The Thanksgiving Rule Our Family Keeps Making and We Keep Breaking
By Ahmie Baum, CFP® CFBA Every year at Thanksgiving, somewhere between the first plate and the second, someone at our table says the same thing. “Don't talk about business right now.” It is said kindly, usually with a laugh, and it is a fair request. Every year, my son Brian and I talk about business anyway.
We don’t plan it. Someone asks how the year went, or one of us mentions something that has been sitting unresolved, and 20 minutes later we are deep in a conversation nobody else at the table asked for. The rule gets issued the following November again, which tells you something about how well it worked.
I have stopped treating this as a failure of discipline. A rule that must be reissued every year is usually describing a condition it cannot solve.
Both Sides of the Table Have a Point
The people asking for the rule are not wrong. For the members of our family who don't work in the business, listening to the two of us talk shop is an interruption to the dinner. The conversation takes over the table and runs on vocabulary nobody understands, turning a holiday into a meeting they never agreed to attend. They want one afternoon where the family is simply a family, and that request deserves more respect than it usually gets.
Brian and I are responding to something real as well. Most of our time together is governed by a calendar that decides what we discuss and how long we have to discuss it. Thanksgiving is one of the few stretches in the year when that pressure lifts. The questions that never fit into a Monday agenda (like where things are heading and what each of us wants next) surface when there is finally room for them.
Both sides are answering a genuine need, which is why neither side ever wins. A subject with no scheduled time on the calendar will find an unscheduled one.
What This Costs Larger Families
Our situation is unusually simple, since there are only two of us in the business. Most of the families we work with have more people holding a stake, and for them the holiday comes with a different kind of pressure. It’s often the only occasion all year when every owner is in the same room at the same time.
And it’s when informal decisions tend to happen. Someone raises a question about a distribution, or about whether a nephew is going to be given a real role. A nod passes across the table. The subject moves on, dessert arrives, and everyone drives home with a slightly different understanding of what was agreed. Nothing was written down, and half the owners were in the kitchen. The disagreement resurfaces in the spring, when positions have hardened, and the cost of settling it has gone up.
Decisions made this way can be the hardest to untangle later, since no one leaves the table thinking there was a disagreement.
Where the Conversation Belongs
Trying harder to keep business off the table has never worked for us. The conversation needs somewhere else to go.
We call that design Enterprise Control Architecture™, the governance, authority, and capital structures that determine how ownership questions get raised and resolved. In practice, it’s less elaborate than it sounds. A standing ownership meeting with an agenda circulated in advance gives those questions a home. Clarity about which decisions belong to owners and which belong to management means a nod over pie registers as a comment instead of a commitment. And when something does come up informally, routing it to the next scheduled meeting keeps it from being settled by whoever spoke last.
The Clarity Foundation™ is how we do this work with the families who come to us. Many of them are surprised by how much the holiday improves once the business has a proper place to be discussed.
We Will Probably Break It Again
Brian and I will break the rule again this year, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Silence at the table was never the point. The difference now is that our Thanksgiving conversation continues something that already has its own place on the calendar. That takes the pressure off the meal and everyone else sitting at it.
If the holidays are the only time your family talks seriously about the business, you have a year to give that conversation a better place to happen.
To talk through how your family's ownership structure is holding up, request an Ownership Architecture Briefing, a 60-minute diagnostic session with our team. Call us at 412-307-4230 or email team@interchangecp.com.
Frequently Asked Questions About Talking About Business at Family Gatherings
Should you talk about business at family gatherings?
There is nothing wrong with business coming up at a family gathering. The concern is when the gathering is the only place it comes up. Families that hold regular ownership meetings find the dinner conversation picks up where the last meeting left off, so nothing needs to be resolved between the turkey and the pie.
What happens when family business decisions get made informally?
Informal agreements get remembered differently by each person who was there, and they typically don’t reach family members who weren't. Months later, the family is working from several versions of what was decided. Decisions carrying ownership or compensation consequences belong in a setting where they can be recorded and shared with everyone affected.
How often should a family business hold formal ownership meetings?
Many of the families we advise settle into a quarterly rhythm, with one annual meeting covering longer-term direction. The meetings should be scheduled well ahead of time and should happen whether something has gone wrong or not.
