How to Build A Family Business Succession Plan with Stephen Shortt Ep. 82

So we've built a piece of software. Where at the moment it's targeted from 16 to kind of 24 years of age. So high school and early in college, we can give you a series of assessments, aptitudes, your verbal numerical, and abstract reasoning, and then an intra inventory. So a group of psychometric assessments, then we will be able to give you a report, which gives you 16, very targeted careers, very specific careers. That you are gonna be good at, and you're gonna enjoy doing a description of what's actually involved in that career. And then what kind of courses lead to becoming that.

Welcome to FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS. How do people end up becoming an entrepreneur? How do they scale and grow their businesses? How do they plan for profit? Are they in it for life or are they building to exit these and a myriad of other topics will be discussed to pull back the veil on the wizardry of successful and FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS. My book RELENTLESS is now available. Everywhere books can be bought online, including Amazon and BarnesAndNoble.com. Try your local indie bookstore too. And if they don't have it, they can order it. Just ask them the reviews are streaming in. And I'm so thankful for the positive feedback, as well as hearing from people that my memoir has impacted them positively. It is not enough to be resilient. You have to be RELENTLESS. You can go to TheRelentlessBook.com for more information. Thank you so much. Steven Short is involved in different industries, including leadership development and psychometric selection, as well as international education and training he's delivered seminars and workshops, moderated panel discussions, and acted as the MC for a range of international events on the topics of entrepreneurship, international communication leadership. Social media marketing, audio visual marketing, and more to date, we talk about an assessment he's developed for young adults to match them with a career. Also the global student entrepreneurship awards and the culture of entrepreneurship in Ireland. Now let's get right into it.

So psychometric tests, it's a collective term for anything that measures human personality, ability, interests, anything that psychoanalyze, so psychos to do with the mind and thoughts. So psychometric tests are tests that assess your abilities in your interests and your personality.

And do you use these tests in your business? Do you use various tests like Colby and culture index? And is there a specific one that you use?

So we are distributors for Hogan assessments in Ireland. So Hogan looks at like a 360 of you, they call the day to day, which is the bright. Then there's the dark side. So at times of high stress, and then there's the inside, which is your motor's values and preferences. So I'm familiar with culture index in Colby and Myers, Briggs, and Disk, and all of these. But Hogan is the one that we use more often than any of the others.

Interesting. I had not heard of that. Is it very specific to Ireland?

No, it's actually in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Bob and Joyce Hogan live out there. They have a fantastic office have been out there and it's worldwide is used by, I think something like 97% of the fortune 500 companies. And obviously many many companies underneath it.

Amazing. You learn something incredibly new every day, and I'm not surprised I'm learning something new from you, but I am feeling a little bit like I should have known about it before, but it's okay. We all have our paths.

That's alright. We, we all have secrets that are uncovered from time to time.

So is this a franchise and are you a franchise owner?

So no, we have our own business. So we do career guidance for individuals. We do selection for companies. We do workshops and training for individuals and for companies, again, team development, coaching, this kind of stuff. And we are distributors for a number of publishers in Ireland. So we are distributors for Pearson, for MHS, for PAR, Hogan is one of 'em as. Got it.

I was just introduced to culture index. And it's interesting to see what you can learn from each of these assessments. And of course, I don't know, I'm a very gullible and somewhat naive person in addition to being street smart. Like doesn't make any sense, but I always wonder. Is this really a thing I was learning also about strengths finders, right? What's your top five strengths. And I thought, well, if I took this, when I was 10 versus 20 versus 51, versus in 10 years, would the answers be much different? And I'm told by most of the people that. You should test pretty much right on, no matter how old you are. Do you agree with that?

