The Second Gen of Pomegranate Market

70% of family businesses either fail or are sold before making it to the second generation. Jonah and Craig Snyder, co-owners of Pomegranate Market, represent the other 30%. The father-son duo is sharing how they successfully transitioned their Sioux Falls grocery store between the first and second gen.

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Transcript

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- Surviving the transition from first to second generation is the hardest one to overcome within a family business. And trying to figure out how you replace that vision of the larger-than-life founder with four equal shareholder siblings, that's a whole different animal. So we're still figuring that out, but I think we're on a pretty good track.[lively rock music]- Welcome to "Common Cents on the Prairie™", a podcast dedicated to helping you demystify the sometimes complex topic of money. I'm Adam Cox, head of Wealth Management for The First National Bank in Sioux Falls. We're a community bank based out of South Dakota. In this podcast, we share expert insights from around the country and stories from our local community to arm you with the tools you need to make better financial decisions because the truth is the more we talk about this stuff, the better off we're all going to be. Today, we're unpacking what it truly takes to build, grow, and maintain a family business from one generation to the next. To do that, I'm joined by Craig and Jonah Snyder, second-generation family business owners, to talk about legacy, ownership, and the realities of working side by side as a family. Craig Snyder is the former CEO and founder of VIKOR Teleconstruction and Pomegranate Market as well as several other businesses. Craig now sits as the chairman of the board at VIKOR and co-owner at Pomegranate Market. Craig was born and raised in Sioux Falls. He attended Utah Valley University studying business management. He is married to his wife, Kristin, and together they have four children and six grandchildren. Jonah Snyder is president and co-owner of Pomegranate Market. He took on this role in 2024 and has since led with a passion for community and natural wellness. Jonah was also born and raised in Sioux Falls. He attended BYU for his bachelor's and MBA. He and his wife, Alison, live in Sioux Falls. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Craig and Jonah Snyder. All right, guys, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.- Yeah.- Great to be here.- Thanks, Adam.- All right, well, looking forward to this episode, but before we dive into the heart of my questions, let's start with a fun one, do a little icebreaker. I know you two both like to spend time outdoors. What are your favorite outdoor activities? Craig, you want to start?- Okay. I love the mountains, so anything mountain-esque with trees, hills, valleys, that kind of thing, and mostly probably just hiking. And wilderness camping has always been of interest to me. I don't really like campground camping so much, but I have a little two-man tent. Take it out into the wild stay for three or four days, enjoy the outdoors, that's probably my best thing.- Oh, very cool. Fun fact about me, I've never slept a night outdoors in my life.- Wow.[all laughing]- Jonah, how about you?- You know, I was thinking the exact same thing. I think I inherited some of that interest from Craig. You know, I've often thought about 51% of me just has this great passion and love of the business world, and the other 49% is always thinking,"You could just forget all this and just go live in the woods, and that might not be so bad." So I love backpacking, and that's something I've done a fair amount of over the years, so, yeah.- Love it.- Sleeping in a tent is great.- Hmm, love it, love that. Okay, well, maybe you'll convince me at some point. All right, let's start a little bit, let's go back in time a little, Craig. So VIKOR was the original family business, and we'll talk a lot about that today. How and when did that get started?- It was 1989.- [Adam] Okay.- And I had worked for five years as a tower climber for another company here in Sioux Falls. The company that I worked for, the owner of the company died in a car crash unexpectedly. Kind of a sad and tragic thing. I had been going to college to start a business someday. My real instincts were entrepreneurship and starting a business. I never thought it'd be a tower company, but, you know, God kind of presents things. This opportunity presented itself. And in April of 1989, I formed a company called Sioux Falls Tower with two other partners, and it was three men and a truck. It's evolved into 50 crews today and eight offices. So it was way back then. I wasn't even married yet. I got married a few months later. So, a single guy, easy to take risk.- Yep.- Got a really great banker that was willing to invest in me, and away we went. And the first year was not anything expect what I expected with my pro forma.- Yep.- I just had my CFO show me the year-one pro forma. He dug it out of an old archive file.- Cool.- And I halved that.[Adam and Craig laugh] but thankfully the bank was willing to keep going with me and my partners, and we just built it from there.