Balancing Family and Business: Brandi Marek on the Uncomplicate it! Podcast

Most people assume running a family business means flexibility. You set your own schedule. You answer to yourself.

What they don’t see is that the business goes home with you. It’s at the dinner table. It shapes how you hire, how you lead, and sometimes whether you stay at all.

Brandi Marek knows this from the inside. She spent most of her career in leadership roles at Magnolia Gardens Nursery, her family’s wholesale nursery with more than 150 employees, before joining Ferguson Alliance as a Senior Business Advisor.

She recently sat down with Sacha Awwa on her marketing podcast, Uncomplicate it!, to talk about leading people in a family business. In the conversation, she covers:

• The four-month stretch when her family realized they weren’t aligned, and the hard thing she had to say out loud
• Why middle managers in a family business so often feel like every decision will upset someone
• How sharing financial information with your team (even just percentages) changes how people work
• The choice between being a business-first family or a family-first business, and why she introduced herself without her last name
• The delegation problem most family business owners have to solve before they can delegate anything
• The one thing she says you have to do before anything else will help

You can watch the full interview below, or scroll down to read the conversation.

What were your earliest lessons about leadership from working in your family business?

Brandi: There are plenty. Navigating challenging conversations. Balancing relationships with family from a personal perspective and from a business perspective. That can be very challenging.

Then there’s managing people in your business who are not family members. That can present some very interesting challenges as well. You want to be aware that your own family drama isn’t coming into the business. But sometimes people tend to think, “Oh, this is a family business, so the rules are different.”

You’re constantly battling. It almost feels like an internal conflict between wanting to do the right thing as a human and recognizing that you have to run a business. What does that look like? It’s very, very challenging.

Now I’m a business advisor with Ferguson Alliance. We specialize strictly in family-owned businesses. We help them get aligned with their strategy, their team, their succession planning, and where they want the business to go.

So I’m leveraging my experience with my own family to help other businesses that are in our shoes, facing some of the struggles we faced. That’s my passion now. I help other people just like me feel less alone and get on track.

You’ve come full circle, using what you learned in the family business to help others. Tell us a little more about that.

Brandi: Unless you’ve built up a very specific network, there aren’t a lot of people who truly understand where you’re coming from, either as a business owner or as someone with family working in a business.

I have a lot of friends with cool and important jobs. At times they’d look at me and say, “Yeah, but you get to make your own schedule. You have all this flexibility.”

Sure, from the outside that probably looks like the case. But it all literally goes home with you.

So being able to tell someone, “I know exactly what you’re feeling. I know exactly where you are,” can go a long way. It helps to have someone see you for what you’re going through.

Are there specific processes you bring in to help families with this?

Brandi: Most of our client engagements start with an assessment, and we’re assessing all the things. We assess the tangible things you’d expect, like the viability of the business and financial reporting.

What sets us apart is that we also assess the psychological component. What do the owners of the business want? What about the family members working in the business? Do they want to keep working in it? Do they have different visions for the strategy? Where are they aligned, and where are they not?

Our goal is to understand what they want the legacy of the business to be and what they want for themselves personally. Then we help them get as much of that as possible.

It can start off intense. It can also be a slow process, because sometimes we’re talking about things people don’t want to say out loud, or are too afraid to address or confront.

So we try to be a conduit and a safe place. “Let’s help you get this figured out so you can live the life you’re meant to live.” Life’s not about being stressed forever. How do you get to a place where you can enjoy what you’re doing?

Our process starts by identifying where you are and where you say you want to go. Then we lay out all the gaps between here and that future that we feel you need to address.

What drew you to the people side of business, rather than staying focused on operations and finance?

Sacha: What’s happening on the inside of a company shows up on the outside. It shows up in customer service, in how people buy from you, in retention. One company I like to talk about, maybe because I’m a customer, is 1-800 Contacts. I’ve never called them and gotten someone in a bad mood, and it keeps me coming back.

Brandi: Part of it is my personality. I’m a people person. I enjoy different types of people, understanding what their strengths are and how to leverage them.

Some of my core values center on purpose and fulfillment. Life is long, but it’s also really short. If you had a choice every day when you wake up, you probably wouldn’t choose to go to work. But it’s a necessity for a lot of people. So how can we make it as enjoyable as possible?

