82. Family Business with Jonathan McCain

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You are listening to The Entrepreneur Podcast from the Western Morissette Institute for Entrepreneurship, powered by Ivy family businesses have been important pillars in the history of Canada, where they have developed industries and enriched communities from coast to coast. Jonathan McCain is part of that tradition, hailing from a family legacy that includes McCain Foods and Maple Leaf foods. Jonathan decided to take the consulting route after university, before exercising his entrepreneurial talents in an industry that was in no way related to food. In this fascinating discussion with Ivey lecturer David Simpson, McCain talks about his entrepreneurial family, how consulting prepared him to lead his own enterprise, and the growing role he is playing in the family business.

Dave Simpson  
So I did want to start off with as a young man, you've been quite open and knowledgeable about your family history. So could you tell us a little bit about the McCain family in Canada growing a fairly substantial business, just to recap for us, where that business is coming from?

Jonathan McCain  
Sure, nice to be with you all. Jonathan, so as you mentioned, my family. I'm from the East Coast. Originally. I was born in a small town called Perth and over would guess that probably none of you have ever heard of have ever heard of Perth and over New Brunswick, but it's a little town outside of another little town called Florence for New Brunswick, which is where my family's from. My family, my grandfather and his brother started a french fry and appetizer business called McCain Foods, and that's really the history of our family business. My family today is no longer really involved in McCain whatsoever, but we're now involved in a company called Maple Leaf foods that's our main family asset, and we spent the better part of the last 10 years focusing on continuing to grow maple leaf and now a pork business that we've spun out of Maple Leaf called Canada packers, as well as, on the family side, building out a direct investment platform which owns businesses diversified away From the food space. So you can think like industrial services, building services, we have an event, rental company, things like that, that are all wonderful Canadian businesses, but diversified away from the food space.

Dave Simpson  
Non food is where the family office is focusing on. So as a individual, those are large public companies which has their own set of governance, whereas buying private companies is what most of us are working on here, on our governance structures. Today, you came to school in Eastern Canada, or we call it central Canada. Here, your career, post, your education. What did you want to do when you were finished school? Did you know you'd be an entrepreneur? Or did you say, I need work experience? We just finished a session here where we were talking about the importance of the self esteem that comes with working for somebody else who will pay you, not just your family. And so what was your sort of career choice when you first left school?

Jonathan McCain  
Yeah, like I had always, I grew up in a very entrepreneurial family, so my grandfather is an entrepreneur. My My father ran maple leaf, and he always kind of, I always viewed him as an entrepreneur within a public company context. So I very much wanted to do my own thing and be an entrepreneur. I credit Dave in many ways. I took a course called entrepreneurial finance way back in the day, and that really seeded in my mind this fascination with the world of small business, and the idea I knew I wasn't smart enough to come up with an idea of my own. So the idea of finding a small business, ideally around succession, so an owner operator that didn't necessarily have a business that they were going to pass on to the next generation, and someone that liked the idea of, you know, a young, pretty naive, mid 20 year old coming in and breathing new life into the business and providing that succession opportunity for them. So I was fascinated with that idea. I talked to a bunch of mentors in my life, and they said, sounds like a great idea. You're 22 years old, and you look like you're 16, so maybe you should go get a little work experience before you start heading down that potentially interesting path. And so I put the idea that I got in Dave's class on hold, and I went into the world consulting for a few years. I worked for a firm called BCG, out of Toronto, did that, but in many ways, I was just kind of counting down the days to do what I ultimately wanted to do, which was get into the world of small business. So after three years at BCG, I left and bought a small scaffolding business based out of Toronto, scaffolding services. So we put up, take down, and provide all the engineering and related services around all that relatively ugly steel and aluminum product, product you see around our cities in Canada.

Dave Simpson  
You usually laugh about the quality of your consulting work, but I won't comment on that. What I want to know is that, though, it gave you a window into a lot of industries. So you learn the metrics of industries. You learn what might be appealing to you, like margins, that kind of stuff. So would you recommend that to people like that was a useful exercise the the years that you were at the consulting firm.

