SPEAKER_01 0:00

From the McGrath Institute for Church Life and OSV Podcasts, this is Church Life Today. I'm Leonard DiLorenzo. Every family hands something on. Not just property or a business, but a way of speaking to one another, a set of habits, the things we talk about and the things we have silently agreed never to raise. Some of that was built on purpose. Most of it was not. And one day, without any announcement, you find that you are no longer the one receiving the culture of your family. You are the one responsible for it. My guest today puts the question this way What kind of ancestor am I becoming? Josh Genteen advises families who own businesses and manage shared wealth. He is hired for governance and secession and estate planning, but none of it works until a family can actually talk honestly to one another. Corporations spend millions building psychological safety on their teams. Almost no one spends anything building it at home. Most families, Josh says, are not broken. They are circling each other at altitude, waiting for someone to go first. What draws me back to Josh's newsletter is that the human heart is always at the center. The complexity is financial and legal, but underneath it is the same thing underneath every family. We would often rather keep the peace than risk the conversation. And that kind of peace is not really peace. So this episode is for business leaders, certainly. But it is just as much for parents, for anyone caring for aging parents, for anyone who has moved from being mentored to being the mentor. And for anyone who suspects that what they will pass along is the life they lived rather than the advice they gave. Josh Genteen is the founder and president of Bench Consulting, where he guides enterprising families through generational change. He himself is a third-generation owner and board member at his family's company, Sargento Foods, and he teaches part-time with the Family Enterprise Center at UNC Keenan Flagler Business School. He studied finance at Notre Dame and later spent a year at Moreau Seminary discerning the priesthood, a story he tells in this episode. He is also, I am proud to say, my classmate in the Notre Dame class of 2003. He and his wife, Meredith, are raising their two children in Charlottesville, Virginia. Josh, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 2:55

Thanks for having me, Lenny.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

So, Josh, you obviously founded and led a consulting company, a consulting group that serves family-owned businesses, helping them to create enduring legacies. I'm really interested in learning from you how you came to do what you do. In other words, like what's the story of your professional calling here?

