The $3.2 Billion Regret
Hi there, friend —
Some of the greatest business builders would struggle in family business.
I'm talking about hall-of-fame entrepreneurs you and I revere. But Sam Walton and Larry Miller both offer warnings for those of us trying to build something worth passing on.
Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, confessed near the end: “My life has been a tradeoff ... in the larger sense — the life and death sense — did I make the right choices?”
I hope I'm never asking that question.
Larry Miller built an empire worth $3.2 billion annually: 90 companies, 7,000 employees. But the personal cost was devastating. His wife said it best: “I've been waiting for him my whole life ... The only time we were really together was when he got sick and could no longer go to work.”
Family business is fundamentally about integration — family and business, not one or the other.
That's what makes it uncomfortable. It puts a microscope on both the science of success AND the art of fulfillment.
Here's what haunted both men:
Larry Miller confessed: “If there is one thing I'd do differently — only one — it's this: I would have been there for the Little League games and the scraped knees and the back-to-school nights.”
Many business builders master the science of success. They compound the heck out of enterprises, spitting out cash and building enterprise value.
But from reading hundreds of biographies, I've noticed something: most of them struggle with the art of fulfillment. They build incredible businesses and empty dinner tables.
Peter Drucker said it perfectly: “Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things.”
In family business, we can't escape this tension. Effectiveness — what actually matters for a good life — stares us down every single day.
Family business puts effectiveness — what actually matters for a good life — right in our faces every single day. It's uncomfortable. It would be easier to separate family and business, just like it's easier to separate Sunday and Monday.
But we don't get that luxury.
We're setting an example not only for our kids and grandkids, but for our team and their families too. We're not compartmentalizing. We're integrating.
We're doing life together.
We're creating something different entirely — what I call a CENTERPRISE — where family sits at the center, rather than building enterprises that become vessels taking us further from what matters most.
I have a long way to go. I'm learning. We're all learning.
Thank you for being on this journey with me. A journey to optimize relationships and wisdom, to build something worth passing on to those who come next.
It's not easy. But I think that's the point. All great stories are ultimately about the struggle to be better than yesterday.
May we find ways to sit at the intersection of the science of success and the art of fulfillment this week.
Our families are counting on us.
(So are our communities.)
Unlike Sam and Larry, we still have time to get this right.
Onward,
Matt