Meghan Juday is a fourth-generation leader and Chairman of the Board of Ideal Industries, a 100+ year old family business.  In this episode Meghan talks about her journey to become the first woman leader in the family business, and some of the lessons about family and governance she learned along the way. Thanks for listening! We love our listeners! Drop us a line or give us guest suggestions here.   Links: Meghan Juday website and bio   The Lodis Forum   Board Refreshment: 50% of boards have at least one director who is no longer adding value; how do you know if you are the “one”?   Big Ideas/Thoughts/Quotes: How I started in the family business “I got a phone call from my dad, I had a three-week-old at the time, and he called me and said, "Now that you don't have anything to do, can you just come work on this project?" But you know what's crazy? It's like people talk about how challenging parenting was and I was like all kind of ready to go, and that three-week-old sleeps all the time. I was poised and ready for the big onslaught.  I was thinking, what’s the big fuss is about, this is fine, and so I said yes to this opportunity.  Honestly, had he called me with a six-month-old, I would've been like talk to me in three years.” Family Governance When I joined the board, I became intrigued with the interplay between family governance and corporate governance.  In talking with other families, a lot of times family businesses will have a very strong corporate board and they'll put a lot of time and investment into it, but they kind of starve the family as something that's not important. I n my mind, family governance has to be equally invested in and taken just as seriously. “My rule of thumb is family businesses should expect to spend and invest as much on their family, their family engagement, risk mitigation, and family education as they do on their corporate board.” Family Governance: “The structure necessary to keep a disorderly system (the family) ordered.” I think that the family, like any system, really wants to descend into chaos. A lot of decision makers, a lot of influences, everybody wants the key roles, everybody wants to be able to tell the CEO what to do. I mean, I'm saying this hyperbolically, but it's really important that family governance is intentional. “One of the conversations that we have in our Family Council every year is what is going to change in the next 10 years whether or not we have a plan. We look at several different systems, we look at the families.  We have all those cute 8-year-olds, in 10 years they're going to be 18 – we better have a plan. We had better have talked to them about the company. They better have been exposed to the family between now and then.” “Family Assembly” is really just the term we use for the entire family.  We do quarterly calls with our CEO to talk about business updates, have a quarterly call with our CFO to do financial overview and do education and training around just being comfortable with understanding some of these financial dynamics. And then we have an expert series as well where we bring in subject matter experts on various topics that may have some relevance. We changed our compensation committee to also embrace culture because we want to make sure that the compensation is driving the culture we intend as well as the business results. I really think the board needs to be kind of forward leaning or future leaning and have the skillset sets and expertise of where the company wants to go directionally, strategically. Changing the paradigm What's so interesting about the previous generations being so thoughtful and thinking with such a stewardship mindset, is that they saw our family basically had two branches, and depending on who died first, voting control would flip flop between the branches. But they really just wanted to work together. If you harmonize the elections, then you don't have the