- Yeah, oh, I love that. So a lot of what we're going to talk about today is family business and particularly the family side of it. So, Craig, at what point did you start to think about bringing family into the business?- I remember when my kids were young, I didn't want them to have anything to do with the tower business.- Oh, interesting.- Partially that was because there was only a few of us in the office, and it would've meant they would've had to go on into the field and be these rough-and-tumble tower climbers, and I didn't want them to take that risk. I wanted them to go to college, get degrees, get professional careers. So it wasn't until my oldest was 21, and he said, "Dad, I know you can't start to climb towers till you're 21. What do you think about me starting on a tower crew?"- Hmm.- And I looked at his place in life at that time, and I thought that made sense. And so after that, he got older, and the other kids got older. Jonah went to college, and I started thinking more like,"Maybe this isn't a build-to-sell business. Maybe this is a build-to-hold for the family. And so it was probably when the kids were in their mid to late 20s when I first started thinking about it. They're now in their early to mid 30s.- Okay, so it wasn't even your idea. It was the kids' idea.- A little bit. It started with my oldest son Ammon and his desire to be a tower climber. He still works in the business to this day. He does our asset management, buys and sells all the trucks, the yellow equipment, things like that.- Yeah, were you excited about the prospect of bringing family into the business, or did it give you any pause?- As long as they were excited, I was excited.- Okay.- And, you know, you kind of get to a point in your career, as I've gotten older, I'm 62 years old now, where you start thinking about your own retirement. And as I thought about that, I thought,"Do I exit, liquidate the business? And then what? Or are the kids interested enough, and we just keep it as a long-term multi-generational business?"- [Adam] Yeah.- So I was excited as they were, and we started forming all kinds of family governance and things like that after that.- Yeah. Well, it's not just VIKOR that you own. How many businesses do you own today?- Technically it's something like 10.- Okay, wow.- But they kind of fall... About eight of 'em fall into one category, which is all in the telecom infrastructure services.- Yep.- With a service company, VIKOR started at Sioux Falls Tower all those years ago. We renamed it to VIKOR about six years ago. And then I have tower ownership companies where we actually own and rent space on the towers to the big three carriers and some real estate businesses that make sense to, instead of the company owning the building, we start a new LLC.- [Adam] Sure.- And I own the building with myself and my partners, my family.- [Adam] Yep.- And then I have another big business that I started 15 years ago with another partner, a couple partners, actually, called Pomegranate Market, which is a natural and organic food store.- [Adam] Yep.- And I could tell you stories about that, but interesting, towers and groceries. And if you think about it, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs has some base needs, and everyone needs food, right? Okay, so we got that covered with the grocery store. The other side of that is communications, it wasn't in Maslow's hierarchy, but think about this. Who would get rid of their cell phone anytime soon? In fact, I would argue they would give over their house.- Yep.- Maybe even get kicked out of their apartment. They would still have a cell phone in their pocket or purse all the way to the end. So we have that covered as well.- Yep, oh, that's great.- With the two types of businesses.- Yeah, from groceries to towers>- Groceries and towers, yeah.- That's great.- There's a connection there somehow.- Absolutely. All right, well, that's a lot to oversee, and so as a family, how do you go about overseeing all that?- So, the family's been wise. We have great managers. We have family council meetings, and we take a look at who our leadership is. The family is also very capable. I have three wonderful sons and a daughter. Some of them have spouses. In the case of my daughter, she's a stay-at-home mom, but she's got a wonderful husband. And so each of those kids have unique talents and gifts given by God that they've picked up for themselves, the interests that they have. And they're fulfilling unique and interesting roles, each one, that I would've never planned.- Yep.- I don't think they planned. It just kind of aligned. And so their interest in the business has been, they found their own lanes and are still finding. I have one son still in college, but they're still finding their lanes.- Yeah, let's give your dad's voice a little bit of a break, Jonah.- Sure.- Let's put you on the hot seat. So, all right, you came up in this family business environment, this entrepreneurial environment. When you went off to college, did you ever envision you'd come back and be involved in the family business?- Yeah, you know, I think my original intent was to kind of forge my own destiny. You know, I've said before that I think I felt, you know, my dad as being this larger-than-life businessperson, and many people who've worked with him have great respect for him. And I kind of felt this motivation to find my own way in the world professionally and make my own story and all that. And so initially going to college and whatnot, my motivation was to not totally disconnect from the family business, but to kind of pave my own way.