S2 E7 – Advising and Living in the Rising Generation ft. Tim Yeung
Download MP3Welcome back to the Our Family Office podcast. I'm your host, Adam Fisch. This season, we're talking about the rising generation and what makes them unique. For this episode, I spoke with Tim Yeung, a family enterprise adviser who is himself the third generation of an ultra high net worth family. Tim spent ten years at his family's commercial real estate company before leaving to eventually pursue family enterprise advising and coaching.
Adam Fisch:Tim draws on his personal experience to connect with business owning families and help them create a vision for the future together. Tim is a friend of our family office, and his thoughtful and introspective approach is incredibly valuable. He knows about the challenges that wealthy business owning families face, because he's faced them himself. In this conversation, you'll hear us discuss his journey as a family employee, using his experience to help other families, and the common challenges that business families face. I hope you enjoy it.
Adam Fisch:Tim, thanks so much for being here.
Tim Yeung:Thanks for having me on the show.
Adam Fisch:So I think a good place to start is maybe you could tell the listeners a bit about your family history and then how you came to join your family business.
Tim Yeung:Sure. So I am part of g three or the third generation. The family business started in Hong Kong originally with my grandpa. He built the business up, built a life for himself there. That side of the business originally started in linen trading.
Tim Yeung:And then my uncle, my dad's older brother, took over that side of the business and expanded us into real estate. My dad came to Canada in the late seventies and, trained to be a dentist coming out of UBC and was tasked with also, while being a dentist, building up on the business on this side of the pond. And so, Peterson today is a national, at times international. We have stuff in The States as well. Commercial real estate firm.
Tim Yeung:And we build and we manage and we, also do, kind of financial lending as well on real estate. So that's kind of the business. I grew up in Vancouver not really intending ever to work in the family business. I always thought I would work somewhere else. I went to mechanical engineering at UBC.
Tim Yeung:And when I graduated, I went to the family business, and this is probably true of other people in their family businesses too, I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do. And I was also graduating in the middle of the, subprime financial crisis. I was graduating in September 2008, and it was at that point, I wasn't sure where to go, and I thought I would go and work in the family business. I'd lived in Hong Kong for about a year at that point.
Tim Yeung:And so, actually, a big part of me joining the family business was this newfound gratitude and appreciation for the opportunity I'd been given in Canada. And so that was actually probably a big part of the reason why I joined the family business, and I worked there for about, ten years total.
Adam Fisch:And maybe then you could talk a little about some of the positives, some of the negatives of being one of the members of the owner family in that business, and then the factors that ultimately led to you considering leaving the business after that time?
Tim Yeung:So the positives were I had this affinity for the business. I knew a lot of our history. I'd grown up in and around a lot of our buildings, and so I think I had this connection and affection for our business that probably, I mean, wouldn't be there if you just kind of came in off the street. I think there was a reasonable amount of negatives, some of which I knew going in, some of which I was naive to, I think.
Tim Yeung:I think one of the biggest ones, and and this comes up quite frequently in my work with families when I work with them now, is feedback. Feedback for family members is quite challenging, for the family member and for any manager managing a family member because anytime a manager is giving constructive criticism or feedback to a family member, they are in their own way looking their job security in the face. There is the potential if this lands poorly or if the family member reacts poorly that they could go above their manager and and cause issues. And so that's where having explicit structure around that is helpful. Well, we I didn't have that. And so what tends to happen then is family members tend to languish a bit in a vacuum, without clear understanding of, you know, what their strengths are and and and what their weaknesses are and what they need to improve on.
Tim Yeung:So in my time at Peterson, when I worked there, that was probably my biggest difficulty. Ultimately, though, it wasn't really the difficulties that led me to consider a new arc for my career. It was actually the understanding, the self understanding that while I could operate in the world of investments and IRRs and cash flows and, analysis, I didn't mind that world, but I think I was tricking myself for a long time. Our capacity for self deception as humans is very strong, and I was tricking myself for a long time that I really liked it.
Tim Yeung:And what I realized through my time working there was actually the thing that I enjoyed by far the most was working and developing and growing people. I really enjoyed managing people. I think that was kind of a surprise for me. I think it's a surprise for people talking to me in that I think a lot of people struggle managing people in teams, but I really enjoyed it. And when I kind of put two and two together, that helped me realize, where I wanted to go.
