Nepotism - The Ties That Blind

We would all like our children to live long healthy lives and to enjoy the relative financial security that my generation has achieved, it's as much a part of having faith in the evolutionary process as wanting our loved ones to be happy. The trouble is some people take things too far and employ their children, some of whom would have trouble writing the names in the sand with a stick if left to their own devices.

I have a client in the leisure industry, has been for more than twenty years and has made sufficient from his various pies to buy his house for £1 million and pay in cash (well cheque - but you get the picture). He has employed his wife for most of his business life and three years ago took the decision that his three grown-up children should become part of the family empire that stretches from Hampshire to Devon, via Dorset, Isle of Wight and Somerset. The thing is two of the three really aren't interested in business, of course they want to impress Mum and Dad but they have no 'feel' for running a company.

In the summer we were asked to train some of the clients staff on an accounting software package, one of the staff included the eldest daughter. It was obvious from day one that the daughter, who had previously worked in a High Street shoe retailers, was not cut-out for office work, she may have been great selling size seven's to the lady who wanted something for that special weekend in Paris but she just couldn't grasp even the simplest aspect of accounts.

At the end of the six week course that we ran I had to write an assessment for the client for each of his employees. I told it as it was, she wasn't up to it and her services would be better employed elsewhere - Squirrel sent off the report and I waited for the phone call telling me I had no right to write about his daughter like that.

When the call came the client was delighted. He knew she was 'useless' , to use his words, and was just grateful that somebody had the guts to put it down on paper. That was on the Friday, by the Monday she had been moved to a job that suited her capabilities and natural talent - filing.

About a month ago the eldest sibling, let's call him Bob, sent me an e-mail setting out the qualities they were looking for in a prospective employee, the work they would be undertaking and asked if I would help find a suitable person. Reading the job advert it struck me that they were actually advertising his job and he couldn't see it.

I told him I knew somebody who could fill the vacancy, at a price below the salary he was offering and that she could start more or less straightaway - one of the girls in my office could do the work one day a week.

Two down one to go, but the second daughter is the one who will be a success. She actually asked to join the family business because she didn't want to rely on her husband's income rather than being press ganged into it and she has a business brain. Mum and Dad have supported her to the tune of £2 million over the last two years and she is now a co-director and shareholder in a very profitable business that will repay the parents investment within ten years.

The moral of the story is this: by all means employ your children but first make sure they can actually do the job and don't actually see it as a way of getting paid to be near Mum and Dad. Otherwise you'll end up paying for an accountant to sort out the mess you would have avoided in the first place if you'd only asked.