Building Unbreakable Brands

Building Unbreakable Brands Podcast
Episode: The Family Business Flywheel with Michael Palumbos

Introduction
What if your family business could run on renewable energy—not solar or wind, but something even more powerful? The kind of energy that comes from alignment, trust, and shared purpose.
My guest today is Michael Palumbos, founder of Family Wealth and Legacy and creator of the Family Business Flywheel—a framework designed to help families turn that alignment into action. Building on decades of family business thinking, Michael's approach shows what happens when your business systems, family dynamics, and wealth strategy start working together to generate their own momentum.
In our conversation, we explore what it means to treat the family itself as an asset, how to build systems that reinforce rather than drain your energy, and why collaboration between advisors can save families both money and heartache.
And of course, Henry joins us to bring his next-gen perspective—with talk about treehouses, teamwork, and even dolphins!
All this and more, coming up on Building Unbreakable Brands.

Main Episode
Meghan Lynch [00:05]: Welcome to Building Unbreakable Brands, the podcast where we talk to business leaders with a generational mindset. I'm Meghan Lynch. I'm an advisor to family businesses and CEO of Six Point Strategy, which helps generational brands honor their past while evolving for the future. My guest today is Michael Palumbos. Michael is the creator of the Family Business Flywheel, a new model that's helping entrepreneurial families grow their businesses, align their wealth, and protect their legacy. Michael's also the host of the Family Biz Show and the founder of Family Wealth and Legacy. Welcome, Michael.

Michael Palumbos [00:45]: Thanks, Meghan. Nice to be here.
Meghan Lynch [00:48]: I'm so glad we finally get to record this conversation. We've had so many rich conversations in the past, and I'm excited to share this one with people.
Michael Palumbos [00:59]: It's really neat because we've talked a lot about how your business interacts with family business. My model is just coming out now that we're launching it in 2025, so the timing is perfect.

Meghan Lynch [01:18]: I wanted to start with your Family Business Flywheel. One of the key questions is: why weren't the traditional models of family business planning and advising enough? Why did you create this model, and why now?
Michael Palumbos [01:42]: The three-circle model is awesome. Davis and Tagiuri put this together, first published back in the eighties. It showed ownership, family, and business—where they intersected and where conflict could arise. It gave us language as family business advisors to identify what's happening.
What I've been thinking about for 15 years now is that there's never really been something that shows the family how to work through this. What if they want to put these pieces together? We've interviewed well over a hundred families through the podcast, white papers, and client work. Some things started to bubble up for us.
Michael Palumbos [02:48]: Years ago, a family said to me, "Michael, what served three families' lifestyle, we didn't want to do for seven. What do we do?" I'd never had that question asked in all the years I'd been doing this. I said, the only way you can do that is to grow revenue and grow profit.
This family had hit what they thought was their ceiling at around $10 million. We dove into things like EOS and Scaling Up—just the growth mindset to say we need to grow the business. That family took one piece that I think is really valuable: creating an A-player leadership team as part of creating their self-operating business. They went from $10 million to $50 million of revenue between a couple of different entities.
Meghan Lynch [04:07]: So really putting your finger on this question of scale—not just saying we've got to scale the business, but also recognizing our family itself is getting more complex. There's more players within the family that are either depending on this business or are somehow connected to the system. How do we start to look at this business system both through the three-circle model and overlay some of these scale-up best practices as well?

Michael Palumbos [04:44]: Correct. So in our three circles, it's the self-operating business. How do I make sure that the owner's not a bottleneck in the business? How do I make sure I'm building something that has enterprise value, not just a lifestyle business? An enterprise value business can be passed on where a lifestyle business can't always be passed on effectively. So it's professionalizing that business. This has to happen for every family business if you're anticipating being out there 10, 20, 30 years. Now we start thinking about generations.

