The communication style that built your farm won't pass it on. Succession planning isn't a document — it's the decision to stop using the same tool on the people you love.
I was sitting in the corner of the office when his daughter came to talk to him.
She’d come to him with something she’d done — a decision she’d made on the business, one that hadn’t gone quite the way she’d hoped. Nothing catastrophic. Just a miss. The kind of thing that, with the wrong father in the room, becomes a lecture. A verdict. A reminder of who built what and why certain standards matter around here.
He didn’t do that.
He asked her what she thought went wrong. He listened. Actually listened — not the kind of listening that’s really just waiting for your turn. He told her what she’d handled well. Then, and only then, did he offer the one thing she needed to hear. Clear, direct, no drama. She walked out of the room taller than when she’d walked in.
Twenty minutes later, his son came in with almost the same situation. Different decision, similar miss. And I watched the same man — the exact same man — do something completely different. No velvet. No checking in. Just clear, sharp, direct. A bloke talking straight to another bloke. His son nodded, they moved on, that was that.
I remember sitting there thinking: that’s why this bloke wins.
Now. Let me tell you what I suspect he looked like at forty.
Hard. Demanding. Not much patience for people who couldn’t keep up or couldn’t get it right. If you wanted something done properly, you did it yourself — because handing it to someone else just meant you’d be redoing it at midnight. Feedback was direct to the point of brutal, because in his mind anything less was dishonest, and dishonest was something he had no tolerance for. High standards weren’t negotiable. If you couldn’t handle that, there were plenty of other places to work.
And it worked. That’s the part people don’t want to say out loud, but it has to be said — it worked. The bank respected him. The contractors showed up on time and did the job right. The operation ran. When he said something, it meant something. When he pointed a direction, people moved. You don’t build what he’s built by being easy to manage or reasonable about everything. You build it by being relentless about the things that matter and intolerant of the things that don’t.
The problem isn’t that those qualities are wrong. The problem is that they were built for a world where everyone around him was an employee, a contractor, a bank manager, or a competitor. People who were there because of a transaction. People who could leave and be replaced.
Now — that’s not a licence to treat your staff or advisers harshly either. Good people leave bad bosses in business too, and word travels fast in a small industry. But professional relationships have a transaction at their centre and a structure that absorbs directness differently. Family has none of those buffers. And family, unlike a contractor, doesn’t just find another client. They find another life.
Then the kids came back.
And the game changed completely, except nobody told him.
Because here’s what brute force communication does to family — and I’ve watched this play out more times than I’d like. The son who gets barked at doesn’t get tougher. He either matches the energy and it becomes a war, or he learns to be quiet and agree and do it his own way when no-one’s watching. The daughter who gets critiqued the same way you’d dress down a contractor doesn’t raise her game — she stops raising her hand. The daughter-in-law who watches her husband get steamrolled at every kitchen table conversation files it away, quietly, until the day she tells him it’s her or the farm. The wife who’s been absorbing it for thirty years just keeps absorbing it, until one day she’s done.
You don’t lose them in a blowup. You lose them in the accumulation of a thousand moments where they decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
The thing that made you successful up until now is the same thing that will make you fail.
Not because the standards are wrong. Not because the directness is a character flaw. But because the people across the table from you have changed, and the same approach that worked with employees and bankers will hollow out a family if you keep reaching for it on autopilot. If you pull the job off your son every time it isn’t done to your standard, you don’t get a better son. You get a son who stops trying. If your idea of feedback is a blowtorch, the people who love you learn to fireproof themselves— and eventually they stop coming close enough to need it.
There’s an old saying — when all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And the thing about a hammer is, it’s a great tool. Genuinely great. It drives things home, it doesn’t muck around, it gets the job done. No-one who built something real did it without one. But a man who only owns a hammer doesn’t think of himself as limited. He thinks he’s got what works — because the hammer has always worked before. The nails have always gone in.
Until the job changes. Until what’s in front of him isn’t a nail.
The most flexible person in the room wins. Not the loudest. Not the most right. The one who can read what’s needed and reach for the right tool — who can be direct and hard when that’s what the moment calls for, and patient and measured when it doesn’t — that’s the person who keeps everyone at the table long enough for succession to actually work.
The man I watched that day with his daughter and his son isn’t soft. He’s one of the hardest-working, most driven people I know. He still has standards that would make most people flinch. He still calls things what they are. He hasn’t become someone else.
He just stopped turning up to every conversation with the same tool in his hand.
I don’t know exactly what it cost him to get there. I suspect the younger version of him left some damage on the way through — because they usually do. I suspect there were years where the family got the same treatment as the contractors and nobody said anything out loud. But somewhere along the way he understood something that most men like him never do.
The people you built it for aren’t employees. They’re family. And family always has a door they can walk through. Find a life that fits them differently, put enough distance between them and the tension at the kitchen table, and they won’t necessarily come all the way back. Not for the money, not for the land, not for the legacy you had in mind.
You don't have to become a different person. You just have to decide you want to win badly enough to change how you play.
The most flexible communicator in the room isn’t the weakest. They’re the ones that always win!
Until next time.
Cheers,
Ben
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Disclaimer: The information contained in this article is general in nature and for education purposes only. It is not financial advice. No one should act on the information without appropriate specific advice for your particular circumstances. Ben Law is a former financial advisor but is no longer licensed and cannot and will not give you specific or personal advice in this article. The Financial Bloke Group Pty Ltd accepts no responsibility for any loss or damage occasioned by any person acting or refraining from action as a result of reliance on the information in this article.