Chris Yonker advises CEOs and other senior executives on effective leadership, with a particular focus on periods of transition. Because many of the businesses he works with are family-owned, he has a particular interest in the work and philosophy of LifeBook Memoirs.
As host of the podcast The Enlightened Family Business, Chris was delighted to welcome Roy Moëd and Yvette Conn, the co-founders of LifeBook Memoirs, to find out more about the company and how it assists families in chronicling their businesses for future generations.
As Roy and Yvette informed Chris, many LifeBook authors are men and women whose story centres on their business career. However, there is another side to LifeBook Memoirs that is bespoke and which specialises in helping companies record their history from the very start.
Such businesses were typically established as small family-run affairs, with the founder’s core values at the heart of their success as they grew into multi-million-pound companies with workforces numbering in their dozens or even hundreds.
Recording a company’s history from the very start – often sparked by a bright idea or a desire to provide better for a family – does more than tell a story. It also provides a road map for current and future family members. Even if they choose to do things differently, they can understand past events and how the company kept moving forward even in difficult times.
As Yvette says, “In these books, family members can discover more about the founder, but they’ll also learn about when things went wrong but were worked through. This can really encourage future generations to ‘have a go’, as well as enabling them to appreciate that there will be adversity and problems along the way, but that these can be overcome.”
Much of that comes from values established in the early days of uncertainty, relentless hard work and fierce determination to succeed. As Roy explains, those values are vital, although he cautions that they also have to be placed in the context of the relevant time and social mores, something which is all too often forgotten.
He says, “Values and the stories surrounding them are very easy to lose or distort if they are merely verbal. By writing them down, everyone can understand those values and where they came from.
“Recording its history in a book can also dispel myths about a company. It can even end family issues and put right misconceptions that could cause division. As one of our authors said, ‘I heard my daughter telling my stories and getting them wrong, so I thought I’d better do something about it’”.
Of course, an important function of creating a corporate history is that it provides a wonderful project for someone who is taking a step back from the company and passing it on to the next pair of hands. Not only does it give the author the chance to reflect on the origins of the company and everything that has been achieved since, but it can accurately document the journey taken to reach the current moment in time and provide context for decisions taken and why certain things happened the way they did.
These are essential concepts for understanding how the company functions today and for managing it going forward.
To listen to the podcast in full, click here.
Written by Halima Crabtree, LifeBook Memoirs editor