Michael Palumbos [05:58]: The complexity piece—that's where our Family Business Family Office is another cog. There are three wheels or three cogs inside of the full flywheel. The family business family office addresses how, as the business grows, wealth grows.
When we started off, we got to $1 million a year, then $10 million a year. We added real estate, investment accounts, 401(k)s, and now I've got an estate tax problem. The complication outgrows the family oftentimes.
I have a great example: When I met them, they said, "We got all this covered." I said, "Let's just take a second opinion and pull it all together." Turns out they had five investment advisors, three of them doing planning, three different insurance agents, somebody else running the 401(k), three different attorneys doing different things, and no one was talking to each other. There was no quarterback.
They have the complication of a family office but typically don't have the assets that most family offices or multifamily offices want, yet they need that level of expertise.

Michael Palumbos [07:14]: The third cog is sustaining the family legacy. The way I like to think about this is thinking of family as an asset that needs attention. We don't do exit planning—we grow into a valuable transition. That's the way we like to think about it.
If I'm going to do that with the next generation, I really have to be thinking about them and the whole family. If I pick Junior or Missy to be the next leader, how does that affect the family? Are we communicating? Do we have trust? Do we have a shared vision and shared values?
If we're not doing those pieces, that's how you create great culture in the business. We need to do that same thing in the family. That helps each one of those pieces affect and impact positively when they're running smoothly.

Meghan Lynch [08:24]: I love that idea of thinking about the family as an asset in and of itself. It makes total sense when you say it, yet I've never heard anybody speak that way about it. I like this idea of thinking about that investment in the next generation and what they'll be able to bring to the table and how well they fit within the system.
If every generation isn't just taking from the business but now they're adding to it, do you have any examples of what that might look like in practice?

Michael Palumbos [09:17]: I think it's just like we would invest in an attorney, a wealth advisor, or a business coach to help us on those other things. What we've done internally is we've brought in family dynamics specialists to facilitate conversations. We believe you have to make that investment.
Let's say we spend 30 minutes a month and we talk about what are my values? Each person talks about what their values are in the family. Then maybe we have a family meeting that talks about where those values intersect as a family and where are we the same and where are we different.
My wife and I went through this internally ourselves. Our five values that we landed on were love, growth, gratitude, grit, and forgiveness. Those were our shared things. It took us a little while because she named them something else and I named them differently, and we worked through that.
Michael Palumbos [10:16]: The conversation I think is interesting is where we were different—where the cognitive dissonance is. That's where we might have more boisterous conversations. It was nice to be able to put your finger on it to say, "Oh, this is really important to her" or "This is really important to him."
If you can do that within the family—some work in the business, some don't work in the business, maybe they're owners or maybe they're not owners but they have a vision for the family name—I think starting with values is a simple example.

Meghan Lynch [11:12]: That's great. I think the other piece is it allows you to have more productive conversations around difference when you also have those core shared values and a shared language to come back to. It helps people stay in the conversation a little bit longer when you have established that shared foundation. Then when you're exploring differences, it's like, "Okay, these are going to show up in different ways, but remember we have the shared core."

Michael Palumbos [11:52]: You can do the same thing with vision. Think about how many times you've seen somebody say, "You have to come into the business—the legacy of the business, the legacy of the family, we need you in here to continue this."
What if we had a conversation that talks about what is your individual vision for your future? Every family member shares their individual vision of the happiest, best life they could possibly live. At the end of the day, when we're raising these kids, we say we want them to be happy, living their passion, and being the best self they can be. That's our job as parents.

Meghan Lynch [12:30]: Yeah.

Michael Palumbos [12:31]: So why are we not asking them what's their vision for the future? Why are we potentially telling them that in order for the family legacy to go on—I think as I said that, we really need to be talking about this: the business is not the legacy. The legacy is the vision, the purpose. What did the family stand for? Beyond profit, what are the values of this family? How do we interact in the community?
If that morphs—if mom and dad run an automobile dealership and none of the kids have that passion and we find out their passion is art—maybe they have a great art store, maybe they have great galleries. It's okay to reinvent yourselves and your legacy for the future.

Meghan Lynch [13:48]: I'm thinking about a family where the business was becoming an anchor and pressure as opposed to feeling like a positive inheritance. One of the things they ended up focusing on was that one of their shared values was stewardship of land that had been in their family. It had been used for agricultural purposes in the past, but what they figured out they could do was use it as more of a hospitality resort, which was more the interests of the kids.