Jonathan McCain  
Yeah, it was a amazing experience, if anybody's considering it, happy to chat about it afterwards, but it was a wonderful experience, because I got to see a bunch of different industries. You know, I grew up in a food business, so I. Uh, not say I knew a lot about the food business, but I was exposed to that a lot growing up, I really didn't know much about any other industries, other than taking, you know, cases in Ivey or learning about things in Dave's class. So the opportunity to be able to go work in largely large US blue chip companies and pretty diversified Industries was a really good experience for me. And then also the exposure that that I got to senior leadership teams and just talking through all the problems that they were dealing with on a regular basis. That was really a wild experience for someone that was 22 to 25 years old.

Dave Simpson  
And just so you don't think, when you decide you're going to acquire business, it takes, you know, two months, all those years at the consulting firm you were looking at businesses and trying to see what you're into, interested into, and when you finally got that opportunity to do the deal, it was a family owned company. Again, transition challenges talk us through that first day, because you have a lovely story about when you're actually then the owner, you've shaken hands, you've got the deal closed, you've done your due diligence, but now you got to show up and work. What did they think of you a young person and from a family that people know the name is that hard for you to walk in? Or did they give you respect right away? Or what was the feeling when you came in there?

Jonathan McCain  
Yeah, it's funny. I so I wasn't looking at companies all through my time at BCG, at least don't tell my my former bosses that, but by the end, I certainly was so I found this. I found this. I looked at about 100 different opportunities over the course of a year, and ultimately landed on this scaffolding business. And it was a 40, around 45 year old business. The guy's name was Russ Dilworth, so the company was called Dilworth scaffold. Russ Dilworth scaffold. He had two sons, a teacher and a doctor, both had great careers, but didn't really want to get into the world of scaffolding. And it was a wonderful business, like profitable in and out every single year. Relatively easy business to understand. It's a rental business with a labor component. But today, like at this point, you know, 15 years later, I've probably done 40 or 50 deals, and I think about that process and just how stupid I was going through that like, you know, the lack of diligence, the massive risks that I was taking on that I just didn't really perceive as risks at the time. I now kind of give my head a shake and thank out. Thank my lucky stars for what I avoided. But I one of which is that I didn't meet any of the management team. I didn't have any exposure to them until the deal, until day one. So it was, you know, day one, I knew the owner, obviously, and that for a business of that size, the owner is obviously pretty critical manager. But I didn't know his right hand, for example, who became my right hand and a really, really critical partner in my business. So day one, I remember meeting him at a coffee shop in Etobicoke. I was like, So what are we doing today? He's like, Well, I figured I just walk around and tell everyone I sold the business and introduce you to them. And I was like, Oh, shit. Okay, you haven't told them. You haven't told, like, your right hand. He's like, No, I haven't told him the thing. I'm like, Okay, this is gonna be interesting. And I remember the first comment, and this was, you know, this company didn't have Microsoft Teams or zoom. There was no, you know, people on their calendars, on their phone, like his invoices were literally stapled to, you know, a wall in his office. People didn't have corporate email. So there was no like, Okay, here's the cadence of the day. I'm going to meet with my right hand at this time. And, you know, the head of the Office at that time. We walked in, and I remember walking up to this, this lady, Linda, who was the head of our who ran accounts receivable for us, and he's like, Linda, this is Jonathan. You just bought the business. And she's like, holy shit. How old are you? I'm 26 years old. She's like, my son is older than you. I was like, Okay, it's gonna be a long day, but it was wonderful I get, you know, at that point in today, I was pretty confident that as long as I just focused on I get some advice, like, have big ears and a small mouth when you go into it. So just build a relationship with the people listen. Try to provide good ideas where I could, but really, like, keep that to a minimum in the early days. And it was all about just meeting the team. And I got lucky, because it ended up being a really fantastic team.

Dave Simpson  
And did you use that as a platform to do any add on, tuck in acquisitions in that sector, or did you move to other things?

Jonathan McCain  
Yeah, our playbook was like the typical kind of private equity or growth playbook. It was part M A so we did a few deals, turning it from a local scaffolding player in kind of Southwest Ontario to a national platform. We also expanded organically. So we moved up to Ottawa. We got into Manitoba, various parts of Manitoba, actually, and then into BC today. So I stepped down from that in which is kind of the next chapter of my career in 2020 and the business, the current guy who's running it is way smarter than I am. He's continued to grow it. They filled out the pockets that we weren't in in Alberta, starting to get into Saskatchewan. So it's now one of the larger kind of independent Canadian owned scaffolding. We now define ourselves as an access player, not just scaffolding, but access services scaffolding players in Canada.

