bit more about Kathy and to see how you can work together and pick up your copy of hug of war at legacy onward.com/hug-of-war.com or wherever you buy your books. Thanks again, Kathy.

Cathy Carroll 20:31
Thank you.

george grombacher 20:32
Till next time, remember, do your part by doing your best

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.