SPEAKER_00 3:16

It was not a straight line, Lenny. And it uh for for many years in um sort of my own discernment journey, it has been um for many years I couldn't figure out how the pieces were going to come together until I started doing the work that I do. But I grew up in our family business, Sargento Foods, and um went through the succession planning process back in the day. And, you know, I I always wanted to be a part of Sargento. Um, I grew up a mile from our headquarters uh uh in high school. I was the guy on the line cutting cheese. And so I expect, yeah, you can imagine the jokes that I got all through high school about that. Um and and frankly, I got a lot of pressure uh to go in from my dad in particular. I think you know he wanted one of his kids to be a part of the leadership team in the future, just like he was. And uh as a dad, I can certainly recognize where that came from. And at the same time, it put an incredible amount of pressure on me to pursue that path and to follow it. And so I did. Uh, we also, Lenny, had a lot of governance in terms of how we operate as family members in the context of Sargento and the business. What does it mean to come into the business? What are the requirements? We had a lot of structure around that. And so I followed that path, uh, studied finance at Notre Dame, and uh after undergrad, I ended up um doing some nonprofit work, got into food and beverages as more of an entrepreneur, following my grandfather's footsteps. Um, but in the back of my mind, I was considering Sargento and uh was also thinking and considering uh a life of um in the priesthood. And I didn't talk to anyone about that because uh I wanted to ignore it. I didn't want to face that calling and and what was happening in the background. I liked girls. I wanted to be CEO of Sargento. Um headwinds, maybe in that discernment process. But I remember uh sitting in an interview with our with our board of directors, the independent directors, thinking about the path and the future. And I remember thinking, gosh, if I don't answer this question, I'm gonna regret it my entire life. And so uh as a part of the plan that we had in place as family members um and as a hedge, I went and got my MBA, spent two years down at Chapel Hill, um, and and really kind of focused on management consulting, which I really enjoyed. And hoped, Lenny, that maybe two years in in North Carolina, I would find the girl of my dreams, this whole discernment and this religious life thing would go away and I could just move on. Um, and that didn't happen. I did meet a great girl, um, but uh I I knew I had to, I knew I had to answer the call. And so after my MBA, I went back to Notre Dame, entered Moreau Seminary, and um spent my postulant year duking it out with God and trying to figure out where was that call. At the end of the first year, while I was discerning the second year, um, a year of solitude in the mountains, and and really taking myself out of out of life and really focusing on on religious life. Um, I had a really, really beautiful moment of clarity where it became crystal clear. And it's hard for me to describe the moment, but it was the moment I finally surrendered to whatever God wanted. And I never did that. I did prior to that moment, I never actually said, you know, thy will be done. And when I did, Lenny, it was such a cool moment of this is not it. I could, I could kind of see everything laid out in front of me. And it was such a blessing that I think most individuals who discern religious life and and either continue on and become Catholic priests or or leave, they always are left with questions. And I didn't. Um, I didn't. I left with a very clear, like, it's time to move on, Josh. And so I called that girl I met in North Carolina, and she's now my wife, and I called Deloitte Consulting, um, who I would recruited with in business school. And when I got the the offer to join them, I said, hey, I'm gonna go be a priest. And they essentially said, if you leave, if you leave, give us a call. So I called Meredith and I called Deloitte. Um, and I got a job doing global MA transactions. And um I spent about four years, probably three years doing MA and one year doing global consulting and a lot of governance and decision rights um in that work. And while I loved the experience at Deloitte, I missed humans. I missed human connection. And in hindsight, a lot of what attracted me to the life of the priesthood was the pastoral nature of that role. And uh, so I started coaching internally uh at Deloitte, and then I also had a client on the outside who had a large family business. And in the course of doing our work, he really said, Can you help us build all the governance that you guys have at Sargento for our family? And so I essentially pivoted from his executive coach to advising his entire family on what does it mean to build a multi-generational family business? And in doing that work with uh with her family, it became very clear to me that this is the work that I want to do. And this is what I'm kind of called to do. And it was a it was a culmination of my my life experience growing up at Sargento, um, going through succession planning. I had uh I had, while I was at Deloitte, made the very um conscious, intentional decision not to go back and and take my name off uh off the list. And so I had I joined the board, I was doing board work at Sargento, and combined with the governance work, my lived experience, and the pastoral nature of what I do now, um, that's how I got here. And so, Lenny, all the work I do is helping families navigate the intersection of family, wealth, family enterprise, family office, um, helping them build the structures that hold it together. But preceding the structures, it's really about the family dynamics and communication and building psychological safety in a family. Because without that, you can't create great governance. You can't do succession planning if the family can't communicate effectively, can't do um sort of the right estate planning work and building constitutions and these things that hold families together in a in a scalable family enterprise. You can't do that without having the family dynamics in a position where people can communicate effectively about what they want. And so while we do governance work and the complexities around estate planning and succession planning and shareholder agreements and and and all of that, um we do that within the through the lens of family dynamics and building, as I describe it, trying to build stronger, better families. And we use their balance sheet as the way in. They're doing this work because of the assets and because there is there is something that is worth holding on to and navigating with care. And that's what we try to work on.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

Yeah. You know, I'm so glad you brought all of this up, sharing your story, but also talking, you know, bringing our attention to the family dynamics that are right at the heart of what you do. Because in many ways, that's what drew me to reach out to you for this conversation. We, of course, know each other, we're classmates. We saw each other, I think, the last time in person at a class reunion, but I came across the newsletter that you put out regularly on LinkedIn where we're connected. Uh so I saw it there and I saw, I think one of the um the uh editions was titled Monetary Policy. And I said, Oh, this is from Josh, I'll read this. And what I was drawn to in that was the deep focus on some of the things that you're bringing to our attention here, the family dynamics, the focus on relationships. And so I then I started to read other dispatches in your newsletter, and I was confronted over and over again with all of this uh relational wrestling, relational wisdom, the human side of every bit of what you were talking about there. And for me, for somebody like me who's not in the field of work that you're in, I found incredible value for myself in reading through that. So I'm wondering if you could talk even a little bit more here about the heart, what seemed to me the heart of what you're doing, which is this relational work within the uh sort of or under the purview of a family business. The business is the reason that there's an engagement, perhaps, but it seems so much that so much of the work has to do with fostering the good communication, like you said, being clear about priorities, uh, really the human, the human and relational dynamics that are making these family businesses truly what they are now and into the future.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