How can we create an environment where people feel fulfilled, purposeful, and valued? And how do they then pass that on to customers, vendors, the other stakeholders in the business, the community, and potential future employees?

You can have the best processes documented. You can have the best equipment. But if you don’t have the people driving it, you’re not going to be the leader for very long. You’ve got to have enthusiastic people.

What’s one moment that tested your ability to balance personal and professional relationships?

Sacha: People assume a family business is less stressful than a 9-to-5. But it’s your life. It comes up in conversations at the dinner table.

Brandi: There are many. I wouldn’t call it one moment. It was a period of several months.

I’ll preface this by saying my family was a former client of Ferguson Alliance. That’s how I exited the business and started with Ferguson Alliance, going on four years ago now.

There was about a four-month period where it was clear we were not all aligned on what we wanted for the future, both for ourselves personally and for the business.

We knew for sure that our family relationships were what mattered most to us. And we knew for sure that some of our professional interactions were getting in the way of that.

So we put a stake in the ground. “Our family relationship is what is most important to us.” Given that, what does each of us need in order to keep that truth?

For me, I said the thing I needed most was a career outside of the business. That was very, very hard to say out loud.

You feel like you have an obligation to uphold. The business has over 150 employees now, so it feels like a huge weight of responsibility. You’re thinking, “What are they going to think if I leave? Are they going to wonder what’s happening?”

You’re taking all of these things into consideration. They’re not usually things people who just work in an organization have to deal with. And they can have long-lasting impacts on your future. You don’t want to do something you regret, so you want to be very mindful.

So there was that four-month period of discovering it, being able to say it out loud, and then making plans and acting on them. There were times when I thought, “Okay, I was just kidding. Maybe that isn’t what I want.”

You go through that roller coaster while still doing your daily duties, because you actually have a job where you’re operating a business.

That’s the period that sticks out to me most as one of the more challenging ones. Not everyone was on the same page, and we had to address our differences.

What similarities do you see across the family businesses you work with?

Brandi: For the most part, everybody is tackling the same challenges, just in different ways.

The thing we see most is strategy misalignment. A lot of times one generation is now leading the business, or one generation is preparing to take over, and they aren’t aligned on the strategy.

Sometimes it’s stagnation that leads to financial problems. Their tried-and-true way of doing things isn’t working anymore, or it isn’t relevant to the market anymore. Maybe they’re afraid to bring in an outside perspective. So they’re experiencing financial challenges and don’t know what to do.

Or there are communication issues. There’s misalignment around communication, and around the family’s roles and how they’re going to operate within the business. Sometimes you have family members who don’t want to work in the business but still want a piece of the pie. How do you handle that?

Those are the top issues we routinely see across the board.

Why is the middle manager role in a family business so often overlooked or misunderstood?

Brandi: It’s especially hard in family business, because the middle managers are often made up of two different types.

You have non-family members who are subject matter experts. They have the expertise and they’re working within the business. Then you often have one or two next-generation family members in those roles, trying to work their way up through the organization.

So you have that dynamic going on. The middle manager is getting feedback from the top, whether that’s an executive leadership team, the family members, a board of directors, or some other higher position. And they’re managing a group of team members.

They often see both perspectives. They understand where the shareholders want to go and what they want to do. But they also sympathize with the people on their team. “Yeah, this isn’t ideal. How do we make it better?”

At times they can feel like they’re in a vise. It can feel like a lose-lose. No matter what I do, somebody’s going to be upset. How do I deal with this?

In an unhealthy organization, what we sometimes see is that the shareholders aren’t open to listening to the middle managers’ feedback. That might be about what team members need, where they think the business should go, or what they think it should do.

That’s present in a lot of organizations that aren’t family-owned. But add the family in there and it creates another level of complication. It can be especially hard for non-family members to balance. “I don’t want to make you mad, but we need to move forward on this.”

What have you seen work well for building up teams without stepping on toes, especially when the toes belong to family members?

Brandi: We always encourage sharing as much financial information with people on your team as you feel comfortable sharing. It goes a long way.

They need to understand how and why what they’re doing affects results. They need to understand the goals of the organization. That gives you the best possible chance of changing the way your people work.

You don’t have to share all the nitty-gritty. Even if you put it in percentage points, at a minimum share what the goal is, what the target is, and why it’s important. That’s the biggest thing for teams, because people want to know why they’re doing what they’re doing.