Tim Yeung:It was actually- I was leading the real estate development team at Peterson, and I remember working with my boss at the time. And he said, you know, Tim, can you just print me off some of these floor plans? I wanna work on them on the weekend. And that's when I realized, oh, I would never work on these on the weekend. Like, I was like, there is no part of this work, as much as I think I like it, that I would ever do have this approach of just doing it for fun kind of.
Tim Yeung:And when I looked at it, I was like, oh, I don't love anything like this, except I realized what I really enjoy is working with people. And, I mean, that was the impetus that led me to consider a new career. I wasn't sure what it was gonna look like, but it certainly was gonna be around working with people, which, again, coming from, like, a mechanical engineering background was kinda surprising to me. Like, you know, coming from being a sports analytics geek for hockey, like, that's surprising to me. But, ultimately, that's where I was this compass was leading me towards. And so leaving the business, there were certainly challenges there, but I've always framed it more that I was leaving for something rather than leaving from something.
Adam Fisch:Right. And like you said, you know, to go from sports analytics, mechanical engineering, you know, working in real estate development to you had good experiences managing people, but at some point, you did that introspective work to think, oh, you know what? I actually have learned a lot about navigating a family business, and so the type of people development I wanna do is helping people in family businesses and helping them develop? How did you put that together?
Tim Yeung:It was actually not my idea. I was actually at a family council meeting for my own family, and one of our advisers said, hey. You know, you might wanna consider this as a career. I think I jumped in and kind of helped paraphrase maybe a more challenging comment from one of the family members. And I remember going to the washroom and thinking, he always like this adviser always tells me I should be doing other things.
Tim Yeung:And so I kind of dismissed it immediately, and it took me a little bit of time afterwards. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, hey. You know, that might be something to explore, you know, where I get to, one, lean into people but have a unique lived experience that I can bring to the work. And so that's what really was the genesis of the idea. And then for the next kind of six months, it was really exploring that idea of whether it might be a good fit for me.
Tim Yeung:Ultimately, you never know, and I just took the leap. But I spent a good amount of time, seeing if I liked the work. I reached out to one of our local practitioners. Actually, he was working with our family at the time, and I got to kind of tag along. And that's where I realized, hey. I think this is going to be something that would be good for me.
Adam Fisch:So let's talk about how you bring that experience into your work. How do you use it to help other families where your you know, every situation is different, so you don't wanna make presumptions. But you're certainly in a position where, like you said, you have that lived experience that you can draw on to advise other families that are maybe working through challenges.
Tim Yeung:I see two different ways that come to mind immediately in terms of how I use my family experience with other families. One is sometimes when we're at an implementation question, how did you guys handle this? I can just give my family experience as a data point. And what's interesting is it's just a data point, but the actual intervention or support is that I think by relaying that we struggled with this decision too and we landed on x y z gives that family comfort that there is ways of going through this and that there's no one right way. So I think there's comfort in that story of, hey. This is just one example, but we did this for this reason. And there's comfort in knowing that there was, like, a process or a rationale behind how they landed at things. And, ultimately, that rationale is unique to the context of every family.
Tim Yeung:The second piece where I often use my family story is in difficult conversations or difficult situations. There are times where I actually can remember one family. I wasn't even working with them yet, and one of the family members, this was an introductory call, was kind of peacing out of the call, for lack of a better word. He didn't wanna be there. And I remember being able to say, well, I don't have the rapport with his family to say, hey, so and so. Like, get it together. I couldn't call him out because I didn't have a relationship with him.
Tim Yeung:I barely knew the guy. But I needed to kind of wrangle the call and bring it together, right, if they were gonna make a decision. And what was interesting was I was able to share a story of my own struggles with my family and how I wanted to choose to live in my values. I actually shared a story of how I wanted to act in a way in a difficult situation that my- I have two daughters, that my girls would be proud of me. You know?
Tim Yeung:As a dad, that's what inspired me, and and I knew this guy was a father. And so I got to tell this story to kind of give him something to latch onto?
Adam Fisch:Right.
Tim Yeung:Without specifically saying so and so. You know, you need to come around. And I think, actually, it did it worked.
Tim Yeung:You know? By the end of the call, he said he was a little abashed at how he managed himself, and, you know, it did its work. And so I think my stories that I can share ultimately are that in difficult situations if we're trying to generalize here, I think in difficult situations, if we can share things that are vulnerable, then it invites other people into vulnerability. Right? It's very rare, I guess, unless you're a sociopath. Right?