Yeah. There, I often reference when we're working with clients, Project Aristotle. This was the Google project that looked at how do you build high-performing teams. And the number one factor in building a high-performing team, according to this research, was psychological safety. And Amy Edmondson from Harvard has written extensively, she's sort of the the godmother, let's call it, of uh of psychological safety. And I think about the fact that in navigating a family business, being a family member in a family business and looking at the ownership group and how decisions are made, it's a team. Yes, you're family. Um, but at the same time, you're you're a team making decisions about an organization, about a um an enterprise that has far-reaching implications for employees, for um for communities. If I look at Sargento, um, let's call it 26, 2700 employees, and the decisions that we're making in in a town of let's 10,000 people. Right. And so the decisions that we as family members make as owners, um have significant impact on the community in which we have our teams, our employees, as we call it, the Sargento family. And so in in many ways, the work is about building a high-performing team. And the psychological safety is so important because if we can't come together as a as an ownership group and talk about the things that we want, the things that matter to us as family members and as owners, potentially as board members in my case and in my cousin Louie's case, as an operator, as our leader or CEO, if we can't have those conversations, it's really difficult to shepherd this from one generation to the next. Because we're gonna, if if I'm holding back and I'm not able to articulate those things because I don't feel safe in my family to articulate it, how do you create the right conditions for passing the business on from one generation to the next? And in every engagement, now there's a selection bias when I look at our clients because they're they're coming to us because they they need support, they need help. Whether they're in the throes of conflict or they're trying to think proactively about the future, they're coming to us because they want to solve a problem. And it presents in many ways around the enterprise, but in every single client example, it comes down to the human relationships and these family relationships. And, you know, in the business context, I go back to Project Aristotle and the work that corporations do, they spend billions trying to figure out how to build high-performing teams. They spend billions figuring out how can we learn to effectively communicate and work together to drive initiatives forward. Well, families rarely spend money actually engaging in how do we get to know each other at a deeper level. Um, at Deloitte, we would do personality assessments, we do chemistry work, we do team leadership events, so on and so forth. Um and we invested in those relationships, and the reality is we invested more in those relationships than we were than we were investing in our own homes. And most people do. Um, I don't know if you've gone, you know, sat down with your family and done a uh, you know, a personality workshop with them, but uh odds are you haven't.

unknown 15:54

Have not.

SPEAKER_00 15:54

Have not, I'll admit it. Have not. Um but the reality is, you know, you have kids, they go off to college, there's transformation happening in the family at every life stage. And when the kids leave, in particular, they're evolving so dramatically in their lived experience as college students and then first jobs and relationships and so forth. And they're changing. And at the same time, parents aren't changing. Yeah. And their life is very different than it used to be. But we take for granted those relationships because we grew up in in the same house under the same roof. And we never go back to being intentional about what does it mean to communicate? How are we communicating effectively? How can we do that in in how can we communicate better going forward? Um, and so we sort of pull everything back to that level and say, okay, what do we need to do? What are the communication patterns in your family? Where are there, where are their landmines that we have to navigate? Why did those landmines exist? We're not going to unpack, we're not, we're not doing family therapy, but we are, it's it's sort of the difference between therapy and coaching. We want to recognize what has happened. We want to recognize the dynamics and where a family is. And we want to say, where do you want to go? How do you want this relationship to be going forward? And if we can, if we can sort of create the glide path for families to map out, here's where we're at, here's where we want to go, here's why we want to do that. We're committed to doing this together. Now let's put in the work to building effective communication and building the psychological safety. And so we do a lot of you know, ladders of inference and we're doing a lot of the psychology and family systems work, all in the name of sort of enterprise um continuity between generations. And it's easy, Lenny, in a in a family business, a sargento of the world, to say, okay, we've got this, we've got this asset, we've got this business, we want to shepherd this from one from one generation to the next. We've got all these employees and vision and values. That's that's easy. Family office context, when there's a liquidity event and you don't have that, all you have is cash and a portfolio. Maybe you have operating companies, but it's a different dynamic. And so um, it's even more paramount in many respects to do this work in family offices where you don't have that grounding asset, that operating company necessarily. You've got values, you've got, you've got legacy, you've got history, you've got all of these sort of anchors. How do we turn that into family? I'm not gonna call it harmony, but family unity around these pooled assets. And how do we be together? How can we do this as a family in a way that is that is fruitful to us and the assets that we're that we're managing?