No, because, so, like, I'm not a psychologist, but I do workshops in basic psychology and things like that. So if I was to ask you, okay, how would you define personality? Most people would, they'd be reaching for something academic. And there are very, very lengthy academic descriptions, depending on whether you're talking about psychosis or whether you're talking about normal, not normal. Sorry, whether you're talking about everyday's behavior of people, basically. Your personality is simply your predictable behavior, whatever other people can observe of you and how you are likely to behave. Our behavior is determined by what's called our internal frame of reference. So our beliefs are values our perspectives and our habits. Ultimately, those are the things which control our behavior, which in turn controls ourself. If somebody were to say to you, I'm an introvert. I don't like talking to people. You go to a party or you go to a networking event, you don't recognize anybody and you physically take a half a step back and then you take another step back. And then a second later, you're at the wall. You're back at the wall. Nobody's talking to you whip out your phone, which puts a barrier between you and the other person. Still nobody's talking to me. They're not very friendly here. I'll go. That's your behavior, your habits and your perspectives. If we were to force you then to go to the next event, and instead of taking that half a step back, you stumble forward and you start talking to the group of people. You are gonna feel like such an idiot. Your foot is gonna be in your mouth. You're gonna stumble over your words. This is all gonna be completely new to you. But you'll get over it. And if you do it again and again and again, and then that little trigger, that little habit that you form when you walk in to step forward, fast forward a year, and somebody else sees you at the same networking event, they're going, wow. That person is the next expert because you've changed your habits. You've changed your beliefs and your perspectives. So your personality has changed and our personality evolves over time. What was interesting for me 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago before my kids were born. And what's interesting for me now, what I like doing now. So my interest changed what I want changes. You wouldn't necessarily see somebody going massive swings from one end of a spectrum to another, unless there has been a life altering event.

Right. Right.

But generally we evolve and we move over time.

Great. Thank you for clarifying that.

If I was still the same person I was, when I was 16, nobody would want to talk to me.

I'm not sure that's true. I'd wanna talk to you, but then I'd probably wanna switch back to the, you now quickly. Describe your team who works with you. How do you get work done?

So I actually, I have a really small team now. So I had an English language school here in Dublin. We sold that right before COVID. So we on my last day was the same day.

Congratulations!

Wuhan announced that COVID was a thing. So I'm never playing the lottery because I won it that day. But so now I have a team of basically four people plus my folks. So we all work together in a small team. We're growing it at the moment. Now, once we've come outta COVID.

You just said plus you're folks. And I'm going to assume you met your parents.

My parents. Yes.

Yeah, which-

So both businesses are family. So family business, both of them, the language school, and the psychometrics business, both family businesses. I bought my parents out of both of the businesses. So that's why one of the army, what we do now is actually fun. And family businesses, succession plan. So I have a keynote which is build a killer family business without killing your family based on a lot of the stuff that I learned at the time of taking over two family businesses and selling one of them.

Well, that was a brilliant segue to what I wanted to talk to you about next was your keynote speaking and emceeing how did you come to know that you were a speaker or wanted to be a speaker? And I mean, keynote are, you have to spend a lot of time. Working out the kinks and making sure it's so great. Emceeing is more of a personality and ability to communicate and stage presence. I'm not saying it doesn't take work, but they're two separate things. Not all keynote speakers can be good Emcees and vice versa, but you do both. So just talk to us about everything about both sides.

You're asking in an Irish moment with a microphone to talk to you about everything. And you said you wanted to be short-

Regarding emceeing and keynote speaking very specifically.

So before I was in EO, I had done a couple of wedding speeches, best man speeches, and I've done a best man speech in English, Swedish and Finish and a wedding speech in Spanish as well because my wife is Spanish.

Do you speak all those languages fluently?

I speak Spanish a little bit, but I had to get the Swedish and the Finish translated and Swedish was okay. Finish. Oh my God. Anyway, so I had not done a lot of public speaking. I hadn't really done any. Professional speaking. I didn't give presentations at work and marketing presentations and pitches and things like that, but that's a different, cut of Phish. Then I was lucky enough to get involved in EO and the global student entrepreneur awards, the GSCA competition, which is still my favorite program in EO. And we were having a European event. And the European event, we were putting it on because we didn't have many applicants in Europe. So we did a big thing where we had lots of countries come to an event in Germany and Miranda Barrett. Who's a staff member who you may remember still very good friends with her. She's no longer with you. She just said about a week before. Oh, Steven, you like talking, youm see this. And that was the very first time I CEED an event. And then I went on and I've, CEED the American final for the GSA. I've done a couple of the global finals. I was lucky enough to do a president's meeting in Europe, which I was terrified about because-

Speaking for your peers is a whole nother level of terrifying. I would rather speak to 40,000 people. I have never met before in my life and will never see again than my own EO chapter. And for those of you listening to this podcast, if you don't know what EO is, it's entrepreneurs, organization. It's amazing. You can DM me for more information or just look it up, continue.

