Within the evolving Canadian family-office landscape, many professionals are defining a unique niche for themselves. Purdeep Sangha is one of these. The founder and CEO of Sangha Worldwide offers “complete strategic advising” to high-performing executives, entrepreneurs and other consulting firms.
Sangha’s firm operates in Canada and the U.S. but with more focus on the Greater Toronto Area, where he is based, and Vancouver, where his brother and business partner, Harjeet Sangha, lives. They also collaborate on a podcast called Business Brothers, and Purdeep Sangha produces two other podcasts on his own: The CEO Anonymous and The Complete Man. He has also published two books: Super Fans: How to Create Unwavering Customer Loyalty (2017) and The Complete Man: Achieve Ultimate Performance, Fulfillment and Victory in EVERY Area of Your Life (2020).
Sangha Worldwide covers a broad range of activities, including work with family offices. We asked Purdeep Sangha how it all fits together.
Please explain ‘complete strategic advising.’
We don’t call ourselves a family office because there is so much confusion around this term. Most family offices are investment companies, whereas our focus is very much on the business side.
The advisory component has to be ‘complete’ because everyone has to be talking to one another – which we don’t do very well in Canada. On the strategic side, we like to consider ourselves to be very strategic but forward-thinking: bringing the pieces together and ultimately winning. We even train and advise other consulting companies, including some fairly large ones in Canada, as well as accountants and financial advisors.
Your business also advises entrepreneurial families directly. How did you get started in this area?
I wanted to create a single place where a person could come and ask for business or personal help.
You have trained at Stanford, MIT, Ivey, Schulich and Lean Sensei International, among others. How do they all come together in your practice?
I was a personal trainer at 17. I was very passionate about helping people lose weight or get fit, but I noticed that maybe 80 per cent of the people weren’t following the advice. I very quickly realized there were a whole lot of other factors involved with that, and that’s when I started to study neuroscience and performance psychology.
You can be a great high performer, but it has consequences: broken relationships, poor health. That’s where the performance psychology come in. When someone comes to us and says, ‘I just don’t have the energy or drive to do this anymore,’ we take them though an exercise to find out how we can improve this and modify it.
And what about the business side?
The area that we’ve focused on is the family business side. We are very strong in helping families grow their business, helping them with succession and transition. Also, as a result of a lot of business owners wanting to step out of their business or sell it, we have created an arm of the business that helps business owners get ready to sell; we help them increase the value of their business.
We have a very comprehensive checklist of over 250 different data points for the business: Do they have a marketing structure? How effective is it? What is their leadership structure? A lot of business owners will go to a workshop or training event and end up implementing maybe 5 per cent of what they’re trying to do, but we work on getting them to implement maybe 90 per cent.
They were inspired by my dad, who gave everything to us as a family and to his business, but he struggled with himself, his own personal fulfillment, and he struggled with alcoholism. We have created a niche dealing with the psychology of men and the dynamics of men and women, what makes men tick.
A lot of men don’t know what their role is anymore. The Complete Man gives men a playbook to help them be more fulfilled in different areas of their life and perform better. Many men are working backwards – they are striving for money or success without defining what that is. They are working 12- to 14-hour days to keep their business going, and they’ve done it to have more freedom, but they actually have less.
A simple strategy is goal-setting. For a vast majority of business owners, their own goals are heavily weighted toward money and the business, and they don’t have clearly defined goals for their families or their health. Because our brain is a goal-driven organ, it will always lean toward the thing we have goals for. We have a points system for this; points are important for them.
Working across borders, have you observed differences in the advisory sphere between Canada and the U.S.?
American business owners will heavily invest in their own education and advancement, so as CEOs of their own companies, they will get advisors and get trained. As Canadians, we’re still about 10 years behind – a Canadian business owner would rather spend $50,000 on a piece of equipment than on their own education.
Finally, you hold an FEA (Family Enterprise Advisor) designation. What did that program teach you?
I took the FEA because I wanted to see what the gaps were in our organization. Going into the program, I learned where we were good, where we could improve and areas that we didn’t want to focus on. I gained a better understanding of the state of family business and the state of family-enterprise advisors.
I started my advisory practice in the U.S. In fact, I didn’t want to come to Canada because the business world in the U.S. is bigger and more collaborative and they seek you out, whereas in Canada they are more risk-averse and don’t want to pay for advisory service. Going through the FEA program, I found that even the people who went through the program were not collaborative. It was an eye-opener.
I coach and train advisors in Canada, and I know that many of them are not having these collaborations. They don’t want to do anything outside their scope. That’s the biggest challenge we have here.
Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
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