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A journalist and freelance writer, Clémence Risler has been playing with ideas and words for nearly 20 years, writing articles in several major Quebec publications. From art to gastronomy, from literature to leisure, many subjects pique her curiosity. But above all, she is interested in stories at the heart of which humans are the star.
CLEMENT RISLER
ABOUT
Interview
DAD, I'M TAKING OVER THE BUSINESS!
Danièle Henkel went to Salaberry-de-Valleyfield to meet Renée Demers, the president...
BUSINESS & ECONOMY
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Renée Demers' decision to take over the reins of Atelier d'usinage Quenneville Inc. , succeeding her father, was therefore not without risk: "During a transfer, the legal and financial aspects are, all in all, fairly easy to manage. What is much less easy is the human side and the transmission of know-how, particularly when the family is involved, because the risks of conflict are greater," emphasizes Renée Demers, who comes from the third generation of entrepreneurs in the family.
Focus on communication
Maripier Tremblay confirms that mixing business and family is always delicate, and that emotion can quickly take over during discussions surrounding a transfer. “In a family business dynamic, it is particularly important that each person’s concerns are clearly expressed. But to achieve this, it takes a lot of listening and humility on both sides,” she emphasizes.
Learning to separate the personal and professional sides is also one of the challenges mentioned by Maude Verstraete, who took over the management of Meubles Arboit-Poitras in 2017. “My father and I don’t always see things the same way. He’s open to the changes I suggest, but we have to maintain a balance between our respective approaches.” One of the solutions for Renée Demers and her father was to hire a human resources consultant to support them in the process: “Having this third party allowed us to stay on the same wavelength and avoid disagreements.”
Give yourself time
Renée Demers joined the family business in the late 1990s, a few years before the official handover began. “The transfer took place over five years, from 2000 to 2005. We took the time we needed to do things right,” she says. “Time doesn’t stand still during this transition period: orders are still coming in and we have to continue to serve customers.”
To learn more about business transfer
Quebec Business Transfer Center (CTEQ)
Academy for Entrepreneurial Succession-CDPQ
The delicate art of family transfer
2019-12-11
CLEMENT RISLER
3 minutes
The chances of survival for a family business that passes to the second or third generation are very slim. Renée Demers and Maude Verstraete tell how they managed to take up the challenge, from father to daughter.
“The more generations pass, the more we see a fairly drastic drop in the survival rate of businesses,” says Maripier Tremblay, a management professor at Université Laval, who maintains that several factors can explain this decline. Among these, she explains that in the third or fourth generation, the successors have not lived with the founder of the business and have therefore been less in contact with the values and vision that were the initial driving force, which can create a gap. “A business can also have become much more complex over the years,” she continues, “and running it becomes a greater challenge. The increase in the number of stakeholders involved in the adventure (brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts) would also increase the level of difficulty.”