Meghan Lynch [14:33]: It breathed new life into this. They all had a shared passion for the beauty of the land but did not want to necessarily go into farming or agriculture. So it allowed the family legacy to evolve with the kids' interests and vision. Opening up that conversation for what is at the core and then what are all the ways that this could show up in ways that play to our passions—I think it gives it new life and purpose as they go.

Michael Palumbos [15:14]: I think that's a great example of how you could do that and reinvent and look at the future differently.

Meghan Lynch [15:23]: Making space for those conversations and making them an intentional part of the family purpose and system that they're building so that you don't have to wait to that point where it's a blow-up. That time and care is part of the investment in that next generation and in the generational aspect of the family.

Michael Palumbos [15:56]: A hundred percent.

Meghan Lynch [15:59]: You're listening to Building Unbreakable Brands, the podcast all about brand stewardship and crafting an enduring legacy. Today I'm speaking with Michael Palumbos, creator of the Family Business Flywheel and founder of Family Wealth and Legacy.
You also mentioned this idea of the Family Business Family Office. It's a concept I love because, as you described, so many families hit the complexity of a family office before they necessarily hit the asset ceiling that you need to be able to truly invest in the infrastructure that is a family office. So I was hoping you could speak a little bit more to what exactly is this Family Business Family Office and how does it work practically?

Michael Palumbos [16:57]: Think about the family businesses—many of them that we serve don't want to have a liquidity event. Their goal is transition. Their goal is to continue to grow and be out in the community employing vast numbers of people. They've learned something.
I was watching the Charlie Sheen documentary. You watch the neighborhood these kids were growing up in—it was Charlie Sheen, Emilio Estevez, Sean Penn, Jennifer Grey. They all grew up together because their parents were in the business. A lot of times Tom Hanks' kid is in the business now. There are other actors where the kids get in and people say, "Oh, that's nepotism."

Michael Palumbos [18:01]: No, it's just that the kids were growing up watching this and they got this passion from watching their mom or dad be really good at something. I think the same thing happens for family businesses. Oftentimes, the kid's five years old and they're in the shop, they're on the shop floor, they're getting behind a bulldozer, they're farming. Grandpa's bringing them in to say, "We're splitting these seeds and doing genetic research to make a whole new variety of cabbage," which happens. That's how one of my clients became a cabbage farmer—his grandfather just instilled this in him.
We shouldn't have to be thinking about a liquidity event in order to have the level of service that's needed. Most of the multifamily offices want to talk to you when you've got five years before you have a liquidity event.

Michael Palumbos [19:02]: What we wanted to do was take all those things that make the complexity—taxes, estate taxes, income taxes, the number of people we're talking about, investments, financial planning and wealth management. Are we going to be okay? Are my kids going to be okay? Do we have enough money?
When you start to take all these different pieces—looking at financial independence planning and risk management—lots of really unique questions come up. Should it be in trust to protect the assets? Should it be in trust for generations? Should it be in trust just for a generation?
The question I've asked so many family businesses is: How many times a year does your wealth advisor, your business coach, your attorney, and accountant sit in a room and talk about what's best for your family based on your objectives and goals for the future? The answer has been resoundingly zero.
Michael Palumbos [20:04]: All in silos. So it's finding a group of wealth advisors typically—and the reason why the wealth advisor typically runs this is because very few attorneys are getting trained in both taxes and the legal side of things.

Michael Palumbos [20:26]: Most wealth advisors today are really focused on the investments and assets under management. I was just lucky—the lucky gene pool. My father, Marty Palumbos, landed in a company that believed if you serve first, last, and always, the pay will take care of itself. That was the company motto.
That creed, the Serve First Creed, came from Stuart Smith from Connecticut General Life Insurance. It was: if I learned how to read these wills, if I learn how to read these tax returns, if I learn how to understand these buy sell agreements and trusts, then I might be able to help this family a lot more. I don't practice law and I'm not going to tell an attorney what to do, but I can have conversations with my clients to help them get really clear on their objectives. When they get the documents, we can shine a light to say, "Is this document you're signing doing what your objectives really want?"
Michael Palumbos [21:39]: That's the idea of the Family Business Family Office—it's a high-level, expert level wealth advisor that has conversations at least once a year, if not twice a year, and acts as the integrator to bring the attorney and accountant together. They say, "Okay, what are the things you're working on? How does it affect the wealth?"
A great example is a business coach working with the family saying, "The business has to go from $10 million to $50 million, or from $50 million to $250 million of revenue." Well, if I'm going from $50 to $250 million of revenue over the next 10 years, I'm going to change the enterprise value of that business. I might've gone from a non-tax situation on the estate tax to suddenly now I've got an estate tax. Should I be doing that growth inside the estate or outside the estate?