Dave Simpson  
And you use the phrase private equity, but I would distinguish what you're doing in a significantly different way, in that you often say. That we buy a business as if we're going to hold it forever, whereas a private equity is always looking for that. You know, where's that? Four to six year flip strategically. You can sell things when it matters. But as a family, do you look things seriously that way? That we are going to own these assets for cash flow forever and grow them?

Jonathan McCain  
Yeah, and maybe I'll just give a quick preamble so it makes sense for everyone. In 2020 I moved from running my own business, kind of in my own world, really, having I was on the board of our main family business at that point, but wasn't operationally involved at all, to now running McCain capital, which is our family holding company, which means I wear a few hats, but at the time, part of that, part of the reason I moved into that role was to broaden this direct investing vehicle that we have, and to that end, like when we look for businesses diversified away from the food space, it's exactly what you said, like our focus is owning things theoretically forever, like nothing's forever. But that's kind of the lens in which we look to buy businesses, and it doesn't. It's less about the holding period. It's more for what we look in businesses look for rather so, you know, companies that have low, lower potential for disruption, or at least, we feel like we can take part in that disruption if it's going to going to take take place, or a real focus on people and building the right teams, like in private equity, when you're flipping a company after five years, you know, I would argue you care less about the team and the people and investing in that team and people and next generation leaders in the company that's quarter our strategy really is like really leaning into having the best people in our industry and giving them a place where they can be fulfilled and build their careers. We tend to employ less leverage, and we probably do less. Although M and A is a really critical component of what we do, it's we probably do that less than private equity, where I, you know, kind of you're trying to grow, yeah, my view of private equity, I like to say to business owners, like, you know, they they play financial hot potato, like they jam a bunch of things together and then flip it over to the next person and hope that they've timed the market correctly. We just can't do that right. So we still do a lot of M and A but we try to position ourselves as the acquire of choice and be the right home for business owners that want to have their business be part of a broader platform in the industry.

Dave Simpson  
So you've talked a little bit about some experience you've now gained on being on the board of a public company, you and your father at Maple Leaf foods. What was that experience like? And how is that different from most of the private families, who either don't have a board or have a few advisors and are maybe thinking of getting a good private board, but public company is a completely different way to operate. So what was your experience there when they brought you on board to the public company.

Jonathan McCain  
It's been a great experience. So I joined the board in 2018 I don't know if you have Jeff Beatty coming to speak, but great guy from London, Ontario, a good, good friend of our family, who was also on the board. I remember when I joined, he said for the first four meetings, just keep your mouth shut. Just don't say anything, and take it all in. And I think I lasted like half of a meeting before that, before I broke that promise. But you know, public company board is very much a governance role, right? Like it's about risk management, it's about governance strategy, CEO succession in our private companies, for example, I tend to find they're a little bit more operationally involved. And then when you layer on family in a private business can become a lot of different things that are non public company, including, you know, all the wonderful things and all the challenging things in families. So it's, you know, it's a very defined governance. Governance role. In the maple leaf context, we have a prescribed based off of our ownership, a prescribed number of seats in that company. I sit in one of them. My father sits in another. And then we've got two other non family directors that technically sit in the seats that we hold. So that's different from a private company, but...

Dave Simpson  
Have you tried to then set up some kind of structure in the family hold CO or family office that has input, then from your siblings, because they're at different stages of their careers and different relationships with you. Where do they fit in now, now that you're the leader of that business, are they joining actively? Or how do you work that?

Jonathan McCain  
Yeah, so I'm the oldest of five. My four siblings are all quite involved and engaged. At this point, it's at our holding company level. So the company that I run, they're all my boss, including my father. So there's...

Dave Simpson  
Directors. (As directors) They're your boss?

Jonathan McCain  
Yes. 

Dave Simpson  
Keep going. 