SPEAKER_01 19:01

You know, it's so striking to me uh hearing you talk about this, Josh, because I'm thinking about um some of the first year students I'm teaching right now. We have this first year seminar at Notre Dame called uh the Moreau Program, which is new as of the last couple of years. And just last week, um, the week's session was on roots and it had to do with family dynamics a lot and uh research into family dynamics and some testimonies about that that they read. But then the discussion in class really gives them an opportunity to think about uh look, your first-year uh college students, things have just uh radically changed for your family relationships, one way or the other. You many come from good um good homes that they feel really good about, they're really attached to their families. Others not so much. There's some tension and strain. But one of the things we kept coming back to, and I was sort of guiding it towards this, was in these testimonies that we read, in the research that we read, there were different kinds of responses uh that proved really fruitful for people as they grew relative to their family relationships. But the one thing that was constant was engagement rather than avoidance. And by that I mean for those who had the difficult family backgrounds, they didn't avoid that, they engaged it. I'm not talking about my students now, I'm talking about these testimonies and the research. They recognized it and engaged it and made intentional choices going forward on the basis of that. For others, it had to do with recognizing that look, uh, these relationships are dynamic. The people in the relationships are growing and changing, and it calls forth different things from us. And it brought, I'm um, this is reminding me of something I read in one of your newsletter posts. Um, there's all these lines that were just kind of like pinging me, almost like examination, little moments of examination of conscience. And this was one that relates to that. I think I wrote it down and said, I don't think most families are broken. This is you writing. I don't think most families are broken. I think most are just circling each other at altitude, waiting for someone to go first. Man, I I it that really that really struck and it and it it echoed back to me, or it echoes back to me now, uh, this theme of engagement rather than avoidance, of in, you know, to use this analogy of actually being the first one to maybe bring the the uh the distance, close the distance, come down for a landing, maybe to talk about the things that really matter. Um I'd love to keep talking about that with you here. How do you see this taking place um with some of the families and some of the businesses that you work with? What are what are um I guess some of those movements towards you know somebody taking that first step, being the one to go first to close the distance? How do you see that? What are what are what are the things that are happening there?

SPEAKER_00 21:52

Well, it's scary to go first. It's nobody it's amazing. Nobody wants to be the front of the line, nobody wants to sit in the front of the club. Leaning, leaning in, being the first to raise their hand, um is a scary thing. Um, so there's fear there because we don't know how it's gonna land and we don't know how somebody's gonna necessarily respond. And we may have inclinations of it based on on history together, of gosh, if I say this, it's gonna land like that. Um and at the same time, if the effort isn't made, nothing's gonna change.

