Dave's Family Business Story

As you might have already read elsewhere on the website, I have been running my own family businesses (including Inspire Coaching) for 26 years now. During that time, I've learned a lot about what it takes to build, manage, and grow a business.

I've also had to work through the very same challenges that you are likely encountering today.

Challenges like:

  • Balancing personal relationships with business needs
  • Managing conflicts without damaging relationships
  • Transferring leadership to the next generation
  • Building a proud family legacy while ALSO building the business 

Let me tell you a bit about my journey...

Starting My First Family Business

The idea to launch my first business came to me in college, where I was studying to receive my bachelor's degrees in Psychology and Social Work. My dream was to open my own counseling private practice. Much to my chagrin, my academic advisor informed me this would be difficult to do without a master's degree!

So I headed down to central Indiana, where I first attended Christian Theological Seminary and then Indiana University Bloomington to receive my Master of Social Work degree. After graduating, I spent the next six years working as a staff psychotherapist for two different organizations, slowly building my experience and financial resources.

Then, in 1998, with the help and support of my wife, I finally opened my private practice in Indianapolis. My very first office was in my home garage, which I had remodeled to include a separate waiting room and restroom. It was a humble beginning, but it was my beginning, and I couldn't wait to see where it would take me.

The Growing Years

The early years of my practice were characterized by steady growth and development. These were the very early days of the Internet, but I could already see the enormous potential of this new technology. I started to develop online self-help classes alongside my normal counseling work, which helped to accelerate growth. My wife also joined on at my practice and became co-owner, increasing our capacity to bring on new clients.

By 2004, I had become increasingly interested in coaching as a way to help people not only return to normal functioning, but grow and thrive in new directions, and I obtained my certification from the Institute for Professional Empowerment Coaching (IPEC). Around this same time, my wife and I did some branding work on the company, clarifying our vision and unique offerings to propel us into the future.

And propelled we were! For almost 20 years, we grew our private practice with only minor hitches. We hired more than 100 employees, and I personally supervised over 250 graduate student interns who used our practice as a valuable jumping-off point for their own careers in counseling work. Everything was going wonderfully...

...until everything changed.

Hitting Rock Bottom

In 2011, I was diagnosed with a chronic, progressive medical illness. Over time, this condition worsened to the point that I became completely disabled.

All of my motivation and enthusiasm for life vanished. Simply getting out of bed in the morning became the most Herculean of tasks. Many days, I didn't.

And yet, in spite of what I was going through each day, I did not want the private practice I had worked so hard to build to wither away and die. I made the difficult but crucial decision to step away from my business and focus on my personal recovery. This decision came with a number of monumental changes, including my wife assuming complete control of the company. I hated to remove myself from the day-to-day operations of the practice, but I had no other choice if I wanted them to continue in my absence.

For 8 long years, I struggled. I traveled the country, consulting with the nation's top medical experts on my condition, searching for a solution to my problem. Finally, in late 2019, I found a light in the darkness. I still wanted to help others, and I knew that I still had much more to give. By God's grace, this conviction helped lead me back to health.

But this wasn't the end of the complications...

Revelations and Separations

As I started easing my way back into managing my private practice, I began to generate many exciting ideas for evolving the business. Chief among these was a new focus on coaching.

All of my education, all of my professional experience, and indeed, my own life experience, had shown me the tremendous value of mental health counseling. Counseling can help a person who is experiencing some of the greatest challenges in their life return to normal health and functioning. And that is a wonderful, life-changing thing.

But it now bothered me more than ever that counseling stopped at normal, baseline functioning. What I had always enjoyed most was helping people go beyond baseline. I felt that the most important thing I could do with my life is help others grow into the best possible versions of themselves.

For a few years, my wife and I tried to integrate my new focus into our business. But there were too many conflicts to reconcile. In the 8 years that my wife had managed the practice, she had moved it in a direction that matched her vision and goals. We had too many employees whose livelihoods were now dependent upon that vision, and it wouldn't be fair to them to change directions just to suit my desires. But neither was I happy being held back from achieving those desires.

At the same time, my wife and I discovered that our relationship had changed, too. We were no longer the same people we had been when we married, nor did we now want the same things. And so it was that we decided to amicably go our separate ways, both professionally and personally.

The Birth of Inspire Coaching

I founded Inspire Coaching with the dream of helping people grow beyond what they thought was possible for themselves. In time, I discovered I was well suited to helping people much like myself—people who wanted to make a positive impact on the world through the creation of something new.

When I further realized that I had decades of hands-on, practical experience running a family business and navigating the conflicts that came with it, it seemed a natural fit to offer my services to others traveling that same path.

At this point, you may be wondering what makes me different from all the other family business coaches out there.

Maybe you’ve tried coaching before and been less than impressed with the results. Maybe you’re thinking to yourself, “Sure, this all sounds great, but how do I know I’ll get real results?”

To answer that question, I want to share why my approach to family business coaching is different—and why it’s superior to other methods you may have tried before.