Meghan Lynch [22:33]: That makes so much sense. Particularly for these subject matter experts—like an attorney—they're going to do what they're asked to do. If you say "create a trust for us," they're just going to create the best trust they know how and maybe bring some examples, but they're still going to do what they're asked for.
I think this idea of clarifying the ask, having somebody who's seen enough different iterations of what the possibilities are—for a lot of families, that's one of the frustrations. You only do this once. You only go through succession transition or these growth spurts once within a generation. Having somebody who has already been through a bunch of different versions of this and knows what the options are, who can lay out "This is what I know you're trying to achieve and all the different ways you can do that"—I think it helps the family feel more confident in the decisions they're making. It's like, "Okay, I don't have to be an expert in this, but I can still have our intentions aligned with all of these really critical decisions."

Michael Palumbos [24:09]: A hundred percent. I'll give you a really quick example. A family came to me just recently and said, "Mike, you know how you tell us we should be inviting you into all those meetings with the attorneys and accountants? We didn't."
They were told that the way they were setting up these new businesses was going to work perfectly and they'd be able to take the losses as they were setting up this business off their ordinary income. Sorry—they set this up wrong. It's passive income, not active income, and now those losses are suspended and sitting there with no way to get them out right now. We can fix it and work through some things, but that's the kind of thing where I had to remind them: Michael gets invited to every attorney meeting, every tax meeting, or somebody from our team.
When you have somebody with that level of expertise, they can hear what the objectives are, look at the fact patterns—is this an S corp, a C corp, an LLC? Are they active or passive? If they're hearing this, it's just a second set of eyes.

Michael Palumbos [25:33]: If it's complicated for the family, the reason why it's complicated is because it's complicated for the attorney, the wealth advisor, and the CPA. So getting them all in the same room—yes, it's an expensive meeting, but if I could capture those $600,000 of losses right now, that family would say, "Oh, you just saved us." And it would've happened had we been looking at it with everybody to say, "Is that really the right way to do this?"

Meghan Lynch [26:01]: I do think sometimes people are a little bit reticent to try to bring folks together from the standpoint of, "Oh, I don't want my attorney to think they're being undermined." But I think for a thoughtful practitioner, you want the information, you want the collaboration. It only helps you do your job better. The more informed and the bigger picture that the attorney gets, the stronger their recommendations are going to be. Same thing on the business coach side, same thing for all aspects of things they're working on.
Have you ever found advisor conflict around that or people jockeying for positions?

Michael Palumbos [26:54]: Of course, because everybody wants to be the quarterback. It's very normal for those things to come up. I think one of the things that really makes a difference is setting the table properly and setting the expectations.
I just took on a new client. She wanted a whole new team—new me, new wealth advisor, new accountant, new attorney. She had gotten rid of everybody because of a mess created because they weren't all talking. What I said is, "Once you put the players together, let's get everybody in the same room. It's going to be an expensive meeting, but it'll save you hundreds of thousands of dollars over time."
We all sat in the room and said, "Look, we all have our areas of expertise. The best thing we can do though is if I'm doing something or suggesting something you don't agree with, let's raise our hand and talk about that. Let's trust each other to be able to make these things happen."

Michael Palumbos [28:10]: Then go back to using the client's objectives as the litmus test. If it doesn't pass the objectives litmus test, then you shouldn't be doing it. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters when we're serving them is the litmus test of their objectives.
Meghan Lynch [28:15]: I think that also gives the family a really powerful accountability tool for their advisor team. So often families feel like, "Well, they're the attorney or they're the wealth advisor. I don't have enough expertise to be able to hold them accountable." But if you have this core vision that you're bringing everybody back to, it really empowers the family to be able to say, "Whoa, I just want to double check—how is this serving these objectives that we've laid out?" That sounds like a really powerful tool for the family as well.