Tim Yeung:It's very rare that people share vulnerable things, and it elicits anger or a desire to drive the needle or the screw further. Right? When you share vulnerability, it invites other people into your experience, and then they can kind of be with you, and it allows them to engage better. So that's those are kind of the two things that I often find.
Tim Yeung:And it's really interesting. There's this feeling of sometimes that things are hard and that nothing good will come of it. And many examples in my life, but this one in particular in working with families is now all of the hard experiences that I ever had working with my family, I get to reclaim them by serving other families and helping them with these stories. Right? And so I think there's, like, a really beautiful full circle, coming around of those, reclaiming and and kind of taking it for myself, as opposed to having things be done to you.
Adam Fisch:Yeah. And it can imbue those moments and those memories with a different- a deeper sense of meaning and purpose because now they're they're as you said, they're being used now to help other people.
Tim Yeung:Yeah. It's interesting. Right? Because you don't ever wish for hard things. Right?
Tim Yeung:But and certainly in the moment, and even now, I wouldn't say, like, I'm happy hard things happened. Right? But I am grateful that they can be a source of comfort. I'm grateful that they can be helpful and ultimately be more beneficial than they were negative . Through this work.
Adam Fisch:And when you talk about being able to share those experiences, as we both know, for many ultra high net worth families, it's hard to find people in similar situations that they can relate to, and it's hard to find a sense of commonality. And it's hard to feel like you can complain when you feel like, well, I have all this privilege, so who am I to complain about this even though you can have problems like anyone else?
Tim Yeung:Mhmm.
Adam Fisch:Thinking about those commonalities and some of the ways that you connect with the families that you work with, what are some of the more common challenges that maybe a business family listening to this might think like, oh, it's not just me. It's not just us.
Tim Yeung:I mean, so many. I think the first one is thinking that it'll be easier than it actually is. Right? I think there's this idea that, like, we're family. We'll just get along. We'll figure it out. And it's not. Right?
Tim Yeung:Imagine, you know, if you've had a bad boss before, you can move on. You don't need to work there anymore. But imagine if your bad boss is your dad. And
Adam Fisch:Yeah.
Tim Yeung:I'm not saying this about my dad, but, like, just in general. Right? In general. Like, you have a relationship with a person. Right? Like, you're not gonna cease being family if you stop working with them. And so that's kind of the problem is sometimes people underestimate what they're stepping into. Specifically, these are things like, there's a multitude of these.
Tim Yeung:The first things that come to mind are there's an evolution between every healthy parent child relationship from a parent child to an adult to an adult. Right? So, you know, my kids, I am gonna they're not allowed to cross the street on their own, you know, without a parent because that's just a safety thing. Right? So parent child relationship. But at a certain point, that would be a very unhealthy thing if my child is 25 years old and they can't cross the street by themselves. Right? So there's an evolution. I mean, that's facetious. Right? We put that into the terms of, like, well, can they decide where they wanna live? Can they decide where they want their career to be? Or as an like, are they still tied to the family business? That there's a natural arc for someone not in a family business, which would be, as an example, you graduate high school, you go to university, you go get a job, you create a family, and you have this kind of now you're this unit on your own outside of your family.
Tim Yeung:What happens is that often gets skipped in a family business because maybe you go you do do the college route, but then you go back and you do your internships at the family. And then you go back and do your initial job at the family, and you only ever worked with the family. And so that distance has never grown. Right? You've never had the space to become your own adult in the eyes of of your parents or in your family.
Tim Yeung:And then the problem begins when those relationships are butting up against each other. You think you have authority and and capability to bring to this enterprise, but your parents still see you as a child. And so that's very difficult. It's very difficult to say, well, don't see me as a child. Well, that sounds very childish. Right?
Tim Yeung:And so the real thing is to be able to elevate yourself even if your parents are treating you that way to act as an adult, and it's also for parents to and the elder generation to realize that too. That's number one. Number two is I would say and this is kind of a bias or a challenge that people don't often understand is, especially from the elder generation, is if you've been a very successful entrepreneur or you've grown a business significantly and your kids know that, that's a high bar to follow. Right?
Tim Yeung:It wouldn't be easy being the son of Michael Jordan. Right? And so there's there's a feeling of maybe no matter what I do, I will never be as successful as this person. And I think what's very common or a prevailing notion today is, well, then maybe I just won't try. Right?
Tim Yeung:If I don't try, then I've never failed because I didn't put myself out there. Right? And so I think those are two really common ones we call- that's from Kristen Keffeler. She calls it the curse of successful parents is that you either die trying to outcompete your parents or you just don't.
