Our guest for this episode featured Nike Anani, Founder of African Family Firms, which is a non-profit community of family business owners of African descent from around the globe. Nike' got her start as a member of her own family's construction firm when she lived in Nigeria. Born there, but raised and educated in the UK, she went back to work in the family business with her father in Nigeria and eventually helped the family plan their own succession. This led to her work with other family businesses. 

Her typical client is a 2nd generation owner of a family business of African descent. She works with them to build a legacy plan, a wealth and estate plan, while counseling them on developing a communication plan to help facilitate and complete all of the above. With an asset base of $50M and above, these would be considered larger family enterprises by comparison to most, making their situations more complex and time consuming, but still having many of the same issues family business owners tend to face.  

Nike recently released "Lifetime to Legacy" a book about how to leave a family business legacy. Her advice for our listeners:

1. Be mindful of all stakeholders in the family business and use empathy when dealing and communicating with each other

2. Owners should try to include the Next Gen into the planning as early as possible. Being a successor can be intimidating; the earlier they know what's going on, the higher likelihood of success.

Thank you to this month's sponsor:
Sunbelt Midwest Business

Find Nike on LinkedIn: Nike Anani

Connect with Julie Keyes, Keyestrategies LLC
Founder, Consultant, Author, Pod-caster and Instructor