Welcome to the Inside B.S. Show. I'm Dave Lorenzo. This is show 798.

So today I'm answering a question that I got from a listener or maybe a viewer. I don't know if they watch on YouTube. By the way, if you're listening to this on Apple podcasts or on Spotify, you can get the video.

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So I'm just getting ready for the week ahead, cleaning up some things in the office and I'm recording the show. So if you want to see the video, go to my personal YouTube channel, The Dave Lorenzo. No, no, I'm sorry.

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Search for show 798. That's today's show. You can see me behind the scenes on video.

Okay. Today we're answering a question from a listener, from a viewer, and that question is Dave, what is the hardest thing to do as the CEO of a family business? So based on my experience working with family business owners and I've worked in family businesses my entire career, I own a family business. My wife and I have a business that we've worked in together.

She's now out of that business, but we worked in it together. Nicola has worked in a family business growing up, so we talk about family businesses. We work with family businesses all the time.

Based on that experience, the hardest thing for a family business CEO to do is to attract top talent. There's nobody in college right now getting a degree and saying to themselves, I need to go work in a family business that does $15 million a year. No matter how visionary the CEO is, no matter whether the business is going to grow to $100 million or a billion dollars, there was nobody.

When Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his garage, there was nobody that said, I want to go work for a book selling company that's going to be online that my neighbor Jeff Bezos is starting in his garage. Michael Dell, working out of his garage, had a hard time attracting top talent. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, I'm sure, had a hard time attracting top talent when they were in a garage.

Even when you're a $10 million company, it's hard to attract top talent. What do you do? How do you attract top talent when you're a family business? You give people a shot at getting experience they wouldn't get anywhere else and that's what you sell. When you're a family business or you're doing $5 million in revenue and the people who are really smart or the people who have specialized skills or specialized knowledge or deep experience in an area and you need to get them in order to take your business to the next level, you tell them that they're going to get experience working for you that they wouldn't get anywhere else or you give them the opportunity to have a piece of the action to own something that they're never going to get anywhere else.

You sell them on your vision for the future and then you give them something that they can't get anyplace else. That's how you get top talent to join you. Let's face it, people join a startup or they join a family business for a couple of reasons.

They join because they see something in the owner or the founder or the person who's going to be their boss that they're not going to get anyplace else or that's attractive to them. They see that person as a visionary and they're willing to bet their future on that person. That's the first thing that draws top talent in.

The second thing is experience or skills or knowledge or the acquisition of skills or knowledge or experience that they're not going to get anyplace else. I remember when I worked with lawyers, I remember talking to people who went into service in the public defender's office or even in the prosecutor's office but particularly in the public defender's office. People who go to work for the public defender's office, they get paid next to nothing.

They get paid very little money and they work with tough clients. They work with clients who have been accused of crimes and these clients are generally not sophisticated. They're unable to afford lawyers that would command high fees but the people who go into the public defender's office, number one, they have a sense of mission and service and number two, they go into the public defender's office because in three years or two years in the public defender's office, they're going to get 20 years of court experience.

They're going to be in court every day as a public defender. They're going to be trying hard cases to win. They're going to be working on things that nobody else wants to work on and the experience itself is going to be brutal.

It's going to be hard. It's going to be terrible. It's going to be tough but they're happy to get that experience and they're going to sacrifice getting paid by a big law firm to get the experience of going to court every day.

Then three years later when they're finished with their time in the public defender's office and they go work somewhere else, they have a lifetime of court experience that kids out of college who went to a big law firm wouldn't have otherwise. So, you've got to be able to produce that in your company if you want to attract top talent. So, the best way for you to go get top talent is to offer skills, knowledge and experience that other people don't have and to have a big bold vision and be able to sell people on your big bold vision.

Those are the two things that I think make you and your business attractive. Now, the incentives in terms of how you keep them afterward, that's one of the reasons why Nicola and I spend a lot of time talking about ESOPs, Employee Stock Ownership Plans because that's a real big benefit for someone coming to work for your business in a family-owned company. If you offer an ESOP and it vests over a period of time, it's a huge advantage for people to join you because they can have an ownership interest in your business after three, five, seven years, whatever the vesting period is.

That's a great opportunity for people who come to work with you. So, that's a way to keep them. Giving them a piece of the action, giving them an ownership interest is a great way to keep them for the long term.

But attracting top talent is the biggest challenge that a family business has. If you're struggling as a family business to attract top talent, you need to have someone come in and take a look at your business with fresh eyes because people from the outside will often see things that you, as a business owner, don't see or can't see. And that's where we really provide a significant amount of value in consulting.

We're often brought in to family businesses to help create a powerful employment brand for that business so that that business, the family business, can attract top talent. So if you're struggling with this, give us a call, 305-692-5531, 305-692-5531. That's our phone number at Exit Success Lab.

You can call us and we'll take a look at your business and help you identify ways that you can attract top talent into your family business. This is show 798. We're two episodes away from 800.

Episode 800 is going to be two days from now on Wednesday. We got nothing special planned. It's just going to be another episode.

But I'm thrilled that you're here. Thank you for joining me. This is the Inside BS Show.

We're here every day at 6 a.m. with a brand new episode for you. I'm Dave Lorenzo. Until tomorrow, here's hoping you make a great living and live a great life.