Michael Palumbos [29:00]: A hundred percent. Let me add to that: it doesn't always happen like that. You've got power plays. At the end of the day, if you've got a really successful attorney, a really successful wealth advisor, and a really successful CPA, they didn't get there without having a little bit of an ego. You want that ego, you want that level of success working for your family business, but you still need that integrator. You need that person—the draw to bring people together.
I think of Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team. You want your advisory team to trust each other enough to have healthy conflict. Even sometimes if it goes right up to the edge, you want them to be good enough and work well enough together that they can say, "Oh man, I'm just having one of those moments."

Michael Palumbos [29:59]: Trust each other enough to have the conflict. I want to have that conflict and get in there. But then after we've discussed these things, we're going to create a path forward and commit to the path forward. Those three steps—they don't have to worry about the other pieces.
For the family and their coaching and advisory group, that's really what you need: a team of advisors that trust each other enough, respect each other enough to have the healthy conflict so that we can say, "Is this the right
thing? Is there another way of doing this? There's three ways of doing this. I'm biased about doing it X, Y, Z way, and you're biased about doing it A, B, C. Let's go back to the objectives." Now based on those objectives, we'll commit to a path forward. And if something goes wrong along the way, it's not "I told you so"—it's "Okay, now we're moving forward."

Meghan Lynch [30:58]: When you see this concept of the quarterback playing out, you gave a couple of examples of some practical ways it can affect performance, but I'm curious: when these are all working together, what are the benefits that the family feels in how the business is growing and how the family is working?

Michael Palumbos [31:30]: Looking at the whole flywheel, when you have a self-operating business—let me walk you through the pieces. You've got a solid A-player leadership team, a culture of accountability created within the company across all employees, and the CEO focused on what the CEO role is. In our opinion, the CEO's focus should be culture and strategy.
On the Family Business Family Office: I need one coordinated plan. I don't need three advisors with three different plans moving me in different directions. I need advisors to be aligned and I need somebody to have oversight of my objectives as a client.

Michael Palumbos [32:42]: On the Sustainable Family Legacy side, that piece is all about values, vision, and purpose first. Then it's communication and coordination, and then it's leading together—getting those generations to lead together.
When all three of those are thriving, when all those are spinning in the right way, it's given the family confidence that the decisions they're making and the places they're going are good. It gives them clarity around all the things that are happening and continuity without any problems. When you have all three of those, that's when you're the thriving family enterprise and you get written about in the Family Business magazine or some other place where it's like, "This family's really pulling it all together."

Meghan Lynch [33:30]: When families are not feeling that flow and they're just feeling like they're getting stuck, is there usually a couple of patterns or warning signs that you see that show there's some component of this missing? How does it show up?

Michael Palumbos [33:50]: Usually it's the idea that the CEO is the bottleneck and there's the ego piece: "Nobody can do this as well as I can," or "I don't trust the next generation yet." You can see they haven't done the work to put all this stuff together.
I have a great example: mom and dad sold the business to the son. Mom and dad stayed working there and never transitioned. Leadership never transitioned. The strategy is yours now and culture is yours now. Even
though the business was transitioned technically, the real transition never happened. Now the rising generation is fighting with building a leadership team, and that shouldn't happen. It's really easy to spot where it doesn't work.

Michael Palumbos [35:15]: I think the three-circle model spots the problems. I want to inoculate against the problems. I know that if people get that business doing what it's supposed to be doing, they focus on the Family Business Family Office and they're doing the Sustainable Family Legacy piece and thinking of family as an asset, they're going to be a hundred-year family. It's just going to happen even if the business doesn't survive.
What I mean by that is: what if they get to a generation and the generation has no interest in it, and so we have a liquidity event? But the wealth isn't going to destroy the family because the family's strong. You'll still be seeing a Thanksgiving dinner table.

