Marc Mathios's Recommendations for Family Business Success

In his interview on yesterday’s episode of Smashing the Plateau, Marc Mathios discussed the challenges that come with helping to lead—with his two brothers—a third-generation, New York-based manufacturing company. Here, he provides us with two further recommendations: one that can be universally applied to any sales business, and one that he recommends particularly for family businesses.

1. Dan Sullivan (The Strategic Coach)

Mathios described how family dynamics inevitably enter into a family business’s discussions: “Everything that I brought, and my brothers have or brought from our childhood, is bought into the business. And it’s a good thing, and it’s a stressful thing at times … You just can’t get around it. It’s something that is just engrained in the way we operate together.” He praised Dan Sullivan’s Strategic Coach, which he says provided him and his brothers with a common, neutral language to discuss their business:

“It gave us language that we could speak to each other with—so it wasn’t my language, or my brothers’s language from an operational point of view. It was a shared language, a business language, that we could all refer to, that was kind of like sacred ground because it was a third-party language that none of us was espousing.

“If you are a family business, I would encourage you to seek out a third-party expert in an area that you are having difficulty with, because that third party can give you the language—the neutral language—to talk with your family members in a way that is not viewed as your opinion or their opinion.”

2. Jack Daly

“I think one of the great sales minds is Jack Daly. He speaks from a tactical point of view, in terms of acquiring customers, and he also speaks from a sales management point of view in terms of managing a sales team, and I think that his viewpoints and knowledge have been instrumental in me being a better sales manager and sales acquisition person.”