SPEAKER_01 22:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:36

And so how do you begin? How do you start that, how do you start that process? Um I think it's I think it's literally just taking that first step and saying, I would like to talk about this, I would like to have a deeper relationship. Almost nothing else needs to come after that as a starting spot. And you don't have to solve for the logistics of how that relationship is gonna evolve. You don't have to solve for the barriers that existed in the past. But I think making a genuine request and saying, I would like to, and we don't have to go any further than that, but I just want you to know that you matter enough to me that I'm willing to go out on an edge and say yes to the idea that it would be nice to have a deeper relationship. And that in many ways begins the thawing process for a lot of families to just take that step. Um then after that step, and and after leading with the heart and leading with this desire for connection and engagement together, um, there will inevitably be moments of tension and the past, past communication patterns coming up and so forth. But if there's an agreement to a shared desire to connect, that's that's the value. That's that's the thing that everyone wants. And um if I think about negotiations um and negotiating for for anything, before you can get in the negotiation, there has to be an understanding for what is the collective outcome that we're trying to achieve. What is what is the best case scenario? And um, before taking positions and sides and so forth, it's like, are we trying to what are we trying to accomplish here? And I think in in families, it's um being able to say, hey, we've got a lot of blockage, we've got a lot of headwinds to this relationship, but if we can both agree that I would like to know you at a deeper level, I'd like to have a relationship with you. I don't want this pattern that we have to continue. Um, let's start there and then take baby steps into and what do we need to solve for and how can we do this most effectively? And sometimes that's a really small step, and it's just spending time talking about things that don't matter um until there's enough of a foundation to talk about the things that matter. If I look at my if I look at some of my family relationships with family enterprises, large family enterprises, um, assets from liquidity events, um the the money brings on complexity whether we like it or not. And it brings on complexity because it um it introduces challenges that you money introduces all sorts of complexity, and uh it's um it's a gift, it is an incredible blessing. It provides uh for so many families, and as we were talking, communities and and employees and so forth. But the reality is you can't um with with significant wealth comes complexity, and that complexity has to be solved one way or the other. Um, you know, the if I if I look at a lot of the clients that we work with, we are we are um we are forced to look at um estate planning strategies because they might have a family business and there's significant assets and wealth there. And if it's not solved for, there's an estate tax liability that has to be paid. Um and in in in and paying that is going to require making decisions that are hard. You can't uh you can't die with a billion-dollar company um and own a majority of that without having to uh to pay some substantial uh estate taxes. And that may mean having to liquidate the family business or find outside partners. And when you introduce these factors, now we have to have a conversation about it. We're gonna have to talk about how to solve for those challenges. And if we don't have the relationship and we don't have the ability, the, the, the ability to effectively communicate about hard things, it's really hard to solve for those. Or they're gonna be solved in a vacuum. They're gonna be solved. I'm gonna make a decision and you're gonna have to live with it. And rarely do those decisions go well. Um oftentimes it's hey, I made a decision. I passed down all of my wealth. I haven't told you about it yet, but you're gonna be surprised when I die. That creates long-term resentment after somebody is gone. That's hard.

SPEAKER_01 28:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:17

And and it has a phenomenal way of negatively impacting the receiver, even though they now have significantly more than they had before. Simultaneously, or or in a different way, um, having a conversation about do I feel comfortable passing all of this wealth down to you? Should it go to you? Um, what are you gonna do with it? How are you a steward of these assets? Do I trust you to um to live the values that that I have when you inherit this money? Um those are those are just really difficult conversations. And so it comes down to once again, the ability to develop a relationship, to have a strong relationship with your family member, because you're gonna have to have these conversations. And uh, or best case, let me put it this way, you're not gonna have to, but it is much better to have those conversations when everyone is in a position to have them with um the right mind. Um and not when you're forced to when somebody goes through a sort of a catalytic event where now they're in the hospital or you're forced into some really difficult conversations because we didn't have them before. And so the foundation starts way before those events happen. Ideally, the foundation is built over time, years before those events ever happen. Um, because then you can navigate them together as a family in a way that's gonna be uh life-giving versus um versus something that creates strain and tension and conflict in in a family.