Jonathan McCain  
It's wonderful. No, it's great. Yeah, I have a great we have a great relationship with all my siblings, and they are quite engaged the maple leaf management team once a quarter, what they share with our board of directors and the public code they'll also share with my siblings, and I get an exposure to it at Maple Leaf. But they also spend time with our family, creating affinity for our our business and Maple Leaf is really important for us. And you know, the. Fact that we've kind of decided as a family we want to own this business or own our position in this business for the long term, one of the critical building blocks to making sure that that's successful, in my mind, is making sure that the next generation has affinity for the business and not just view it as this kind of amorphous business that may or may not been your mother or father's and so building that connection, in my mind starts with exposure and having a seat at the table. At some point, other siblings will be on the board with me at Maple Leaf, but to this point, their exposure is with the management team, the incredible management team that we have on a quarterly basis.

Dave Simpson  
So even in the private family structure, do you encourage or support or pay for continuing education for people about what it means to be a good director, like how to read financial statements, that kind of stuff. Was there any prerequisites for them to be able to be on that? Or is it just you chose to have all the family members on it? 

Jonathan McCain  
No, there's, there's not prerequisites necessarily to be on our family board. Yeah, and that might just be a product of the fact that, you know, my four siblings are way smarter than I am. They're very highly educated. Three of my four siblings built their own very successful careers in business. So they're, they're well versed in financial statements. And then my brother, he's a PhD, was at MIT. He's now like he, you know, grew up in the science world, but he's picked up financial statements relatively quickly because he's, again, like way, way smarter than I am, but to serve on the Board of Maple Leaf, we do have requirements. So, for example, taking an ICD course. I don't know if any of you are familiar with that, but it's a, it's a course that Rotman offers. Sorry. Dave around, basically being a what it means to be a fiduciary of a company, both public and private. It's a 12 day course at Rotman. I took that two of my one of my sisters has taken another one signed up for it and so to serve on the Board of maple, if that's a prerequisite, that we have informal prerequisite. And I guess the you know, not prerequisite, but it would be largely understood that that people are sophisticated enough to understand financial statements and strategy, and, you know, the basics of attracting good talent and hiring and firing a CEO, all the things that are part of a board's mandate, that by the time that they're put in a position to take on a roll like that, that they'd be qualified to do it.

Dave Simpson  
I like though that he said even that board, though, spends time with the family to update them on the public company information at the at the family level. Because, to me, private family investors need to be able to confidently be positive advocates of your business. You have to know what products we're in. What do we do? What's our brand reputation? And you should be able to enhance that just by speaking publicly about things. So we want to, you know, shine a lot of light on it. So I think that's a fabulous opportunity. I'm going to capture a comment you made, and it's not, we're not trying to dis private equity, because a lot of our students at Ivey go into private equity. I have a lot of good friends in private equity, but it is true that the buyer of choice for many family transition companies has moved away from some of the private equity to more like a family office because of those shared values, because you're looking at long term in my own experience buying companies, I can beat out a private equity person because they're slashing and cutting and and not really listening to what you mean to a community. So have you found that a real competitive advantage when you're pitching to someone to say, Hey, join this group, even if they have a carried interest, join this group because we're building for the long haul, and we have values that that we put out there on our sleeve? Is that been a real positive? Because I've noticed that in the buying world.

Jonathan McCain  
I like to think so. It's kind of you to not want to shit talk private equity. I will freely. Should talk private equity. I do quite regularly. Some of our friends, it's fine tell to their face. And the reality is, you know, they're like all things in life. There's folks in private equity that are super talented and and do great things. I think the vast majority of them have no idea what they're doing. And, you know, it truly has been looking back historically, in my mind, a game of multiple expansions, of buying something and not improving the business, but just simply trading it for a higher multiple, or, like I said before, playing financial hot potato, just jamming a bunch of things together and doing a quick flip. So when we say that, we compete against private equity, we do things differently. We really, really mean it. And I think in large part, you have to be competitive on price. It would be ridiculous to say to a business owner, look, sell me your business and I'm going to pay you half of what private equity. Like no business owner would ever agree to those terms. You know, in many cases, like this is the nest egg for not only them, but their future generations, right? So I find we have to be competitive from a price standpoint. But people, a lot of people, care about other things too, right? Like they, in many cases, they've worked with these. Teams for, you know, 1020, 3040, years. And so having conviction that whoever's going to take the keys next is actually going to take care of their teams, I think that actually does hold a lot of weight. And not everyone's mind, but certainly some people. I think the family angle helps us, in some cases, not, not all, but the fact that, you know, we can appreciate and in some ways understand the complexity, the wonderful complexities, of family businesses, and help owners, owner operators navigate that transition. I think that's played to our advantage from time to time and again, the the the use of leverage, probably in a more responsible way, I would argue, I think resonates with business owners too. I think, a lot of folks, and it ties back to team and taking care of their business for the long haul. But you know, if I was a business owner, I wouldn't necessarily want to sell to private equity, who's putting a little sliver of equity in, loading something up with debt and then putting my business in a precarious position. That's certainly something that we don't do, and private equity does a lot, because they need to do that to drive their returns. So, yeah, I 

