Ivy Coach<\/a>, now includes personnel from a third generation. It began three-and-a-half decades ago when my mom, then a high school counselor, recognized that families navigating America\u2019s highly selective college admissions process needed guidance that schools simply didn\u2019t have the capacity to provide. She saw a need before there was an industry.<\/p>\nOver the years, I\u2019ve helped grow Ivy Coach from a solo practitioner shop into a globally recognized college consultancy led by admissions officers from our nation\u2019s most selective institutions while staying committed to the values that built our business.<\/p>\n
Today, my niece and nephews are learning the business as members of our team while my son listens while crawling at my feet.<\/p>\n
5 lessons every entrepreneur can learn from a family business<\/h2>\n1. You inherit an in-progress story<\/h3>\n
Every generation inherits more than a company. It inherits decisions, challenges and unfinished work. A family business is an in-progress story.<\/p>\n
At Ivy Coach, I inherited the foundation my mom built. My responsibility wasn\u2019t simply to maintain it. Instead, it was to strengthen it and prepare it for the future. It\u2019s why we brought on former admissions officers from Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Penn, Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia, UChicago, WashU, Duke, Northwestern and more to learn our methodologies and lead our team.<\/p>\n
2. Holidays are your longest board meetings<\/h3>\n
Family businesses have one unique advantage in that ideas don\u2019t stop when the workday ends. Some of the best decisions happen around the dinner table.<\/p>\n
At Ivy Coach, many years ago, we decided to drop the \u201cThe\u201d that preceded our name at the risk of a temporary dip in website traffic due to a URL change for the long-term gain of a more contemporary name. It was decided during the matzoh ball soup portion of a Passover seder.<\/p>\n
3. Don\u2019t preserve the museum, preserve the mission<\/h3>\n
Too many second- and third-generation leaders confuse tradition with strategy. The goal isn\u2019t to preserve everything exactly as it was. Rather, the goal is to protect the values that built the company while constantly evolving how those values are delivered.<\/p>\n
When my mom first started Ivy Coach, she charged clients hourly. But who wants to count up your hours, and who wants to debate how many hours were spent editing college admissions essays? The end product is the end product. Hourly work was cut.<\/p>\n
4. Reputation compounds faster than revenue<\/h3>\n
Revenue can disappear in a quarter. A reputation can take decades to build and minutes to lose.<\/p>\n
At Ivy Coach, we\u2019ve declined opportunities that may have generated short-term revenue but didn\u2019t align with our standards, such as participating in pay-to-play rankings of college consulting firms, which, at least at present, easily influence AI answers but don\u2019t have any legitimacy.<\/p>\n
5. Build something your grandchildren will be proud of<\/h3>\n
The greatest entrepreneurs aren\u2019t only builders but stewards. The question shouldn\u2019t simply be, \u201cIs this good for the company today?\u201d The better question is, \u201cWill the next generation thank us for this decision?\u201d<\/p>\n
If my son someday leads Ivy Coach, I want him to understand my decision-making and his grandmother\u2019s decision-making as a roadmap for the obstacle course he encounters. If America\u2019s highly selective colleges one day eliminate the antiquated practice of legacy admissions, as they should<\/em>, we want him to understand how to help these students navigate the admissions process on more equal footing.<\/p>\nThe lesson the MBA interviewer didn\u2019t understand<\/h2>\n
I often think back to that student\u2019s MBA interview. The interviewer saw a family business as a limitation, assuming our client lacked ambition because she intended to return to her family enterprise instead of pursuing the traditional post-MBA path.<\/p>\n
He couldn\u2019t have been more wrong. Today, she leads her family\u2019s multinational conglomerate, shaping thousands of jobs, influencing industries across continents and impacting communities worldwide.<\/p>\n
The interviewer asked why she needed an MBA if she planned to return to her family business. But the question he should have asked was: \u201cHow many entrepreneurs will ever have the responsibility of leading something built not just for the next quarter, but for the next generation?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n