- Yeah.- But the time came when I think the family business, you know, it can get its tendrils into you. And there was an opportunity and a need for me to step in, and I felt like, "You know what? I can step in and do this." And I remember in the early days kind of caveating that with Craig and with the management, like, "I'm committed to six months, and we'll see what happens after six months." And then, you know, six months becomes a year. A year becomes four years. And I ended up spending, I think, about five years at VIKOR-- Okay.- Before branching off and spending more of my time at Pomegranate Market.- Yeah, so, when you got involved in the business, I think I remember you telling me it was a really challenging time for the business. Tell me about that.- Yeah, so I think this kind of plays into that whole transition in mindset for the family of, "Could this be a family business?" Craig was right at a place where he was maybe ready to take the exit ramp and step away from the day-to-day, you know, struggles and stresses of being a business owner and the CEO and founder and all the weight that comes with that. And so he had created a succession plan that basically was going to sell the business outside of the family to some junior partners. Well, he could tell you more about the detail, but that kind of all one day blew up.- Hmm.- It wasn't going to happen. And I was kind of on the sidelines of the family business at the time, but I could recognize that the business was heading into a challenging period. I don't know if that was going to be for a couple months or a couple years or what. And I've had some empathy for what I could see. My dad was all ready to retire, and he was getting sucked back in, you know, in a major way. And so I remember calling him on the day that the news broke the junior partners wouldn't be staying. And I told him like,"I'm ready to come on however you need me." And so he took me up on it, and I got pulled in as a project manager.- [Adam] Okay.- Like, that next day or whatever. [laughs]- And that was at VIKOR?- At VIKOR.- Okay. And how long did you stay at VIKOR?- I was at VIKOR from 2020 through pretty much the middle of 2025. It was about five years.- Okay, okay.- And I actually still, I sit on, represent the second-generation family ownership group and sit on the board at VIKOR. So I haven't totally turned my attention away from VIKOR. Still had a beautiful experience there and learned a lot and grew immensely and still have a great fondness for VIKOR and get to play a small piece in what it is.- Love that. All the while you were over at VIKOR, there's this other thing over here. Craig talked about groceries, this Pomegranate Market thing. So what attracted you to Pomegranate, and what opportunities did you see when you looked at that business, which is obviously very different than VIKOR?- Yeah, well, funnily enough, before ever starting at VIKOR in 2020, after college, my first job ever was as a cashier at Pomegranate Market-- Okay.- You know, 10 or 12 years ago, maybe even more than that now. And I just did it briefly as a high school student. It was just kind of I felt this like, "You know what? I don't want to graduate high school without being able to say that I ever had that high school teenager job." So I went over and worked it there and didn't have great aspirations or plans to make that a part of my career, but I got some experience, and I got some, you know, perspective on this other sort of side hustle that Craig had going. And then, yeah, fast-forward until about three years ago, you know, I have this entrepreneurial juice. I want to be able to grow something and have it have my DNA on it, a little bit more my fingerprint, and VIKOR is, it's a Craig company, you know? And I think so long as VIKOR continues to be the brainchild of Craig and his vision and his motivations, I think it'll continue to succeed. And I could just sort of see that and feel that, whereas Pomegranate was over on the side as sort of the neglected stepchild of the Snyder family businesses. But I thought, "This business has a lot of potential." It had taken a while to get to that point, but, you know, it was 12 years in business at that point, and it was profitable business. There's growing interest in this sector of healthy, natural, organic food nationally but in our community. And having talked with Craig and Gabe, our other partner, a little bit, I think we could just sort of sense Craig is not probably excited or interested in taking this side business and helping it to achieve its full potential at this stage in his career, but we might be, you know? And we think there's something here. And I think the other part that's really fun and exciting about Pomegranate is it's much more, it's a Sioux Falls community-centric business. You know, VIKOR has crews all over the country, but most people in Sioux Falls have probably never heard of it, wouldn't know anything about it. So it blesses the community sort of in some less tangible ways. It employs a workforce, helps with communications. Whereas Pomegranate is a business that we feel like has the opportunity to become a little bit more of the culture and to bless our community in other ways through, you know, nutrition and finding ways to give back and stuff. And so, yeah, we took an interest in that, and so I approached Craig with a plan to expand the business, add a second location with hopes of continuing to grow it from there. And he said, "Sounds good to me." And so we bought out a couple of his other retiring junior partners at that time. And now it's me, Gabe, and Craig, the three of us, and we just opened our second location a few months ago.