Dave Simpson  
So, Jonathan, even when you don't do that, life happens sometimes. And you and I were talking about the going into the event space right when covid hits. So you buy a company and the revenues go to what zero negative right away, as soon as covid hit, and for many entrepreneurs, that's the end of the game, right? But if you're stewards with a long term view, you took that as an opportunity because you have a balance sheet that say, Hey, you know this too shall pass. And so let's buy up more of these from distressed people. So is your balance sheet, not just the lack of too much leverage, but just balance sheet and a long term view of a business that's really a strategic opportunity for you, given the cycles of any business, not not the least of which was covid. But so tell us a little bit about that. How did you decide that was a good business, and how have you worked your way out of it?

Jonathan McCain  
Yeah, so we started this diversification path and around 2017 2018 I brought on my partner, Zach, who's still my part. He's a wonderful guy, still my partner to this day, and he leads, kind of our directing, direct investing efforts. And so in 2019 middle of 2019 Zach and I had this wonderful idea to buy an event rental company called Chairman mills in Toronto. It, it's a wonderful business. It's been around since, I think 1912 was literally Chairman mills. Was the guy rented out chairs way back in the day it became, became, really the market leader in kind of the GTA around event rental equipment. And, you know, we did our at that point. We're, you know, I was probably a little bit better at diligence, and Zach's forgotten more than I know about running a proper diligence process. But what was not on our screener was a global pandemic. And so, you know, six months in, bought the business, we were super excited just starting to understand how it works and start building relationships with the people, and then covid hit, and it was a really interesting experience for us, because in many ways, it forced us to either double down and have conviction in our thesis, which is that the event rental business, well, first of all, that humans are creatures of habit. They we all enjoy, you know, large scale human gatherings. That's not going away, at least that's what we hope and think. And there's a real opportunity to take what is a very Mom and Pop regional business and create a national platform in this space. And so we were dealt a pretty tough hand with our business in southern GTA, but when we left covid, we ended up with a national platform. So we bought two businesses in BC, one in the East Coast, in Halifax, another one, and Toronto, kind of or two in Toronto, actually, to build out our presence in the southern Ontario market. And it's been a, you know, candidly, a tough experience, because it's, we're still not back to that pre covid level in the event space, but we're, we remain super excited about the business and really proud of the team. And it was a it was a challenging few years, but I'm comfortable saying we're kind of through that now, and on the up and up, but from an investment perspective and from a family perspective, you know, pitching that idea to my family and then having that happen, it was a tough one. Thankfully, we've made two other pretty solid investments since then, so it all works out in the end.

Dave Simpson  
So I'm going to ask you to think about some questions that you want to throw out there to get ready. So I'm going to ask one last one your level of confidence in your ability to do transactions and to be you know, a functioning leader of businesses stemmed not only from the work experience, but owning a business on your own and going into that and what advice do you have for next gens that we have here? Some of them are already in their business. Some of them are trying to decide whether they want to be in their family business. Some of them are owners and will never work in their family business, but seeing unique experiences on your own. Outside of that family business, how important was that to you in your personal development? Because we're trying to sort of gage how much experience they should get elsewhere.