So then fast forward a couple years later, and I've been involved in do workshops in EO, in Entrepreneurs Organization for strategic planning. I do workshops for a leadership academy and I was asked by a very dear friend of mine, Miranda Niman in EO, Tanzania, who I think you're familiar with. She was a she's Global Learning Chair. She was in head of GLC X the year that we went virtual in 2020. And she said, "Would you be interested in doing a talk?" And I said, "sure" what do I do? What do I talk about? And then I sat down with some people and I'd been working on some talks on kind of leadership and on psychometrics and leadership and personality. And I developed a couple of these, but there was nothing unique about it. And then I started toying with the idea of succession planning because I'm in two family businesses sold one just before the world fell apart, a building the other one. So that's where we came up with. So there's a whole arm of the business now called successful success. Where we do workshops and we do consulting. We do coaching, but we don't do so much coaching, but we do consulting and we do, a workshops for people. And now this is where the keynote came out of.

So, are you making money doing keynote speaking, or are you really focusing on generating leads or is it a hybrid of both?

It's a hybrid of both, but I know the argument of, do you make money for the talk or from the talk? So I don't really have too much downstream yet, so we have, I can do some workshops and I can do some other stuff, but I don't have a pipeline built up. So really it's for me to talk to people who are interested. People who can maybe learn something or get a little nugget from some of my experience who are going through the similar things. And I've had conversations one on one with people who are going through very similar things that I went through when I nearly left the family business years ago, because I figured we wouldn't be able to be in the same room together. My parents will never see their grandkids because we can never speak to each other. I mean, I've gone through a lot of the ups and downs of that. Really, what I'm trying to do is help people in a similar situation and put good into the world. But at the same time, I do want to get paid for taking time away from the business. And then if I put all this stuff down in a book and try and sell the book and all the rest.

Yeah, well sharing that.

I think I might know some people who can do some, help me with the book stuff.

You will, we can talk later.

Yeah.

Have you ever thought that you should write a book that you should write the story of your life to help other people learn from your experience? Please go to MemoirSherpa.com and learn how I can help you write, figure out your publishing path and market your story, your memoir to a best seller status. We're gonna move on to GSEA, which we need to tell the listeners what that stands for. And I'd like you to talk about own the room.

So yeah, GSEA is the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards. This is a program run by entrepreneurs organization, and it's a competition globally. We're in about 52, 53 countries around the world, probably run national competitions where we are targeting university level students, third level students. Who own and operate their own business to try and show them, yes, you can do what you're studying and you can study some amazing things, but you can also be an entrepreneur. And entrepreneurship is a viable alternative instead of going out and in inverted com is getting a real job. So we get these amazing, passionate idea driven, very eager university students from around the world. And for a lot of them, this is their first time really interacting with other people like them because. Like a lot of entrepreneurs operating in kind of silos and going, am I weird for wanting to build it? Like everyone else is wanting to get a safe job? Am I, is there something wrong with me? Like what's going on. And when they meet these other people who have completely different businesses, but they're still going through the same stuff, how do I market, how do I set up my business? How do I get a chief operating officer? Or how do I do this? Or how do I get an investor or a mentor, all this kind of stuff. And it is absolutely mesmerizing to see the benefit that these students get. And I just love being around. The university, these students and the energy and the insights, and really you get a feel for what's coming in 10 years time, like we were looking at virtual reality heads up displays in Germany. And that very first thing that I was talking about, for example, and AI and machine learning. And it was really ahead of anything that would be involved in my professional world. So I was able to get a heads up on a lot of that. So I really love the program and then Own The Room. So Own The Room is a documentary that is on Disney plus, which is why actually, if you look at my LinkedIn profile on the headline of my LinkedIn profile, I actually say that I am a Disney princess and I am happy to defend that title so, because I am on Disney plus, so this is a documentary that was done by, I can't. Just slipping on the name of the company, two brilliant documentary makers, it, a team of about three or four people came out to Macau and we had a great time. They were really involved. They really got to know the students and they followed five of the students of the 50 that we had in Macau. And it's amazing. The five they picked, I genuinely I've said to people, they were the five people that they picked. They didn't like interview everybody and just pick those five it's, they interviewed everybody and they picked five to follow because that's all they could afford to follow, like for the funding that they had. And I mean, they pick. The winner, the winner of two different awards and another one who, I mean, his story is just phenomenal.