- Which is fantastic-- Thank you.- By the way.- And Gabe is my son-in-law.- Okay, all right, all right.- So it's still fully family business.- And VIKOR's CFO.- And VIKOR's CFO. [laughs]- And VIKOR's CFO also. So Pomegranate Market is Gabe's side hustle-- That's his side hustle. Okay, I love that. What is your long-term vision for the business?- Yeah, you know, we've talked about that a few times just over the last couple months. And I think that having the second location and all of the excitement and stress of that has kind of pushed me to think about that. Where are we going with this? I can tell you that I don't have my eye on an exit ramp.- Okay.- You know? I think I am motivated and excited about the opportunity to take what we think is a compelling and an interesting and unique business and to make it the best it can be to bless as many lives as it can, grow the team, add locations, figure out even more specifically what's our business model, how do we bless and elevate our community and give back to Sioux Falls, which has given so much to us. I guess I think of myself as sort of a third-generation Snyder in Sioux Falls. And so during that time, you know, if you go back in time over the last 75 years or something that Craig's mom Barbara being kind of that first generation in town, he could probably tell us more about family history, Sioux Falls has totally evolved.- Yeah, yeah.- You know, and it's growing, and we're great beneficiaries of that growth of Sioux Falls. And so if we can just in a tiny way give back by providing, you know, nutrition and different things to our community, we're thrilled about that.- That's awesome. Do you think you'll ever get to a point where you'll expand beyond Sioux Falls? Because I know that's one of the things that you like, you kind of like. Whereas VIKOR is national, Pomegranate, you said, is really local. Local's only going to grow so much. So as you think about the future of the business, I guess, are you thinking beyond Sioux Falls? If so, does that worry you at all that you'll lose kind of that local culture?- Definitely, you know, I think are thinking beyond Sioux Falls. I think we have to, you know, take it one location at a time, make sure that there's that customer demand. But, you know, in my vision, yeah, I'd love Pomegranate Market to be the next Whole Foods and to have locations across the country. And I think you can still maintain that focus on the community and the local aspect of the food supply chain if you have the right team and the right local vendors, and you set up those structures. The two communities that continuously kind of knock on our door, and I just got an email from one of 'em the other day, are Brookings and Mitchell.- Hmm, interesting. You know, are they the right size or right communities for Pomegranate? We'll have to do a little more market research, but, you know, we are thinking about that. How do you expand a small business and make it regional and then maybe one day national without losing this, you know, the DNA of what makes it special?- Yeah. So, Craig, as you sit here and listen to Jonah talk about the business and from what you've seen over the last two, three years in particular, did you ever think this business that you had on the side over here could become what it has the potential of becoming?- Well, Pomegranate came about as sort of a inspiration-- Okay.- More than a strategy. And I've often said I'm more of an intuitive leader than a business school leader. I see something, feel something, and kind of follow it. And that's what happened with Pomegranate back in 2009 when it came into my mind that I should start a grocery store. So at the same time, I also thought at the time,"I see this as 30 stores."- Oh really?- Now I didn't have the time, the ambition, the skills, or whatever to actually make that happen.- Yep.- It became one store and a long slog as the city learned about us, and eating habits changed and things like that. So yeah, I did see it that, but I lost that vision along the way. And I think when Joan and Gabe approached me, I thought,"Okay, there's that vision," and it may have never been mine. It was mine to get started, bootstrap it, but then theirs to take to that next level. And so now do I think it's going to be 30 stores? I don't know, that's just kind of a number way out there, but I think it could be a lot of stores.- How cool, how cool. Well, part of the reason we're getting together to talk today is to talk about that transition from one generation of business ownership and leadership to the next generation. And I was chuckling. I was putting questions together thinking about it. Craig, one of the last times you and I had lunch together, you were leaving lunch to go to your retirement party. And as I sit here today, I'd say you're clearly not retired, at least not in the traditional sense of it. So did you get lost on the way to retirement party, and you didn't go, or what's happening?