Jonathan McCain  
That's a really good question. I think about it a lot. I'm not sure I have a great answer for it. I can tell you what worked well for me, and I may resonate with some of you, perhaps not all. But for me, it was less about getting I was very focused on on doing my own thing when I left university. In fact, I actually wanted nothing to do with my family business when I left, and I basically said as much to my father when I left. That's the words I heard. So and then I got a little bit older and wiser and realized, you know, that we have a wonderful business and and it kind of was the right time and place for me. But, you know, the real benefit for getting experience outside was just building my confidence. Like I would have never really had a confidence issue, I would say, but, but it gave me I saw a lot, it allowed me just to understand the world of business more and just get more confidence, get more experience, so that when I did get the opportunity to come into my family business, I didn't feel, of course, you know, I was given a wonderful opportunity, but I really felt like when the opportunity presented itself, that I should step through the door, and that I had confidence that I could do a pretty good job when I stepped into that role. And I don't think I would have been able to do that if I didn't have, you know, the previous time, building my career in a very focused way, away from from my family. So, you know, I see a lot of value in in kind of seeing the outside world, getting experience, building confidence, proving yourself. But you know that different horses for different courses, right? So worked for me, not just...

Dave Simpson  
But there's a lot of value, as you say, in a family that's built a reputation over, you know, 100 years. Kind of thing, it's, don't just walk away from that, but, but gather that.

Jonathan McCain  
Yeah, the other thing I might say, as well as, you know, for us, when I joined the our family enterprise, it was really clear why, like we thought about, we talked about, as a family, what the next 1015, 20 years was going to look like, why we needed this role that I was stepping into, which is president of our holding company. You know, what ultimately success would look like 20 years from now? It was very clear to me what I was stepping into, and where what would make me uncomfortable, and frankly, where I've seen some failure. It doesn't always fail is when people feel forced to step into the family enterprise. And what success looks like isn't really clearly articulated. It's just, I feel like I need to step into this. Don't necessarily know why. Maybe I'm getting a little bit of pressure from mom or dad, or maybe I feel internal guilt or pressure like I should do this. And, you know, I think forcing yourself to have the hard conversations around what is success like? Why am I doing this? Why does my family want to want me to do this? If that's and what do my siblings think about? Do my siblings think about this? Talk to my siblings a lot. I regularly talk to my siblings about this and and, you know, I think again, really leaning into those conversations that could be quite hard, but really probably should be had before you step into that role. In my mind, is probably easier said than done, but also really, really critical.

Dave Simpson  
Handling your parents when many of these have these businesses in the room today, have parents who are active and engaged, even if this group is bumping up in their level of support for that business, how do you talk to your parents about what you're ready for, and your dad kind of announced on the public company level that he was retiring, but yeah, so how do you have that discussion about what's your role dad in these things? Because He's a talented guy that you want to take advantage of his skill set to things, but he also was trying to put you guys into a position of run a real business here. How do you use that and how do you have that discussion about his role over time?

Jonathan McCain  
Yeah, and to be clear, he's not fully retired. He would kill me if that was ever out there. He is now exec chair, which is kind of a hybrid role between board and management. He's like a more involved chair of the board, exec chair at Maple Leaf, yeah.

Dave Simpson  
So that's of the public company?

Jonathan McCain  
He's chair of our family, Hold Co. and so look like I have a deep appreciation for the enormous experience that my dad has in the business, like again, he's forgot more than I will ever know, particularly about Maple Leaf. But at the same time, I'm my own man, and I want to carve my own path. And you know, the reality is, it's. Hard, right? Like I talk to my dad every day, and so drawing the line between, you know, updating about the grandkids and then, you know, talking about what's going on in the business, like that is a really hard line to draw. I wouldn't say that we do a great job of drawing that line like it all kind of blends together. But where we have, I think, drawn a pretty good line is around who's responsible for what, particularly around, you know, our private assets and this diversification stuff like, he really gives me a lot of autonomy to run with that. He'll always provide his opinion. But he very frequently said, this is my opinion. It's not direction tough to, you know, you could say the words, you know, tough to always abide by that but, but he does a really thoughtful job, I think, around trying to draw that line, I spent a lot of time having formal touch points with him. So like, you know, about business, about business. You know, once a month, like a formal hour with him, where I will just walk down the list. Here's the update of each one of our companies, and give him the opportunity to, you know, give any thoughts, the goal there really is to kind of focus the the input in that conversation, versus having it bleed into the weekend up at the cottage or whatever it may be. Doesn't always work like that, but that's the that's the intent. And so, you know, it's, it's a really delicate balance, but in my mind, it's you got to find time to have those conversations, and ideally, more formally than informally, is the right way.

