Hubler Award: Larry Hause
The first business succession plan attorney Larry Hause developed was for his own family’s business, a NAPA auto-parts store in South Dakota. “It was a small business with big problems,” Hause says. The transition did work out: Hause’s youngest brother bought the business and it’s thriving. But the experience showed Hause that family-business owners and managers need to be on the same page.
For his work helping business-owning families develop successful decision-making and transition strategies, Hause is the 2022 winner of the Hubler Award for a Multidisciplinary Approach to Working with Family Businesses.
“Larry is an innovator when it comes to working with family businesses,” says Tom Hubler, the founder of Minneapolis-based consultancy Hubler for Business Families and the creator of the Minnesota Family Business Awards. “Owners generally are not excited about governance. They experience it as losing control. Larry is able to work with them in a positive way to get them to understand that in order to go forward, you have to have a governance plan. That’s one of the critical issues in ownership succession planning.”
Hause launched Edina-based Hause Family Business Transitions in 2010 after working more than two decades at Fredrikson & Byron, a Minneapolis-based law firm. There he mastered the legal aspects of family business management. He also formed the Family Business Alliance, a rotating group of practitioners in different disciplines that conducted family business case studies. The group included psychologists, accountants, financial planners, business consultants, and attorneys. “That’s how my interdisciplinary practice started,” Hause says.
He collaborates with numerous consultants, including business consultants, communications experts, and financial planners, on nearly every engagement. “The space that I work in mostly is where you have multiple owners, and not all owners are involved in management,” Hause says. “When you have that case, you have owners who are one group of people and you have managers who are another group of people. Where do they meet? How do they connect?”
Hause addresses this topic in The Balance Point, a book he wrote with former business partner Cary Tutelman that identifies how owners and managers can align their values, needs, and goals to keep the business moving forward from generation to generation. “I locate the balance point at the board, where the board manages a process of decision-making alignment between ownership and management,” Hause says. Without that balance, power struggles within the family and between owners and nonfamily managers can trip up transitions and hamper crucial decisions about the business and its direction.