- One you have a word. Was it preferment or something?- Preferment.- Preferment.- Preferment. So, yeah, I did get lost on the way to retirement. I will admit it. I did retire from the day-to-day at VIKOR. I don't go to executive committee meetings anymore. I don't lead the executive committee. We have a CEO. But there's a lot of things that happened at VIKOR that pulled me in mostly on a national level. Our vision statement is to elevate the industry for the betterment of everyone. So for the last year, I've spent a lot of time working with our national association and the FCC, and then Jonah and Gabe decided to start to build a second store.- Yep.- And for a long time, I kind of left them alone. And then as it went along further, I thought, "You know what? I probably have some things I know that I should lend to the cause until they got the store built and launched." And then I've been a little bit more pulled back the last month or so.- Okay.- But, yeah, retirement is elusive.- Yep.- But I love working, so it's not a disappointment at all. I am looking forward to that day

of less, you know, getting up at 6: 22:09

00 AM

and being into the office at 8: 22:13

00

and not coming home till 5:00 or 6: 22:16

00, but I always say, "I don't work 45 hours anymore. I work 40."- Okay, okay.- So, I got that going for me.- Were you able to put things back onto your plate that hadn't been there in a long time or things that you prefer to do now that maybe you didn't have time for before?- I have. You know, Stephen Covey said there's things that are in quadrants. You have urgent and important, and then you have important but not urgent in the top two main quadrants. I don't have much left in the urgent-and-important quadrant, and that feels really good to me. My time is spent in the important but not urgent. It's more of the visionary kind of things, and I love that, that quadrant. So that's where I spend most of my time. Although, Jonah, his bookkeeper left here recently, and he had me scanning invoices for about a month. So there's a little bit of task work that I still, and I kind of enjoyed it.- Yeah.- It was kind of fun.- I did also see you hanging pictures on the wall at the second store too, so. [laughs]- Okay, yeah, that's true.- He's our handyman.- Yeah, okay.- But I wouldn't call that urgent or important.- No.- That was just like,"Okay, what would make that look good?" So, yeah.- Jonah, how do you pull your dad in now into the business?- Yeah, you know, on one hand, I think I do my best to be respectful of him being retired.- Yep.- But on the other hand, I think he has a lot of wisdom and knowledge and perspective on things that I might be experiencing for the first time. So I think sometimes there's a lot of value in me, you know, facing what feels like a crisis in the moment. We've got a challenge with our books. We need to find a new bookkeeper. It's a small thing. And he's experienced those sorts of things enough times across his career that sometimes just the calming voice of, "This is going to be fine. Let's not make, you know, a mountain out of a molehill," I think that goes a long way. And just sort of a sounding board for ideas and just the support of knowing that there's a wise experienced leader behind the scenes that is not, you know, is still invested and motivated to see us succeed. So I think a lot of that goes a long way. So I think it is mostly as a quiet guiding force behind the scenes, but every once in a while if we need him to clean the bathroom or scan some invoices, we take advantage of that too.- You got him, yes, [laughs] you got him. With that urgent stuff being pulled out of your mind, have you been able to start thinking strategically again?- Yeah, I think so. You know, I leave a lot of the strategic planning to the management group, but like Jonah said, I get pulled in every once in a while."Hey, what do you think about this, Craig?" And strategy becomes like second nature when you've been in a business 40 years. There's still some things that I'm learning, but I love being able to share some of that strategic vision that helps both the businesses, VIKOR and Pomegranate Market.- Yeah, do you ever think you'll retire-retire, like not rocking-chair retirement but-- I don't see that very clearly in my mind to be honest. I would love to. I have a cabin in the Black Hills that calls to me all the time, but I don't go out there as much as I would like. You know, family is important too, and so I want to be with the family. And I think one of the geniuses of thinking about family businesses is, you know, as families, we grow. We raise our children. We send 'em to college, and we hope the very best for 'em to go out and make your way. I think before the 1930s, before the Great Depression, there was this interdependence that families, they depended on each other, farm families in particular. The more kids you had, the better that sustained the farm. But after that, during like the World War II era, we became independent, and then it was like, "No, push 'em out of the nest. You can make it on your own. You got this. Go for it." And that's been kind of the mindset for a long time. The Snyder family is pulling back a little more toward that interdependence. And it feels really good because, you know, we spend Sundays together at dinners. We go to, you know, the grandkids' sporting events, games, things like that. We were down at the State Theatre on Saturday watching"Demon Dragon Slayers"?