A field guide for first-year CEOs of family-owned and family-backed businesses. The real work of the first year isn't what you think it is.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. The guide goes straight to your inbox.
Not a 90-day plan. Not a strategy framework. This is the work of becoming the person the seat requires, while the people around you are still relating to who you were before. In family-owned businesses, that work is louder.
Before you can define where the company is going, you have to know who is leading it. Not your title, not your background, not what the family expects.
What does this company look like in three years if you lead it as yourself? Modernize, sell, position for acquisition, or hold. None of these are wrong. Drifting between them is.
In a family business, the suspicion follows you in: that you got the seat because of your last name. The more you try to prove you deserve it, the more it looks like you're trying.
Your team can't be your sounding board the way they used to be. Family members can't be peers anymore. The room you build is the single highest-leverage investment of year one.
The section most new family-business CEOs would rather skip. It's also the one that decides whether the vision you defined becomes the company you lead.
Fifteen statements across all five sections. A snapshot of where you actually stand in the seat today, not where you think you should be. The number matters less than your honesty in answering it.
"You don't earn the seat by holding it. You earn it by how you grow into it."
From the introduction
"Vision isn't what you say at the offsite. It's what you're willing to expect of yourself and other people, on the record, knowing it might create conflict."
Section 02 · Vision
"Confidence doesn't come from studying. It comes from acting."
Section 03 · Confidence
"Where am I leading the way I think I'm supposed to, instead of the way I would if no one was watching?"
The diagnostic question, regardless of score
If you're inside the first year, and the hardest part isn't the strategy but the part of you that's still adjusting to being the one who decides, the field guide is for you.
Sent straight to your inbox. No spam.