Meghan Lynch [35:52]: One of the fears that's in the back of people's minds is: what happens if we're too successful? Is our success going to rip apart the family? I love how this both drives you towards success but also inoculates you from all those negative side pieces of "Oh shoot, we did this and it worked too well, and now our kids are entitled or there's family friction."
It sounds like this really provides a roadmap for families to be thinking about, "Okay, this is where we want to go and where we're driving towards," and this is a very practical system to be able to get there.

Michael Palumbos [36:47]: I think it's really important to say: we know how to spot the problems. We all know what they look like, but the family themselves don't know how to inoculate themselves against it. They don't know how to combat it. Then they're always bringing an advisor for this or bringing in a governance person for that: "Help us get through these emotional feelings that we have. We never forgave each other for this thing that happened 15 years ago." Those are the things you want to start working on.
I will add that I think it's important to understand that today this is going in, and my hope is that this becomes more of a movement than a model. That 25 years from now, the family businesses are looking at this and they know what needs to get spinning.

Michael Palumbos [37:41]: By having awareness makes all the difference in the world. I'm supposed to be working on my family while I'm healthy, while things are good. We just hit $10 million of revenue for the first time. We just hit a hundred million dollars of revenue and everybody's all talking to each other. Now is the time to be working on these things, not later. Now is the time to be thinking about our Family Business Family Office. That's my dream—that 30 years from now, everybody knows they have to get their flywheel spinning.

Meghan Lynch [38:20]: Particularly thinking about the future and all the uncertainty we're all living with right now—thinking about all the technology changes and accelerations that are going on and all the geopolitical
instability—how does this flywheel work within that bigger sense of what's going to happen? We don't have a lot of control over what's going to happen in the next 25, 30 years. So how does this flywheel start to help families deal with that uncertainty?

Michael Palumbos [38:58]: A hundred percent it does. What do we always say? Put your blinders on and control what you can control in the business. You can't control the government, you can't control other countries, you can't control what people are thinking and doing outside of this. You can control what's happening in your family. That's where we need to start.

Michael Palumbos [39:16]: That's why if we make that shift where family is an asset class—and I heard that first from a guy named Roy Dhotar, so I need to give Roy credit for that. When you start to think about it that way, it really does make a difference.
Now it's like, "Okay, we have all this noise happening with leaders around the world at different levels. We have noise of wars, we have noise of other things you can't control." They are still risks and they should be on what I would call the invisible balance sheet. The invisible balance sheet is the area where people aren't looking at those things on a regular basis, and we should be. Just like when we're doing a SWOT analysis, you've got threats coming from the outside.

Michael Palumbos [40:15]: You can't do anything about them, but at least if you name them, you can look at them and maybe think about them. Now I'm focused on the family. If I continue to strengthen the family, if I continue to strengthen and coordinate the wealth, and we continue to do the same thing with the business—and that we're never exiting the business, we're never doing exit planning, we're always doing growth planning—so that we're growing into a wonderful and beautiful transition in the future, that makes it all come together.

Meghan Lynch [40:54]: I love that piece of really making sure you are focusing on the things you can control and building the strongest system that you can. It also allows you to have something that's more robust and resilient to deal with uncertainty or to deal with shifts that are out of your control.
If somebody's listening to this podcast and they are about to go through a transition or they're feeling some of this pain in their family or business, what's one mindset shift or conversation or first step forward that they could be taking?

Michael Palumbos [41:43]: Well, one of the things—just to plug what we do—come to our website and we're building lots of resources out there. When I first built the flywheel and I saw it so vividly and wanted to start sharing it, I was designing it for the middle market family business—those ones where we haven't had the liquidity event, we don't have tons of assets at this point, but we have this great big strong business.
As I was doing it, I showed it to some colleagues. One of them lives in the multifamily office, in the family office space. He's like, "Michael, I got three families right now doing $500 million a year. They're these big
giant corporations, comparatively—they're almost past middle market—but they don't have anybody doing this for them and they need you."

