Got Family Quick Bits: Monsters

Got Family

Hello, this is Got Family, and I am Carey Berger and as the song would indicate, we are talking about monsters. No, we aren’t talking about monsters exactly, we’re talking about fear. As a family business owner most of us know what it is to have some degree of fear. How we deal with that fear is each of our own neuroses, oops I mean our own life, and that fear for a family business owner usually starts off with the financial. Like I said, it's personal, financial, and structural, and that’s how we look at every question around here at the Got Family show. From a financial point of view it's like, okay if I just work harder, if I put more money in the bank, I'll have the money to get through the tough times, I’ll save, save, save, and that'll be how I deal with my fear. Financial is good, but then there's the personal side. Okay, again, I'm not going to ever let Phil play the song ‘Cats in the Cradle’, but nonetheless, I'm afraid I've given up my life in exchange for this business. I'm afraid I've lost the opportunity to be the father, or the mother that I want to be. How do I deal with that fear, or that guilt? Then on the structural side there's all of that liability control. There's a reason why there's an LLC, or C Corp, or S Corp., or any number of other entities that you may or may not need to give you some degree of structural protection from liability, but how you operate that structure really matters. You can have all of the best Corporation drafted by the best attorney in the whole wide world, and at the same time you still have to operate it, you still have to know what you're doing within that. I will talk about that in another episode, but in the meantime, this about fear. Let's mash the monsters and address those small three points of view, whether it be the personal, the financial, and structural, it's a scary world out there, and for those of us who are running the businesses that we’ve built ourselves, we sometimes have a little more fear than others. We have to cover it up because that's how we get through the next, and that's how we keep don't were doing, and that's also the reason why, hopefully, there's some upside in our business, because that is the price we pay in exchange for taking ownership and responsibility over our lives in maybe a little different way than some people do. Everybody's got their own demons to slay, but sometimes the ideas apply to you that you can apply in whatever ways appropriate in your world. That’s what we do, we tell stories form the crossroads of business and family here at the Got Family show, and I am Carey Berger.