A few weeks ago, Andrea Carpenter and I sat down with Family Business Magazine for a live webinar on preparing the next generation for ownership. We were joined by two people who know this journey from the inside: Laurie and Brad Irish-Jones of Irish Family Companies, a fourth-generation family business that has been serving Western New York since 1932.
Laurie is the prior CEO who led her family through the transition from the third generation to the fourth. Brad is part of that fourth generation, now helping lead the business forward. They are past clients of ours, and they were generous enough to share what actually worked, what was hard, and what they would tell families standing exactly where you might be standing right now.
The conversation was too good to live in one place, so we are sharing the full webinar as a special episode of the Business Transition Roadmap podcast. You can listen right here:
In this post, I want to highlight a few of the moments that have stayed with me, and the thread that ties them all together: what happens when two generations build a transition side by side instead of one generation deciding for everyone.
“We were stuck because we were so busy”
Succession planning with multiple siblings is one of the most complex paths a family can walk, and the Irish family knows it well. When we first started working together, four of Laurie’s five sisters were working in the business, each with a defined role. On paper, everything was fine. But Laurie kept doing the math. The sisters were in their fifties, they had been running the company together for twenty-five years, and nobody had answered the question of how to keep the business in the family for the generation coming up behind them.
Her words on the webinar were honest: “We were stuck because we were so busy in the business, we weren’t even thinking about transitioning.”
I hear a version of this from almost every family I work with. It is not that owners don’t care about the future. It is that the business demands everything today, and transition always feels like something you can get to later. Meanwhile, the next generation is watching and waiting. Brad described what that waiting felt like from his seat: wondering about the timeline, wondering how it would work, and eventually feeling what he called deal fatigue, where everyone is so focused on the transition that the business itself stops getting full attention.
The difference between telling and building
There are really three generations of transition thinking. In Transition 1.0, the plan lives in a will and the family finds out when it happens. In Transition 2.0, the owner makes the decisions and announces them, hoping everyone falls in line. In Transition 3.0, both generations build the transition together.
The Irish family is Transition 3.0 in action, and their story shows what collaborative design actually looks like when you are transitioning ownership across multiple generations.
First, every voice was gathered before the direction was set. Nobody handed down a finished plan. The family worked through the Transition Compass together, answering the Big 6 questions of why, what, who, when, how much, and how as a group, so the direction they landed on was collective rather than imposed.
Second, the next generation organized as true participants, not spectators. While the sisters were working through their side of the transition, Brad and his cousins were meeting as their own unit, holding regular conversations about who would take which role when the handoff came. Brad’s younger brother became CEO, not because of birth order, but because, as Brad put it, he was the better fit for the position. When the transition happened, the fourth generation was ready and, in Laurie’s words, they took off.
Third, commitments were made in both directions. The successors knew what they needed to learn and when they needed to learn it by. The transitioners knew when they were stepping out. As Andrea likes to say, people line up to their commitments, not your expectations of them. A commitment only becomes possible when both generations helped shape the plan they are committing to.
That readiness was not luck. It was the direct result of the next generation being invited into the process early, with real information and real responsibility.
Assumptions are what get us into trouble
One theme came up again and again in this conversation: the danger of assuming instead of asking.
I shared a story on the webinar about a client from years ago who wanted to bring his qualified, capable son into the company but had decided against it. Why? He assumed his daughter would be upset, because her husband had been out of work and there was no role for him. When we finally walked the family through the process and everyone shared what they actually wanted, the assumption fell apart. The daughter was happy for her brother. The son-in-law found his own path. Father and son have now worked together for well over a decade.
The Irish family had their own version of this. Their biggest area of conflict was the timeline, because different people wanted different things at different times, and some had no timeline at all. Nothing moved until someone made a clear commitment. Once Laurie named her own direction and did the Pathfinder work to define her next adventure, the rest of the family had something to respond to. Movement created movement.
Assumptions harden in silence. Clarity only comes from the conversations most families keep postponing.
What held it together
I asked Laurie and Brad what carried the family through the harder stretches, because there were hard stretches. Previous consultants who didn’t work out. Tough conversations. Periods where people stopped talking. Family business tension about succession is normal, and pretending otherwise sets families up for a fall. What matters is having a way through it.
Their answer was a single question the family kept on the table: what is best for the business? When emotions ran high, that question gave everyone a shared North Star. Everybody wanted the business to go on. Everybody wanted the next generation to succeed. With that as the anchor, the family could work through the details, even the painful ones.
Near the end of the webinar, I asked them both to finish a sentence: the families that make it through this well are the ones who do what? Laurie’s answer was to plan, ask the hard questions, and address them. Brad’s was to have lifelong relationships and a plan on how to move forward.
Notice what neither of them said. Not the perfect legal structure. Not the ideal tax strategy. Relationships and a shared plan, built together.
Hear the full conversation on the podcast
This webinar is now available in full as Episode 85 of the Business Transition Roadmap, and it is one of my favorite episodes we have ever shared, because it puts real names and real voices to the work we do every day. Laurie and Brad talk about the fear of letting go of the business, how to step back from a family business without losing yourself, the two-year outside work rule for the next generation, how they handled sixteen grandchildren as potential successors, and what life on the other side of transition actually feels like.
Listen to Episode 85 of the Business Transition Roadmap wherever you get your podcasts, or press play on the episode above.
And if this conversation sparked questions about your own family’s path, we would love to talk. Schedule a free discovery session with our team at transitionstrategists.com/discovery.