Adam Fisch:Don't bother.
Tim Yeung:Yeah. And those are neither of those being good outcomes. Right? So I think those are really challenging, and being able to share amongst friends or, I guess, a shared cohort is very helpful. They're not many, but being able to find one for yourself is very helpful.
Tim Yeung:I'm actually facilitating one right now. And I think the biggest part is you kind of mentioned this already. If you have a group of people who have a similar background, it's very freeing to be able to share without self censoring, to not have to worry that some of my problems sound like champagne problems. And to a regular person, they are, but they're still problems to me. And so I still need to solve them. Right? And so I think being able to find, like minded groups of people is helpful and a useful thing for rising gens.
Adam Fisch:Yeah. And those ideas we've kind of touched on throughout this season is right like you said, they seem like champagne problems, but, you know, if you're having trouble figuring out your own identity or living in the shadow of your parents, yeah, it's nice to have wealth and privilege, and you can take nice vacations and live in a nice house, but that doesn't make up for those underlying problems or that sense of being, you know, unmoored or not understanding your place in the world. Like, you can't just ignore that part because the material part is nice. In real estate in Vancouver, Peterson and my dad are well known. And so in many different instances, whether I was here or sometimes even in Toronto, people would say, oh, you're Ben's son. Right? And I'm like, oh, yeah. Yeah. I am. Like, he's my dad.
Tim Yeung:And it's been nice in this family advisory world that being able to go to a different industry, I call it, like, the anti- cheers where no one knows your name. You know? And so it's been nice. It's been nice. It's actually been nice to have space because it also then gives my dad a license to ask me questions about my work rather than just opining and tell me, like, I don't know anything about my work because I don't know as much as he does, right, because of his real estate experience. So I think that's actually been a real side benefit to me being outside the family business.
Adam Fisch:Yeah. Now I know that the work that you do can take months, years for a family. So, you know, what we talk about now will be very high level. But talking about navigating those parent child or elder generation rising gen relationships, either from the perspective of the elder generation that has trouble seeing the younger as their own fully formed adult or the younger that has trouble finding their own identity. Are there some strategies or approaches, tools that you found can be helpful for those individuals to help on that journey?
Tim Yeung:From the elder generation side, I think it's helpful, One activity I've heard, and I'm borrowing this. His name is Faisal. He works for Geneticare and or he founded Geneticare, which is this family health office. He really does really deep work with families before they come to people like, my firm, LGA, to get advisory.
Tim Yeung:And so one thing he talks about, one of his favorite interventions, is to ask the elder generation, what is your policy on spilt milk? Like, are we gonna whine and cry about it if the kids try to do an entrepreneurial venture and it's not successful? Or are we gonna explicitly say, we know that some things don't work out, and we are not going to, put you on blast because your first investment didn't work out. Certainly, there will be learning lessons, but it's not about batting 1,000. The other part of that is it's a license for the elder generation to share some of their mistakes. Like, what were some of their failures? What were some of the decisions that they really blew up on them? And it gives a a shared space then for family members to maybe step into taking their first initiative that they may not otherwise feel capable of because they've seen that they can make mistakes and work for them. So that would be from that side. I think from the rising gen, you can't force someone to see you as an adult, but you can stop acting like a child.
Tim Yeung:And I don't mean that in, like, a mean way. I just mean in the the natural way that comes up because I joke, you can always tell when someone's answering the phone with their mom. Because if it's a stranger, you'd be like, hi. How's it going? But, you know, you can tell when someone goes, what do you want? Right. You were talking to your mom or your dad, you know, and you're annoyed that they're calling. And so you you can start to act more like an adult. Right? Like, when they say things that are triggering to you, you can have plans and plan b's and plan c's around how you're gonna manage Right? And so if you can start to do that, if you can start to carry yourself in that way, you can start to change that dynamic just by virtue of how you show up. I mean, that's self work, and it's not easy. But it is the one thing that is directly within your control, and that's where coaching can be really helpful. You know? Like, what are the like, you know, just I shared that story earlier of me showing up in difficult situations, I'm thinking about, you know, holding both of my daughter's hands and, like, how would I wanna be in this situation if I were in that stance? Right? How am I gonna act? And what that is for an individual, that's unique to them. But if you can stand in these values, these things that you hold core to who you are, it's empowering, but it also gives you kind of a steadying grounding presence from which to act .
Tim Yeung:Right? To come back to when you're triggered because your parents brought up something that always bothers you.