If you want someone to feel fulfilled and purposeful, they’re going to want to know exactly what they’re making an impact on.

When you walk into work, do you switch off being family and become coworkers?

Brandi: At a minimum, we have a conversation with clients about how they want to approach that. We ask them, do you want to be a business-first family or a family-first business?

In a business-first family, you check the family at the door. Leave it in the car. The decisions you make are the best decisions for the business, regardless of the impact on any family member.

The family-first business is the opposite. This is often more of a lifestyle business, where the business exists to create a lifestyle for the family. They default to hiring family members regardless of experience, or whether they deserve the role. This is where you see the son or the daughter take over the business regardless of experience or desire.

There’s no right or wrong. It’s about what aligns with what you want most and what’s going to provide the best results for your family.

Making that choice gives you a checkpoint. “This is what we said we were going to do. Are we aligning with that right now or not?” It gives you a place you can always come back to and start your conversation from.

So if you choose the business-first family route, you can say, “This position is open now. As a business-first family, we’re going to open this job up. Family member, you’re encouraged to apply. But there’s going to be an interview process, and we’re going off qualifications.”

At that point it’s more of a cultural thing. But it’s hard. My family went the business-first route, and there were times when your home self wants to take over.

Sacha: It’s so true. Say my mother works at a big enterprise company and hires me. If I get promoted, people who aren’t family might call it nepotism. Why wouldn’t you get promoted because you’re good at what you do? It’s a double-edged sword.

Brandi: Right. At least for me, I was always thinking, “How is this coming across?” I often introduced myself to people without saying my last name.

I kind of prided myself on it. There was a vendor I’d known for about four years, and for the longest time she had no idea it was my family. I thought, “Great, then it’s working.”

I wanted it to be so merit-based. I probably took it to the extreme.

Sacha: If somebody didn’t notice, your goal has been achieved.

What are some non-negotiables for creating a culture of excellence inside a family business?

Brandi: For me, one non-negotiable is being able to resolve conflict and have challenging conversations. You have to be able to move through those to get to the other side.

Often we see cultures wrecked by the things left unsaid. Addressing those as quickly as possible, and creating an environment where people feel comfortable doing so, is probably priority number one.

Number two is having a strategy. If you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t know when you get there.

Have a plan and an outlook on what the future looks like. Otherwise people use their minds to fill in the gaps. Sometimes that can be beneficial, and sometimes it can be detrimental.

Then there’s focusing on people. Understand what they need and where they’re coming from, and check whether you’re communicating effectively. That’s going to make all the difference.

What’s your favorite framework or habit for mastering delegation?

Sacha: A lot of the time it’s the idea that “I can get this done faster.” But then why did you hire somebody? And what time are you taking away from growing the business?

Brandi: In family business specifically, the first challenge we see is getting them to hire the person at all.

Often they started the business and did all the things. They were the salesperson, and also the AR and the AP. They’re very slow to add people to the team. They think, “That’s a big expense. I can do that in the evenings or on the weekends and catch it up.” So number one is just getting them to hire some people. That’s huge.

Then it’s realizing what your goals are. Do you want to sell the business eventually? Then you need to be mindful of how involved you are, because that affects the value of your business. If you’re the main thing keeping it running, your business isn’t going to be worth very much.

So again, it’s having a plan and a strategy, and understanding where you want to take the business. It’s very hard to delegate, or to know what you need to delegate, if you don’t know your end goal for your time. You need to know where you need that time and what you’re going to do with it.

Then come the more nuanced things. A lot of times we fear delegation because we think we’re just pushing something off on somebody else.

Often you’ll find people in your organization going, “Thank you. I’ve been waiting for you to let me do this, because I’ve had to wait on you to do it for so long.”

Sacha: And somebody may not have the kind of personality to speak up about it.

Brandi: Yes. Or you might be putting out the vibe that no one can do this as well as you. So it’s also checking your ego. Somebody might have a better idea. And it will make life so much better.

With 150 employees, what was the tipping point that let the business grow?

Brandi: First and foremost, it’s a labor-intensive business. It’s a wholesale nursery, a people-powered business, so you have to have a lot of people.

My father-in-law was a visionary. He could identify issues other nurseries experienced. He had a very solution-oriented, entrepreneurial mindset. So it was about thinking through the issues businesses face and how to provide solutions for them.