Even they didn't have the advantage of being followed.

That's not why they won. Right. There's no way that that could have no, absolutely not. Because nobody knew, like, I don't think people knew the extent of what the documentary was going to do. I think they might have thought, oh, GSEA or documented this. No, it was a professional documentary team that had asked us, can they use our backdrop as part of the story? So it wasn't commissioned by us. It was commissioned actually by shop.

Jenny Feterovich involved in that at all?

No, she wasn't

In Detroit.

Yeah, she wasn't-

Sounds like something she could be interested in or involved in, in the kind of her jam.

So the people who did this documentary, they did one, a couple of years before that called Science Fair, where they followed a couple of kids on an American. It was an American focused Science Fair documentary about some student and the ins and outs of that. And then they wanted to do it on student entrepreneurship and GSEA was the perfect backdrop for.

That's amazing. I haven't seen it yet. I'm going to watch it this week.

Amazing. So a little inside story that you won't see in the documentary, but there's a little easier to notice. So Adrian Palmer, former global board member of globally, of, EO amazing, amazing entrepreneur in EO member. She was the head of the American GSCA competition. And when they picked Daniella Blanco to represent America, They wanted her mother to come from South America to Macau. The story was amazing. We were on board calls. Like I was the chair of the competition. I was the EMC of the competition. So I was the chair of the whole committee. So we were on calls and she was really pushing, going, look, we gotta get this woman to Macau. And I'm looking at her going, we have so much to do. Like, why do we want to add more? We have 52 students from around the world to get. Why are we doing this? And she just said, no, okay. I'll do it. And she moved mountains to get her to Macau, to get visas, to get tickets, to get the hole on. And she got it and she got it over the line. And the whole time I remember I met Danielle and I met them on, they were lovely people and everything else was fine. And then I watched her on stage and I sent, I mean, Daniella hadn't even finished her pitch and I sent Adrian a message on my WhatsApp. Cause I could see her in the audience with his mother and I was like, wow, you were right. This is amazing, so it's an amazing story and what Daniella's done and how the relationship with the mother, it was just phenomenal. It is shown a little bit in the documentary, but Adrian just genuinely moved mountains to make sure that her. That's cool.

Thank you for that behind the scenes. Look, I'd like to talk about the entrepreneurial mindset in Ireland. I do know that through Babson college, I was asked to mentor a group of Scottish entrepreneurs and the idea of entrepreneurship and taking risks. It's not culturally, really, this was a few years ago, really honored. What is it like in Ireland these days?

In Ireland is very different. It is very, we are a very entrepreneurial country in general. So we are known kind of throughout the world, I suppose, as being the European headquarters for the likes of Facebook and Google. And yeah,

I saw that when I was in Dublin, all these places, I was like, "oh, am I in San Francisco? Or is this Dublin?" Yeah.

So, even though we are the location for all of those headquarters, something like, I think it's 80% of the Irish economy is made up by small businesses like EO level and accelerator level businesses, all the pubs,

including yeah, the pubs, yeah.

Yeah. The pubs, the shops now there's chains. I mean, there's chains of shops and chains of stores, but a lot of the stores, a lot of the businesses are these one off small companies kind of doing their thing. Selling into the market. So entrepreneurship is very much alive and always has been because even when we became a Republic, we didn't have the benefit of the massive engine of England. For example, having factories and having big companies and having like one company could have like 300 locations around the country. We didn't have that for our size for everything else. So there has been this real embedding in our DNA, I suppose, of small family businesses, bakeries, restaurants, pubs shops, horse riding ledger, whatever.

Yeah.

