Cara Macklin is the CEO and Founder of Future of Family Business. She is a Next-Gen Entrepreneur who grew up in a second-generation family business in Northern Ireland. Cara spent 15 years as a Director of the multi-award-winning Macklin Care Home Group and Malone Lodge Hotel. Under her leadership, it grew to become a multi-million-pound organisation with 7 businesses and 600 employees. In 2019, she left the family business and founded Future of Family Business to elevate dynamic next-gen leaders who are ambitious to do things differently and make a greater impact on the world.
1. Who are you and what do you do?
I’m a second-generation family business leader. I grew up in my parents’ business which was in hotels and care homes in Northern Ireland. I was a Director of the company for 15 years and by 2019 we had scaled our business to about 600 employees. As I always say, just in time for COVID.
I left that business to set up Future of Family Business. The specifics of what we do really involve working with Next Gen Family Leaders who want to make a positive impact in the world with their business. They will either be leaders in their own business or leading their family’s business, but they have all grown up in a family enterprise of some description and have the core ambition to create a positive change in society.
2. Was there a particular moment when you felt a drive to make a positive impact in society and help other people make the most of their positions?
In 2015, I took a year sabbatical out of the business to do my MBA in London. I came back with the idea that elderly care could be a lot better. Not that it wasn’t good, I just felt that there needed to be a different model for it.
I felt that a lot of people didn’t want to go into a care home for two reasons. First and foremost because we don’t want to get old and die. We can’t solve that. But when you think about stereotypes around care homes you think dark, dingy and somewhere grandchildren don’t want to visit. I thought that if you could turn that stereotype on its head and create somewhere people would rather be than in their own homes, somewhere where grandchildren can’t wait to visit, then you can solve that part of the problem. That was the start of it. It was about social well-being and helping people live a full life. So I, along with the fabulous team who did all the work, set about creating the first lifestyle care home in Ireland.
3. How has being part of the family business shaped what you do today?
At 24 I was managing a team of 120 people with no leadership experience, so I had to learn very quickly how to get the best out of people. I still think that is the most important thing in any successful business. With my family business, there was also this amazing focus on innovation, developing a new idea and building commercial success alongside a positive impact.
When I saw the impact that our business has made not only on the residents in our care homes and their families but also on the wider community, I thought wow, if we could take the family business model that we had so much success with and translate that into something that other next gens can apply in their own industries, we could have a massive positive impact across society. So, I decided to bring together the business side, the innovation element and my coaching skills to create a business which impacted society on a much bigger level than just one business.
4. In terms of the family business model (your care homes) did you have a defining measure of success in mind when you created it?
There are two great examples that come to mind. The first was around the huge problem of loneliness in the UK that exists for older people, even more so since lockdown. We really wanted to address that problem by making it a place where people wanted to come together so we had a pub, cinema, spa and special days dedicated for grandparents to spend time with their grandchildren. One of the major successes for me was then when a resident who could have happily stayed in her community chose to come into our care home because it was filled with joy.
Another moment was when we had a lady in her early 90s come into our care home for a week’s holiday. She loved it so much that by the first afternoon, she asked me to call her daughters and tell her that she had found her new home. It really transformed her life and her daughters’ and she kind of went back to being a teenager again. There were other successes from the business perspective but those were the two moments for me that I thought yes, we’ve definitely achieved what we set out to do.
5. How did your family react to your idea of creating lifestyle care homes?
Heart-wise, yes, they wanted to do it. Head-wise, they were nervous because it was a completely new model of elderly care. It wasn’t easy and it took a long time to bring together. A local GP said to me, “You’re not opening a care home, you’re transforming a whole industry”. That’s never easy, no matter what industry you are in.
That’s another thing I am really proud of – completely changing the culture of working at care homes. We did a full 18 months of building a truly outstanding team. The minute we started building the care home, we started building the team. We invested heavily in staff and training and brought in experts from lots of different industries to do it and we were able to make it happen.
6. What are the challenges that you see next-gen leaders facing?
I put the challenges into three buckets. One is the business, two is the family and three is themselves. So, in a business sense, the first big challenge is ‘Should I go into the family business or not?’ There are a lot of challenges to do with joining a family business including high expectations and as well as emotional and psychological challenges.
Another challenge is that next-gen leaders want to put their own mark in the world but are hit with what I call the ‘Legacy Innovation’ challenge. In the startup world, you can build a business by breaking lots of stuff and it doesn’t really matter because if you break it and it fails, you start again fresh. But when it comes to a family legacy, there are a lot of emotions and things are not so easy to break. So often you have the next generation wanting to change things but the older generation saying it’s not going to work.
Families are complex and when you mix that with business, it’s not always easy. If you grow up in a family enterprise, you really grow up under a big cloud of legacy and often you don’t get as much room to fly as other people who start a business. So a lot of my work is around helping next-gen leaders define their own goals, their personal legacy, what they want to achieve in life and how that differs from their family and the enterprise they’re in.
7. Is creativity a stumbling block for next-gen leaders trying to forge their own path?
Multi-generational family businesses are inherently entrepreneurial and innovative. You don’t survive three generations let alone twelve if you are not entrepreneurial and innovative. The challenge lies in the fact that family members in the business don’t always think enough about each other’s generation. Communication between generations to enable creativity, then process and structure will help streamline it.
8. What kind of leadership qualities do next-gen family business leaders need when they are tying together business and social impact?
The first thing is really understanding who they are, what they want in life and what kind of legacy they want to create. In my experience, next-gen leaders come up against a lot more challenges than other leaders and you need serious grit and resilience to overcome these challenges which comes from a deep understanding of why they are doing what they are doing.
There are also the other necessary leadership traits in terms of humility, confidence and playing to your skills. I don’t agree with the people who say work on your weaknesses. If they had put David Beckham in goal Sir Alex Ferguson wouldn’t have been very successful. You need to properly figure out what your skills and natural tendencies are and play to your strengths.
The final thing is flexibility and innovation which will be tough for generations going forward. The biggest challenge now for next-gens, is protecting the heritage and the legacy of their family business while keeping up with the pace of innovation. It’s a huge balancing act and one that is going to be far harder now than for any generation before us.
9. What is your ambition for your business going forward?
The dream for me with this business is to create a safe space for Next Gen family leaders to talk openly about everything including the family dynamics and challenges they are facing. That’s one ambition and then the other is having a community of next gens who are philanthropic and committed to making an impact in society in different areas and parts of the UK whether that’s in care, tech or climate innovation. I can look at the model we built and see its impact being magnified tenfold by these leaders who are creating their own legacies.
10. Can you share some lessons you learned along your entrepreneurial journey?
I’ve been running my own businesses since I was 15 so if I do nothing else but prevent other next gens from making the mistakes I made, that would be a huge success. My very first failure was at 8 when I was making jewellery and selling it to my mum’s friends, I learned very quickly that friends are not going to support your business financially.
My next business was set up with my brother when I was 15. We lived in a rural community in Northern Ireland and there was no way to get out to the local nightclubs, so we started running buses to them. Each bus had 52 seats (two were for my brother and I) and the bus cost £100. We charged £5 each so we were making £150 a night 25 years ago. That was all profit because of course, at that stage, you have no idea about tax or VAT. So that was probably the next lesson – make sure you know all your regulations.
We were nearly put out of business by my now best friend, who started her own bus. We figured out the only way to get our customers back was to work out a discount for the bus and nightclub entry. In the end, we got them back but that was another learning from the early days – you never know who your competitors are and they’re not always the obvious ones.