Michael Palumbos [42:41]: As I was doing this, the flip of that also happened. I'm like, "What about the family that hasn't hit a million dollars yet? Or they're a family farm doing a million and a half and they're trying to figure out what's next and where do we go?"
On our website, what we've decided to do is we've got three different paths for people. We've got the Do It Yourself, where we're going to list all the books and resources and people you might be able to listen to in the podcast that can help them to just start changing their framework and their mindset.
Then we've got the Done With You, where it's like, "Look, I can't afford Done For You where they're going to come in and give me the white glove and make sure all this stuff and tell me where to go and how to make this happen and work with me as a team. But we need more than Do It Yourself." So we're building those pieces out and we're finding partners that we know and trust that we can introduce to families.

Meghan Lynch [43:45]: You are listening to Building Unbreakable Brands, the podcast all about brand stewardship and crafting an enduring legacy. I'm speaking with Michael Palumbos, creator of the Family Business Flywheel and founder of Family Wealth and Legacy. And now my son Henry is here to be the voice of the Next Generation with some questions for Michael.
Henry Lynch [44:33]: Hi, Michael. Great to meet you. You have your own podcast too. What's your favorite thing about being a podcast host?

Michael Palumbos [44:42]: Good question. Never had that question before. I just love talking about family businesses. The podcast came out because COVID happened, and when COVID happened, we were all in lockdown. I needed a way to help family businesses and communicate what we were thinking in an easy way. So we started the podcast and I just found it fun for me to talk about where these families got the idea, how they started, the struggles they went through. It's just enjoyable. It's fun.

Henry Lynch [45:21]: How would you explain the work you do for families to a kid like me?

Michael Palumbos [45:26]: Good question. That's not fair, Henry. I think I got a good analogy for you. See if this works. Imagine that somebody created the best tree house on the planet. One person built that tree house, but now all your siblings or cousins and everybody else wants access to that treehouse. So there needs to be some rules about how do we make sure that everybody gets to use the treehouse fairly, and how do we make sure that the treehouse is still around for your kids or maybe even for their kids someday? That'd be a pretty cool treehouse if it lasted that many generations.
Well, that's the same thing for the family businesses. We want them to last and everybody to be able to work together to make sure that the business lasts. Does that make sense?

Henry Lynch [46:30]: Cool.

Henry Lynch [46:35]: So what's one thing you learned from your dad when you were taking over the business?

Michael Palumbos [46:44]: Probably the most important thing that I learned from Dad was just to serve the family without trying to sell anything and to help them understand and listen to them and help them understand what they were trying to do, and that in the long run, everything would kind of work out.

Henry Lynch [47:14]: Thanks, Michael. I have a joke for you.

Michael Palumbos [47:16]: Oh, I'm ready.

Henry Lynch [47:19]: How do dolphins teach their kids everything they know?

Michael Palumbos [47:25]: I'm stumped. Tell me.

Henry Lynch [47:28]: Through podcasts, of course.

Michael Palumbos [47:32]: Bravo, Henry. Nice one. How did I not get that? Love it. Anything else?

Henry Lynch [47:44]: Yeah, so thanks so much for being on the show, Michael. If people want to learn more about you or your podcast, what's the best way for them to do that?

Michael Palumbos [47:58]: Sure. So our website is Family Wealth and Legacy, spelled out A-N-D Legacy dot com, and they can find me on LinkedIn, Michael Palumbos. Those are probably the two best places to do that. And our podcast is the Family Biz Show.

Henry Lynch [48:23]: Great. We'll put those in the show notes. Thanks again. It was great talking to you.

Michael Palumbos [48:29]: Henry, it was super cool to talk to you. Thank you for chiming in and giving me your perspective. It was a breath of fresh air.

Outro

What I love about Michael's Family Business Flywheel is that it reframes how we think about sustainability in human terms, not just in financial ones.
He reminds us that a thriving family business doesn't have to constantly push uphill. When your systems, your relationships, and your purpose are aligned, they start to create momentum. Instead of burning out, you're building a structure that fuels its own growth.
If you'd like to learn more about Michael's work, visit familywealthandlegacy.com or listen to his podcast, The Family Biz Show. We'll link both in the show notes.
And if this episode sparked a new way of thinking about how your business, wealth, and relationships connect, please share it with someone else and leave us a review. It helps more generational leaders discover the podcast.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time on Building Unbreakable Brands.