Ask me what business my family is in and the honest answer changes depending on which decade you ask.
Real estate. Professional sports. Chinese restaurants. Supermarkets. Rare earth mining. Cashmere factories. Venture capital. The list goes on...
Most people would call that inconsistent. I call it the whole strategy.
Here is the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset applied to a family business, and why one of them is genuinely more fun to
run.
A fixed mindset treats the business like a noun. We are a real estate company. We are an office landlord. The identity gets defended even after the market has quietly moved on and the identity no longer makes sense. Every pivot starts to feel like a betrayal of what the business "is."
A growth mindset treats the business like a verb. Something you are always in the middle of building, never something you have finished becoming. The business does not have a fixed identity to protect. It has values to protect, and a shape that is allowed to keep changing.
Kaizen is one of our five family values for exactly this reason. Not one big pivot every twenty years. A thousand small ones, all the time, until reinventing the business stops feeling like an emergency and starts feeling like Tuesday.
What that actually looks like in practice:
1. You stop defending the last generation's business and start defending their values instead. During his tenure at Westlake Realty Group, my grandfather ran operating businesses in China and built retirement centers. I run an industrial outdoor storage platform. Different nouns. Same instincts: work hard, take the long view, do not skip the unglamorous part.
2. You get to be a beginner again, on purpose, regularly. Learning IOS from scratch after twenty years in real estate felt closer to being seven years old tagging along on property tours than anything I had done in a decade. That is not a bug. That is the fun part.
3. You stop asking "does this fit who we are" and start asking "does this fit where the market is going." The first question protects an identity. The second one protects a business.
We fundamentally believe that every generation of the family has to reinvent what the business is and take the mindset of being a value creator. The businesses that die aren't the ones that changed too much. They're the ones that got attached to a version of themselves the market already left behind.
Do you think of your work as a fixed identity, or a living thing you keep rebuilding?
Protect the Values, Not the Business Model