Adam Fisch:Yeah. Yeah. No. And I love the idea of thinking about failures of the elder generation or challenges that they faced, and, you know, I think there's so much value around that. Certainly, the work that we do putting together family constitutions and including family history in that.
Adam Fisch:I think it first of all, it gives the next gen an opportunity to see the struggles rather than just the results. And it humanizes that elder gen of, hey. They weren't perf- just because they, today, have all the success. This didn't happen overnight. It wasn't perfect.
Adam Fisch:First of all, it was hard, maybe harder than you realized. And so that, you know, reinforces the value of hard work and persistence and all of that. And, also, they made mistakes. They messed up and just like anybody. And so to your point, Tim, this idea of they're not expecting you to be perfect and never make mistakes because they made their own. You know? I think it's such an opportunity to bridge create a bridge, create a connection between the generations.
Tim Yeung:I think there's this idea, you know, when you design something, you often do a brainstorm where you start with a blank page. Right? And the beauty of being able to share failures and to be able to have dialogue, its just this there's a feeling of the design space opens. There's more here. Right?
Tim Yeung:When the box is you have to be perfect, it has to go right right from the get go. You have to get into an Ivy League college or or whatever the thing is. It feels narrow and constrained and tight. You know? And so anything we do in general, when I work with families or just individuals, anything that opens up that design space is almost always a good thing.
Tim Yeung:You know? Anything that feels like we're stepping into some level of freeingness or freedom is almost always kind of a guidepost that you're moving in the right direction.
Adam Fisch:Yeah. It it's so interesting, Tim. And, you know, I really do appreciate your perspective because as we've discussed, I think your own experience coupled with the work that you've done with families, it really just gives you that vision and that ability to relate to the challenges that families are facing. As a final question for you, what's one exercise or question that families can use to start building a shared vision of a future today?
Tim Yeung:I really like to ask families, and this is often actually prework for the first session we meet in person, is where would you wanna be in ten years? If everything was more successful than you could have ever dreamed of, where would you be? And usually, actually, the prompt we give people is, write a postcard to your family ten years from now. Imagine that you're somewhere doing something, and you're telling them what's going on. And in so doing, you get to write about kind of in an oblique way, like, your aspirations are, what your dreams are for you personally.
Tim Yeung:But you also get to talk about, you know, the dreams of where you hope the family is, the dreams of where you hope your business is in the future, and where relationships are. And so I often find that once you can share that, once it's a great way to set the tone for a meeting, but it also plants the seeds of, oh, we actually all do wanna go there, and that sounds really great. And I'm really excited about that. And I wish we were there. Right?
Tim Yeung:I wish we were more on track because often families aren't. And so usually, it's working from the future backwards. If there's not a compelling- and this is the same thing with goals. Right? If there's not a compelling enough future that we can articulate and come together, there's not enough there to do the hard work.
Tim Yeung:Mhmm. Right? If it's not exciting, then we haven't set our goals lofty enough. Right? If it's not exciting, then why are we gonna do all this meeting and difficult conversation?
Adam Fisch:Doesn't feel worth it to do the work.
Tim Yeung:So a big part of this is, like, making it feel worth Like, what does feel worth it? And then once you can land on that, then that's a really helpful and important shared north star for conversation, but also motivation. You know, we're doing this work for a reason, not just because it's the thing that we've been prescribed. Right.
Adam Fisch:Yeah. So insightful. Tim, thank you so much for being here, and, nice to chat with you again.
Tim Yeung:Yeah. It was great connecting with you. Thanks for having me, Adam.
Adam Fisch:Thank you so much for listening. Our Family Office is Canada's first purpose built shared family office, and the Our Family Office podcast is produced by Henry Shew. Please visit ourfamilyoffice.ca for more information about our firm, and don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And of course, share it with your family. See you next time.
Adam Fisch:The information in this podcast is presented as a general educational and informational resource only. While certain participants in this podcast may be registered to provide investment advice as a representative of Our Family Office, Inc, itself a registered firm in certain Canadian jurisdictions, this podcast does not provide individualized investment, financial planning, legal, tax, or insurance advice, nor is it meant as a recommendation to any listener to buy or sell any specific securities or otherwise take any other investment action? Any action you may take as a result of the information presented in this podcast is your own responsibility. Our Family Office, Inc. And each of its representatives that participate in any podcast disclaim that any listeners should rely in any way on any of this content as investment, tax, legal, or insurance advice.
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