Getting into that value-proposition mindset of what’s going to make someone’s life easier was another big driver.

It’s also knowing your market. Know what opportunities are out there and what gaps exist, and whether you have the ability to fill those gaps.

What’s something you’ve changed your mind about when it comes to leadership in the past few years?

Brandi: There are so many things I’ve changed my mind about.

In the beginning, it was my father-in-law who wanted to hire Ferguson Alliance to help us. I thought, “Seriously? That’s the last thing we need right now. I don’t have time to spend with these people. We know what we need to do. We just need to do it. Why are we going to pay somebody to tell us what we already know?”

Looking back, I don’t even recognize that person. I learned so much about myself, about how to run a business, and about how to manage people. I had to check my own ego and change my perspective on what it means to seek advice and outside perspective.

I wouldn’t be where I am today without that moment. I would likely still be slogging through all of the pain. So being open to new experiences has probably been the overarching one.

Secondly, as it pertains to people, it’s recognizing that the goal is not to get everyone to be the same. There’s no checklist of strengths.

It’s spending the time to understand what everyone brings to the table. If they get to do that as much as possible, everyone’s life is going to be easier. They’ll be easier to manage. They’ll be more fired up and engaged in the business. The customers, everybody, will feel that.

For a long time I led with, “If this person is going to be in this role, they have to be this, this, this, and this.” I overlooked the glaringly obvious thing. They need to be them first.

So I’m not trying to put them inside a box of what I think is best without letting them show me their perspective.

Beyond revenue or business performance, what does success look like for you now?

Brandi: For me personally, success is feeling proud of what I did and how I did it. It’s not some KPI I’ve been grading myself against all year or for the quarter.

As for how I measure success with a client, I want to see and feel that the work I did made a difference.

The worst thing that could happen with a client is that once our engagement is over, they put it on the shelf. They go back to operating the way they were before, and not much has changed in the organization.

So I constantly keep that in mind when I’m working with a client. You can think about all this theoretical stuff. But if you’re not making it applicable, and you’re not getting them in the mindset that they can do this, you’re not successful at what you set out to do. The goal is to effect change.

It’s constantly on my mind, maybe even to an obsessive place. At the end of this, are they going to say, “I’m glad we made this investment, because we’re seeing a difference”?

What’s one action a listener could take today to improve how they show up in their business and their family?

Brandi: You have to be honest with yourself about what you want and where you’re at.

Until you can do that, you’re going to be chasing symptoms. You won’t get to the root cause of the pain you’re experiencing. Or at least get to a place where you can say, “I don’t know what I want, but I want to figure it out.” You have to take that first step.

That’s always a question we ask clients when we start working with them. Do you recognize that this is going to be hard and challenging? There’s not a one-size-fits-all prescription for what you’re experiencing. There’s going to be a lot of work to get there.

So it comes down to, “Are you ready to do the work?” Great. If you’re not, no problem. But it’s only going to work if you’re ready to do the work. So be honest with yourself about that and about what you want. You have to think about that first.

More from Brandi and Rob on stepping away from the family business, choosing business-first, and leading your team

When Your Child Doesn’t Want to Take Over the Family Business
Looks at the same moment from the parent’s side, including Brandi’s own experience of telling her family she wanted a new chapter.

Advisor Spotlight: Brandi Marek – From Client to Culture Coach
How Brandi went from a skeptical Ferguson Alliance client to one of its senior advisors, and what changed her mind.

Will You Be a Business-First Family?
Rob’s video on the decision Brandi describes, told through two fifth-generation family businesses he was inside at the same time.

Challenges of Hiring Friends and Family in Your Business
Brandi’s conversation on the A Call to Leadership podcast about setting expectations when you hire family, and why some families hold relatives to a higher bar.

Bridging the Gap: Engaging Middle Managers in Implementing Strategy
Five ways to bring middle managers into your strategy, including explaining the why behind it and involving them before decisions are made.

Delegation in Family Businesses: A Guide for New Leaders
Brandi’s seven tips for delegating, including how to handle it when someone does the work differently than you would.

Avoiding conflict? Here’s how to stop.
Why we put off hard conversations, what it costs a team when we do, and how to get better at having them.

What Happens to Your Business If You Can’t Show Up Tomorrow?
How to get your business ready for the day you step back from it.