- "KPop Demon Hunter."[Adam and Jonah laugh]- "KPop Demon Hunter" with the little girls, grand-girls. We do a lot of things as a family. And like I said, it feels good having that interdependence. And sometimes we're just sitting around the dinner table, and we'll start brainstorming. And somebody said at the dinner table the other day,"What if we had a book reading at Pomegranate with Poma Grandma?"[Adam chuckles] And we're like, "Wow, that sounds really good." So my wife, Kristin, goes down once a month with Poma Mama, my daughter, Ellie, and they read books with kids, and there's snacks and things like that. And so those kinds of things wouldn't happen if there wasn't that interdependence aspect of our family.- Yeah. Were you thinking about that as you were deciding whether or not to sell the business off? Like, the business has obviously created an environment where your family can stay really tightly knit together, and had you sold the business, maybe you wouldn't be as close today. Was that going through your mind, or that has been something that you've realized after the fact?- Yeah, I remember thinking about when it came time to sell the business, or I thought it could be a sale. I see things as visionary. I'm kind of very visible, vision learner. So I'm driving down this highway, and there's an exit ramp. The exit ramp represents me getting out of the business, selling it, retiring, that kind of thing. And as I looked at that exit ramp, I saw where it was headed. It was like I was going down 29, and I'm getting on 90. I'm like, "Well, if I'm on 90, if I'm going to stay on 90, why don't I just stay on 29, so to speak?" What that means to me or what made me think of how that applies is that if I sold the business, then I would probably start a family office.- Hmm.- And if I had a family office, what would we do with the capital? We would invest it in various things. But we could invest it in businesses, and, well, what business would you invest it in? Well, I don't know. What about investing it in VIKOR with your family? And so, two thoughts. One, if you're going to do that, if you're just going to be investing money, and you feel good about the businesses you're in, stay in them. So that was one thought. Second thought was, as a family, we talk a lot about, our church has a cliche,"Together forever," sort of like, you're going to be as a family together maybe into the next life. Well, why don't we keep practicing that togetherness as adults, not just as children and Mom and Dad and a little bit of getting together at holidays kind of thing. And so I thought, you know,"Families bring challenges, but why not work together on those challenges?" And the business just seemed like a logical, the businesses, a logical way to do that and fulfill that goal, which I also have.- Yeah. Speaking of challenges, it can be a challenge as a family working together. Sometimes it can be a challenge just spending Christmas together, let alone running businesses together. How do you handle times when maybe you have different vision or different strategies or come into conflict with business?- I think there's this interesting sort of paradox within our family. One, we're very conflict-averse. So, you know, there's never going to be almost ever a big fiery-blowup heated discussion. That's just not really... We'd much rather brush it under the rug. So there's that kind of that exists. On the other hand, we have a family council, and I actually do, I give us some credit. I think we're fairly good at bringing the issues that need to be addressed up.- [Adam] Okay.- Or at least dancing around 'em enough that we all know what we're talking about, and then we can go privately figure out what the next steps are.[Adam laughs] So I do think that there's definitely, there can be different points of view. You know, I think particularly when business is tough, and you're feeling the pain of, it's a challenging year, economy's struggling, whatever that looks like, you know, everybody kind of addresses that in their own different ways. Some people are looking for the exit. Other people might be more prone to kind of lean in. But I think together as a family unit, I like to think we're fairly resilient and fairly good in getting better at communicating. And all in all, I don't think that... I think we like being together. You know, we enjoy each other's company. There's not some of those big, huge, ugly family rifts within my generation that I know can sometimes exist. And a decent amount of self-awareness about what each of our strengths and talents and what we bring to the business are. I don't think that there has been ever a huge amount of infighting about who's going to get what position or, you know, who gets more acclaim or recognition or, you know, who's going to take over for Craig. It just wasn't really the dynamic within our family. We each, like Craig mentioned in the beginning, have kind of found the different things that we're excited about and that we feel like we have the right skillset for. And so, you know, today I think that that's working pretty good. I'll say I've also heard that surviving the transition from first to second generation is the hardest one to overcome within family business. And trying to figure out how you replace that vision of the larger-than-life founder with four equal shareholder siblings, that's a whole different animal. So we're still figuring that out, but I think we're on a pretty good track.