Keeping Family Traditions and Stories Alive for Generations
What is your family story? You probably know where your parents came from – but what about your grandparents or great grandparents?
Knowing your family’s history and passing down stories and traditions is a crucial part of family succession. It gives a family something to fall back on.
There are many aspects of passing down stories to the next generation, be it family traditions or stories of failures and successes. Specifically, for families in business, capturing memories and the intention behind the family business is critical. The goals behind the business and how the business was initially built by the creator are two important anchors. Understanding the reasoning and original concept behind starting that business can ensure that the business stays on track and true to its vision.
Families in business greatly benefit by going through the exercise of gathering information about the past – this can be done by speaking with elders who are still with us to understand what their experience has been and what their mindset was. Too often the traditions and history of a family are lost with our relatives, as the next generation finds itself too busy to spend the time to record it.
We encourage the families that we work with to share those memories and intergenerational histories with their family to help connect the past with the present, and to help reaffirm the vision for the future.
If you’re reading this and you’re a successor for a business, start by asking how your business’ founder had the idea to start the business. What were their goals, their struggles, and their successes? What did they attribute that success to? We can help facilitate these conversations for our client families and help them to learn at a meaningful level how they can not only build stronger family relationships but employ that history and those family traditions to ensure their business thrives for generations to come.