So there are a lot, a lot of family ES it's actually one of the reasons there's so much kind of investment. There's so many accelerator programs. There's so many support programs. It's actually one of the reasons that we find it difficult to get people onto the EO accelerator program, because there are so many out there that people just go, oh, and they don't pay attention to any of them because they think they're all the same. Even though the EO one is obviously very different.

Is entrepreneurship brought up at all in the upper high school level. I'm not sure what you call that level in Ireland.

Secondary school, not. So we do have this thing called the Young Scientist Award where kind of two years before you finish high school. So I think it's about the time you go from middle school to high school, that kind of 15, 16 years of age. So there are competitions, but it's not a core subject. It's not something that everybody learns about, but there are competitions for science and for businesses and for build your own business kind of thing. But even in the business curriculum for people who do the national curriculum coming up to their leaving cert business is still a bit generic.

They're talking about you working at somebody else's business, right?

Maybe you working at someone else's business or you working for yourself, but it's more about, this is what marketing is. This is about finance business is what, so it's an understanding of the functions of business, as opposed to actually going out there and grabbing the world by the end of the year.

What is the challenge that you're focusing on or dealing with or mitigating right now in your own business?

So we spent COVID rebuilding a program that we had developed and we rebuilt from the ground up with a completely new algorithm. So we've built a piece of software where if you are 16 years of age. So at the moment it's targeted from 16 to kind of 24 years of age. So high school and early in college, we can give you a series of assessments, aptitudes, your verbal numerical, and abstract reasoning, and then an interest inventory. So a group of psychometric assessments, then we will be able to give you a report, which gives you 16, very targeted careers, very specific careers. That you are gonna be good at, and you're gonna enjoy doing a description of what's actually involved in that career. And then what kind of courses lead to becoming that career? Very, very targeted. Nothing really like it in the world. So we launched it last September. So we go, academic year because it's targeting into schools. We got amazing feedback. We've tweaked a couple things, a bit of the UI, a bit of the all based on like, everybody has a strategy until they get punched in the face. I think it was Mike Tyson said that. So it went out into the market. We go, this is perfect. And then people were like, oh, why is that button there or this? Anyway, so now what we're doing, we're spending the summer tweaking the bits that are Irish specific to make it international. And then we're launching into the UK. Next year. So in September, I had some meetings with people in Malta. I was on holiday last week, but I'm an entrepreneur. So I had meetings while I was on holiday. Then we'll probably be going either to Australia, New Zealand or to Canada, because there are national things when the states is kind of our last port, because we have to go state by state. So that's what we're focusing on right now and just getting the I that part.

I love that and do you, is your target market schools and counselors, or is it individuals.

So at schools and we've built a way for these counselors to have a dashboard so they can upload all their students. They can manage all of their students and see the individual reports and message the individual students. So basically we do all of the heavy lifting for the counselors. So when the counselor gets the report, the other thing that we do, that's different, a lot of places will do norm based charts where they'll go. Okay. Well, in relation to the rest of the population of America, you are in the 66 percentile doesn't actually tell you a huge amount as to how well they're gonna do in a particular job. We also do selection. We know what it takes to do well in all of these careers. So we are criterion referenced. So we actually match the career to you as opposed to you to the career. So all of that lifting is done for the counselor or for the parents or for anybody else of kids of that age that are not sure what they wanna do. And they can sit down and read the highly targeted careers and then they can have really in depth conversations. So what is it that appeals to you about that? What doesn't appeal to you about that? We might have things like you might get a kid might get real estate, a real estate agent as one of their careers. And they might say, "oh, my parents are real estate agents." I hate going to open houses or whatever it is. First of all, you're never gonna get that from an assessment. Right. But it does actually show that even though they might hate the idea of working with their parents, actually they'd be good at it. If they have experience, they enjoy aspects of it. And their personality obviously leans towards being able to engage with people on that kind of a level. So that's where the counselors and the parents can have much more in depth conversations about the real aspects of what the job. So that's who we're working on right now.

I love this idea so much. And there's such a need for it. There may be other tools out there that I'm not aware of, but I can tell you this, my counselors didn't have that, anything like that. And also they looked at me and actually they didn't look at me. I was invisible. I didn't even. Have a counselor because I was not their typical student. And they thought that I wasn't going to go to any kind of school. Yeah.