- Love that. Craig, let's do a little advice now. As you talk to other business owners, what advice would you have them for bringing family members, particularly G2, into a family business?- Good question. I think it's really important to form a family council. Maybe three or four years ago, we joined the Prairie Family Business Association, and they were the best-kept secret for me for 30 years because they existed for 30 years. And I guess it wasn't family-business oriented, and maybe Facebook heard me say that out loud once, and so it came up as a literal email. And I'm like, "Well, I'm going to click on this." Get some advice from people that have done it before. So what we did is we hired a consultant that specializes in helping family businesses become family businesses from first gen to second gen. That was very helpful. They bring documents, knowledge, best practices, that kind of thing. Maybe join a family business association. I recommend Prairie Family. It's, I think, the second biggest in the country.- Yeah, it's incredible.- And so you can get a lot of help there. Along the way, as you form this family council, you start to hear opinions and ideas. You got to find out if the kids are even interested because what I've heard from some of my friends and colleagues is that half of the kids don't want anything to do with the business, and the other half do. So you'd have to weigh that as first gen, and even as first and second gen, whether it's a smart thing to be in a family business or not because every family dynamic is a little different. The other advice I would give if you're first gen is be completely transparent. A lot of times first gen wants to keep it all to themselves. They formed a trust. They have their will, and it sits in a vault somewhere. And second gen has no idea what Mom and Dad are going to do.- Yeah.- I brought my kids in, and I had them help advise on those kinds of things. I sent them copies and drafts as they were being prepared. And they're hard documents to understand at times, so not everybody understands them perfectly, but if you're transparent and like, "What does this mean for me? How much am I going to get?" second gen is curious about those kind of things. And you should just be open with 'em if you really want it to be a successful multi-generational business. So those are a few of the things that we've done.- Love that. Jonah, on the flip side, what advice would you have for that second generation who's thinking about joining a family business?- Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. I think doing your very best within the business to pave your own path. I think, you know, I remember certainly in those early days in VIKOR, you come in as a family member, and you have to work pretty hard to dispel this illusion of entitlement or, you know, that, "Well, Jonah, Jonah gets a pass on certain things because he's a family member. They're going to overlook whatever missteps he makes." And I felt a great responsibility to earn the credibility with the non-family team. You know, I think most family businesses, and certainly ours, are made up of mostly non-family members. And at this point, you know, the executives in our businesses are mostly non-family members. And so they have to, on some level, also be bought into this concept of family business. And I think that starts with mature, disciplined, humble, second-generation family members. And I'm not saying we've always been perfect at that by any means, but I think I felt sort of a weight of responsibility to prove that I deserved my seat in whichever business I'm in. And so that'd probably be my advice to a second gen or, you know, the incoming generation, is don't take it for granted that you're very blessed to be in a position that most people don't have, to be in a family business. And you might have to hold yourself to an even higher standard than a normal person might within your role. For me, that was as a project manager or as a vice president of operations. Don't give 'em any excuse to say,"Well, Jonah's a family member, so he gets a pass." You know, that sort of thing just keep me up at night if that was the perception. So I did my best to earn the respect of the team.- That's awesome. Well, congratulations to you two not only on the business success you've had but also the family success you've had. As you know, being involved in the Prairie Family Business Association and reading all the stuff that you both read, it's really difficult to pass family businesses from one generation to the next. And congratulations on doing a great job so far, and good luck figuring the rest of it out. And thank you so much for joining me today.- Yeah, thank you very much.- Thank you, Adam.- [Adam] I hope you found this helpful. 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