The Typical Approach to Business Coaching

Many family business coaches focus on guiding you through tactical or strategic changes to your business. For example, they might teach you strategies for lowering your expenses, securing more customers, streamlining your workflows, and so on. 

These tactical changes can work wonders for your business, but they are only one part of the solution you need. Why? Because the challenges you are facing in your business aren't just about your business. They’re also about you, your mindset, and your ability to lead with clarity and confidence.

True transformation begins with mastering your inner game—the mindset, beliefs, and emotional resilience that shape every decision you make. When you strengthen this foundation, the solutions to your business challenges become clearer to see AND more effective.

The 5 Pillars of Business Intervention

My coaching model is built on a dual process of guiding you toward strategic solutions and inner mastery. We’ll work together to address your pressing business issues with proven strategies tailored to your unique situation, and at the same time, we’ll develop the mindset and emotional tools you need to lead with confidence, resolve conflicts with grace, and navigate the complexities of family dynamics with ease.

The 5 Pillars of Business Intervention that we will work on during coaching are:

  1. Clarity of Vision
    Develop a concrete understanding of what your business stands for, where it is going, and which goals you want to accomplish in what time frame. 
  2. Strategizing Actions
    Learn how to break down your business goals into simple, approachable actions you can start working on right now.
  3. Upgrading Skills
    Identify skill deficiencies that are holding you back from achieving your goals, and take the steps required to improve your abilities.
  4. Optimizing Environment
    Determine which policies and processes work best for you and your family, and implement them throughout your business.
  5. Mastering Mindset
    Find the balance between confident leader and loving peacekeeper that your family business needs to succeed.

All five of these pillars are important for the success of your business. However, it is my experience that 90% of family business success comes down to the leader’s ability to master their mindset.

Why My Method Works

As I’ve already mentioned, this method is radically more effective than cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all family business coaching. The right strategy paired with a resilient mindset can transform challenges into opportunities, ensuring your family business not only survives, but thrives.

How do I know this? Because it’s the very same method that has worked for my own family businesses!

It all began with vision, which happens to be my strong suit. Even as a young boy, my parents used to say things like, “Dave has his head in the clouds.” Fortunately for me, I was able to turn this penchant for dreaming big into a business asset many years later.

Twenty years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic that changed many aspects of our daily lives, I envisioned that I could deliver therapy services virtually for my counseling private practice. I started offering those services way back in 2004, sixteen years before telehealth services would become mainstream.

However, I wasn’t always good at strategizing actions that were needed to implement my visions. My wife and business partner at that time was an incredible asset in this regard, as strategic planning was one of her natural talents. Over the years, she helped me learn how to strategize next steps and prioritize those actions in logical, actionable ways.

I also encountered many situations in which I needed to upgrade my leadership skills for the good of the business. One example was when I decided we should adopt a new Electronic Health Record system in order to stay competitive in our industry. In my characteristic excitement, I wanted to start using the new system as quickly as possible, but again, my business partner helped me understand that this project would be bigger than myself. All of our staff would need to be trained on any new software we adopted, and while some were younger and more adept at technology, others were older and more resistant to this type of change.

With these considerations in mind, I weighed the pros and cons of several different EHR systems, chose one that I thought would work best for our team, and signed up for training sessions on the new software. After I had learned the system, we scheduled training sessions for each of our staff, and I was able to field all the follow-up questions they had as we began implementing the new system. This whole process helped us optimize the business environment for greater success in the future.

Last but certainly not least, it has been necessary for me to do much work on mastering my mindset throughout my career as a family business owner. For starters, I wasn’t always good at delegating tasks to others. I have a perfectionistic bent, and I often felt I was the best person to take care of any and all tasks. To delegate was to take the risk of a job not being done in the way I thought was best—in other words, my way!

It didn’t help that when my first business was just getting started, I couldn’t afford to hire all the help I needed. So, like many startup owners, I “wore all the hats” until I could afford to hire more staff. But even once I could afford to hire help, it was still a challenge to let go of my desire to control every process.

When I finally accepted that I had no other choice than to start delegating some tasks, I found that some people were average in following the systems and processes I had set up, but others were able to refine those processes and make them better than I had originally imagined. This was a pleasant and enlightening surprise! I learned I had a limiting belief that others wouldn’t do as good a job as me, but in reality, they sometimes surpassed my ability and helped bring the entire business to the next level. 

Ready to Transform Your Family Business?

You, too, can reap the rewards that come from my 5 Pillars of Business Intervention. Once you have the strategies, skills, environment, and mindset you need to faithfully execute your vision for your business, anything is possible!

If you are just launching your family business or have been running it for years...if you are facing minor challenges or staring into the darkest cave you have ever seen...if you need help implementing fixes or don't have the faintest idea where to begin...

I have been there.

I know how you feel.

I can help you.

...Will you let me?

If your answer is "yes", then I invite you to click here to request your FREE Business Breakthrough Session. This no-risk, no-obligation coaching session will help you assess the current state of your family business and immediately start working on solutions to your problems.

I can’t wait to start this journey with you.

Warm regards,

Dave

Dave Shields October 9, 2024
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