Dave Simpson  
So when we talk about family council later this week, you used the comment that spouses are invited, are they not at every piece of information or willingly open to say, listen to anything, and different families make different decisions along that. But how did you come to that decision? And what is it precisely that you do?

Jonathan McCain  
Yeah, so our family council, we call it, is different from our board, right? Like the board is more of a decision making body, right? So we'll meet. And of course, there's a big update component, like, here's how the businesses are performing, but there's also decisions to be made. Our family council is more a more of an update form, right? Like, here's what's going on in the business. Let's have our management teams come and present to the broader family. All my siblings have incredible spouses, like wonderful, wonderful people, and a lot of them are in business too. So they're just interested in business, right? So they come to the family council, and they're, you know, they get an opportunity, I think they would say, an opportunity to sit down with, you know, these really talented CEOs, CFOs, of these operating businesses, like, it's a great opportunity to ask questions and learn and and and build those relationships themselves. So, but it's very much a reporting type environment. From a business standpoint, from in the family council meeting, we also talk about a lot of family stuff too. So there's decisions around family, family stuff, but, but from a business standpoint, it's more again, going back to building that affinity across not only my siblings, but their spouses and then ideally their kids, to the underlying business assets.

Dave Simpson  
Just to recap, a couple things, entrepreneurship is at the core of this family. And even if you build a business that's so substantial that the expertise you need is more about management and bringing in the right management teams, the family is always looking for that entrepreneurial edge to say, Okay, let's look ahead 50 years. Do we want to have all our eggs in this particular basket, even if we agree that going deep into an industry is a way to build wealth. The portfolio theory, even the Warren Buffets of the world will tell you go deep into something is how you end up building significant wealth. But at some point we look at saying, How do I balance that out. And so that's re engaging entrepreneurship, and your generation is the perfect vehicle for successful family enterprise to re engage entrepreneurship to let's remember about what grandma and grandpa started and say, Well, what turns you on? You know more about the current economy in many ways than some of the leaders who have been doing a management job for the last, say, 10 years, and you're looking at what are the new opportunities, and using the brand recognition or the balance sheet of a family enterprise that's been successful over time gives you an incredible advantage, but don't think you just have to go in to replace one person in the family enterprise. Think about what a family business could do in the world today. And I love that you talked about Canada said it's not just about selling our branch plant to the Americans to give our family money, but let's see if we can build some national champions here that can, you know, kick butt all over the world, because every country is trying to figure that out right now, and gosh, we're so blessed here. We got some great opportunities to do that so So look, Familyshift has been well supported by this family. Jonathan in particular has always taken time out from not A. Only busy schedules, but family commitments. And he knows me more than anyone, always check that kind of pulse. Well, don't come if your wife's going into labor this week, it's a few weeks. But so he's done a great job of trying to continue to support us, even if London's not on his regular route. Now he's buying more businesses around here, which I'm excited about, because that's good to keep the London economy going. But he's been a big supporter because he has been through all that you're going through. He knows what it is like to be dealing with fathers who are often have their own opinions about who should be running things, but also who care deeply about their family and want to see the next gen succeed. And our journey this week is discovering what works for your family. Remember, we're not trying to give you the pure template to say you should do this, because it is based on what does the family value? What do you enjoy doing? What are you trying to get out of it? And I love that he told you. We talked a lot about what does success look like, right? There's no point in trying to measure something that we haven't defined. What is a win? What is a win here? And so if you sit down and talk a lot more, morphs nicely into tomorrow's session. Is a lot about communication, and you're going to hear a lot about the different styles of communications and knowing across generations. You know, what does my mom or dad need to hear that gets their attention? Because it might be different than what motivates this generation? How you communicate? Okay, so on behalf of Ivey and the Familyshift program, please give a warm round of applause for Jonathan...

Introduction/Outro  
The Entrepreneur Podcast is sponsored by Quantumshift 2008 alum and founder of Closing the Gap Healthcare Group, Dr Connie Clerici. To ensure you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast player or visit entrepreneurship.uwo.ca/podcast.

Thank you so much for listening until next time you.