So the couple of things that I really noticed when people who have been through it, when they give me feedback on this, first of all, if I was to sit down with you and say, "Okay, for the next three hours, we're gonna sit down and you're gonna list every career that you can think. How many do you think you could give?"

Right, right, right. There's a bunch, I don't know.

Most people say between 250 to 300 careers. Most people would say that if I was to say, okay, well then how many of those could you explain? Most people cut that in half. And then I said, okay, do you know what it takes to do well in each of those careers? Most people will cut that down to even less than half to understand what it takes to do well from an aptitude point of view. So career guidance answers are teachers are people who are not properly trained in this. It's not their day to day. They're trying to do a lot of other things. They don't have the time to research all of these careers. So that's why a lot of people in Ireland, for example, go, "oh, you should into business." "You should be a nurse.", "You should be a lawyer." Like there's a couple of the big careers that they just tell people that it fits. We have a database of 1000, 270 careers with the description for each how to go back, getting into each of those and what it takes to do well in each of those. So we match those careers very specifically to students. For example, if you have an interest in numerical careers, for example, you might be told, oh, you should go off and be an accountant. But actually if you've got really good verbal skills and really good abstract reasoning skills, you might not make a good accountant. You could be a really good CFO. Because you're not good at actually crunching the numbers, but you're very good at articulating and visualizing the numbers, or you might be very good verbally, but actually you don't have an interest in being in front of the camera. So you might get journalist instead of TV producer, for example. So there's a lot of that stuff. And that whole algorithm was really fun to argue each of these conversations.

I mean, it sounds like so much work. I, I can't even imagine what kind of lift that took. That's a big number and those are really deep things that you are considering within all of those careers. And I was wondering, I'm assuming that. There are careers that these people have never heard of before. So if they haven't heard of them, they haven't considered them. And wow, what a mind opening project?

So my wife, when we were doing this, my wife is a teacher. She's a secondary school teacher, high school teacher. And when we were, obviously we were testing this out for the year and we all did it multiple times where we did answer different questions but when she did it for the first time, one of the career, she didn't get teachers a career. Because most people, when you talk to teachers who are not really happy with teaching it's because they have this romanticized version of what teaching is not actually, you're gonna spend most of your time teaching kids, how to learn, learn, to read, and write and do maths.

And behavior situations. Right? That's

So we have a much more realistic view of what it takes to be a teacher and what interested it is to be a teacher. She got a career that she had never heard of. Like she read it and she went, I didn't know that this was an options. So it was, hospital play specialist. So all of the games, all of the development, all of the nurturing for kids who are in hospital long term, acute care, all this kind of stuff, but they still need support and care. And there are people who do that. And she was like, this is exactly. I mean, I would love to do this job. Now. My kids are in the school that she teaches in. So we have an agreement on fees. So she's not allowed to change her career for a couple years. Right.

She's stuck with it for a minute.

Yeah. But as soon as my youngest graduates, I think she's gonna be looking at that career change, amazing career, but it's exactly you say she never even knew that it was a thing.

Right. What career did you get matched with?

I mean, I got a lot of the things that I've grown up with psychometrics, and I've grown up with personality profiling because it's my family business. So I've done these from a young age. So it has always kind of pushed me into marketing, entrepreneurship, public speaking, and like doing stuff for other people.

Because you know about these assessments and such. Do you think that actually a genuinely good subject to take the assessments because you kind of know what they're looking for?

Yes and no, but I mean, all of these assessments are all self-reporting anyway. So whether you know, or not, you're still saying what you believe about yourself. So it's one of the things with Hogan. For example, the one that we talked about, it's actually a fake 360. It's not really, it doesn't care about your identity. It cares about your reputation, but that's a whole different conversation.

For more information, go to the show notes for you listening to this podcast cast. Wanna know more about me go to my website, OfficialNatashaMiller.com. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you loved the show. If you did, please subscribe also, if you haven't done so yet, please leave a review where you're listening to this podcast now. I'm Natasha Miller and you've been listening to FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS.