The following is an excerpt from a conversation that took place at MLR Media’s The Private Company Governance Summit 2025.
SPEAKERS: JOSH GENTINE, director, Sargento Foods; TAYLOR MERRITT, chair and CEO, Merritt Aluminum Products; LAURA PEARSON, partner, Deloitte Tax LLP; CHRISTINA SORBARA, vice president, The Sorbara Group
PEARSON: What tactics are your organizations using to attract and retain talent in a competitive market?
SORBARA: The battle is real, especially in the post-COVID world. The way we attack it is a balance — how can we balance our current employee needs with the need to attract that new experienced talent, all the while trying to create room within the organization for that new talent to come in?
“We’re a family business, so our values, our integrity and our honesty are very important. When we onboard an employee, they become part of our family. Many times, though, especially in the construction industry, those roles become obsolete. So while the war for talent is real, we have to make decisions to remove some talent when that role is no longer needed.
MERRITT: This is not a new thing. I can remember attending board meetings when I was a kid. I was probably 12 or 13 years old sitting in our board meetings, and this topic of talent would come up. “How are we going to find the right talent? How do we keep people? How are we going to deal with succession for long-term team members?”
I think we have to take a step back and think about this war for talent at a strategic level. It all starts with the family and the values. What are the shared values of our family and what are the values that we espouse in the business? Then take that and cast it forward into how you marry those values to the vision. Create the strategic plan around how you’re going to recruit, onboard, hire, train and retain great people.
GENTINE: I think it starts with culture and values. What are we doing to retain talent? It’s about anchoring first and foremost in our purpose. We talk about the reason behind it all a lot in shareholder meetings, board meetings and at the line level, too.
Finding great talent is challenging for both hourly workers and executives. We’re trying to recruit executives from across the country to come to Plymouth, Wisconsin, a town of 8,000 people. And it’s cold. We’ve got to do a lot to make that a compelling case. Part of that starts with the family and how we show up as owners, as well as how we cascade that down the organization to make sure that everyone understands that and is buying into it.
Then there are the tactics of benefits and how we’re treating our employees. My grandfather’s line was “Hire great people and treat them like family.” For us, family doesn’t mean just ignoring issues. Family means addressing issues.
PEARSON: How does your board support succession planning for long-term talent needs?
MERRITT: We have an advisory board structure in our businesses that we lean on heavily for good governance. The fiduciary board is still comprised of family members, but we treat our advisory board like they are fiduciary.
We’ve been working with individuals on our advisory board who have great experience in talent management, and a component of our work with those individuals has been how do we really start employing a succession process.
We’ve taken one of our executives — our chief of staff — and charged her with owning the succession planning. That includes the development of the process, the development of our competency matrix and the identification of the holes to fill. Do we think that hole is going to be filled by someone internally? Is it going to be a combination of individuals? Or do we need to go outside and bring someone in?
GENTINE: We’re a fiduciary board. We have four family members and five independent directors. We have succession planning built into our quarterly board meetings.
At one of the quarterly board meetings, we go through the entire slate of the top 50 leaders of the organization with our chief human resources officer. We’re looking five, eight, 10 years out, depending on the role. Who could be next? Who could be next in an emergency? And we’re looking two-, three-, four-deep on those positions, figuring out who we need to move, who we need to develop, who is next in line, what that is going to look like and what the risks are. We spend quite a bit of time as a board looking at leadership succession planning.
PEARSON: How do you approach succession planning for family members who want to join or lead the business?
GENTINE: We have a very clear family participation plan on what it means to be involved in the business. If you’re interested, how do you signal that interest? How do you find a role within the organization? What does that development plan look like?
We created a professional development committee as a part of our board and that committee is responsible for helping guide family members through onboarding into the organization and being an objective party for family members who are involved in the business.
It’s a way to create objectivity and help guide family members in the next generation who have an interest but find it difficult to talk to other family members about it. We’re really excited about the next generation and succession planning for the family. As we look to the fourth generation, both family members as well as spouses, we think about how we create that interest, clarity around the expectations of what it means to come back, and expectations in terms of how to be as an owner and employee, and also get to the point of training our management on how to manage a family member because that can be an awkward situation. Part of that committee is also charged with making sure that individuals who are responsible for managing family members are prepared to do that, including having frank and honest conversations.
PEARSON: What are some ways your board is ensuring alignment between business needs and generational shifts in expectations?
SORBARA: You need to educate them. You need to bring them along, and that can create high-tension, complex environments.
I had the honor of being the captain of Canada’s women’s inline hockey team — competing in nine world championships, the oldest captain in Canadian history. Every day I had to manage my own goals, I had to think about the goals of the team, and then the coach had to manage everybody else and the outcome that they wanted. And it’s the same in business.