SPEAKER_01 30:01

Yeah. This brings me to to one thing I wanted, I was hoping we'd be able to get to as well, which is here you're bringing us to this kind of transition of assets, of responsibility from one generation to it to the next generation. And it brings me back to something else I read that you wrote, which came down to this particular question. What kind of ancestor am I becoming? You posed this question, what kind of ancestor am I becoming? That hit a little bit for me. I've thought and and written about and tried to work with people on, like that transition from being mentored to being the mentor, or the movement from really benefiting from uh a rich culture that someone else has contributed to and built for you in a family, in a community, in a parish, in a parish, in a school, to becoming the bearer of the responsibility for the culture culture so that others may flourish. And so I'm I'm really struck by this question of what kind of ancestor am I becoming? That movement in in one way from being the beneficiary to being the benefactor, the good maker, if you will. Um how tell me how you think about that, Josh, and how you see it in your work, that sort of transition or transformation from being one kind of uh member in the in the family, in the community, to suddenly without, and sometimes there's no announcement that this happens, but now you're the one to whom others look uh to take on the responsibility to nurture an environment to pass things along.

SPEAKER_00 31:39

Yeah. Um this question um and or uh that we often pose to clients um what kind of ancestor do you want to be? Um and and what does that look like to you? Is a question or a prompt that requires somebody to um to have agency, to take initiative, to do something with. And we often pose it because hard things need to happen in a family, in a family business, um, conversations that haven't been had, family system dynamics that continue from generation to the to generation. Um, do you want those to continue or not? And how are you being the one who is changing the course and the trajectory of your family? Um, family and enterprise family office, if if that's the situation, but more so family. And as I look at that question, it can be related to the enterprise. It can also be related to, excuse me one second, Lenny. It can be related to the enterprise, it can also be related to the family dynamics and being the first to take a step and to say, hey, let's not do this anymore. Let's let's do it differently. We've all expressed an interest in being a different family. I'm gonna take, I'm gonna have the courage to be, you know, different and to go out on a limb and to take that risk because I want our family, I want to be known as the ancestor who changed the course and the trajectory of our family. And imagine looking back and having grandkids sit back and say, well, you know, grandpa so-and-so or grandma so-and-so, she was the one that brought us together. She she did those hard things because she saw a future that was that was better than the past. And it's interesting, we've we've got a client right now who is having to be that ancestor in their family enterprise. Um, they are having to make all of the hard decisions because those hard decisions hadn't been made. And it's painful for him to go through that, but that's his anchor. His anchor is it might be difficult. I might be the one that's taking a lot of hits right now, but I want in 50 years to set our family up for success. I want them to look back and say, gosh, you know, he did some really hard things and they were uncomfortable, but they were the right things for the family, for the business, for the community. And he made those hard decisions because he wanted to create that path for the rest of us. That in in many ways is being a great ancestor. It also might mean having the hard conversation and saying, listen, this is difficult, but you're in a position, hey, son, grandson, granddaughter, whoever it might be, we have to have a hard conversation about wealth and money and the decisions that we're making. Um, that is an uncomfortable thing to do, but if it can set up the conditions for success later on, those are the right conversations to have. And families in family systems, there is a there is a gravitational force towards the the comfort, to the stability. We all play our roles. We all um we do things to keep the peace. And sometimes it takes somebody upsetting that system and challenging that system, and it's gonna be uncomfortable. And at the same time, it's what the entire family needs. And in my mind, that's what being a great ancestor is. It's it's taking that initiative.

SPEAKER_01 35:39

Love it. Well, listeners, as you can certainly hear, there's so much going on in what Josh is doing that relates to a broad array of people, myself included. I'm so grateful, Josh, that you, on the one hand, had this newsletter that brought me into some of the fruits of your work that I might not have looked into otherwise. But I'm doubly grateful for this conversation that you've shared today. Thanks so much for this time.

SPEAKER_00 36:02

Thanks, Lenny. I appreciate it very much.

SPEAKER_01 36:05

And for all of you listening, I'll be sure to link in the show notes uh not only Josh's uh company bench consulting, but also a direct link uh to his newsletter page so you can thumb through there and see what might appeal to you. I do highly recommend it, and I am pretty confident you'll find some things that are of interest to you in there. But for now, we thank you as always for joining us on Church Life Today. Talk to you next time. This has been a production of OSV Podcasts. To learn more, visit osvpodcasts.com.