As you know, I keep repeating that one of the main common weaknesses of various family businesses is that they are stuck in an operator’s mindset, whereby the ownership and leadership of family businesses are completely overtaken by dealing with daily, operational matters and rarely ever find any time to look around them and position their businesses accordingly. The Financial Times has recently published an article about IKEA, which is a family business, that underlines the importance of having a strategic mindset to be able to change the business model, as the external environment changes.

Let us rewind the tape a bit. IKEA, which is ultimately a family business, revolutionised retailing from the 1950s, persuading shoppers to travel to its out-of-town stores, navigate their mazelike warehouses to collect their furniture, transport it home and assemble it themselves. This was a business model which worked well and allowed IKEA to grow at a fast pace. However no business model last forever.

Josper Brodin, took over as CEO of IKEA in 2017. His research resulted in a common message from customers across IKEA stores in Spain, the UK, Sweden, the US, Canada, Japan, China and Russia – “We like IKEA, but it’s not working for us. It is an inconvenient place to shop. When we come home from work and we’ve fed the kids or they’ve done their homework, if we need to buy two folding chairs, we are not going to the Ikea store. So if IKEA can’t offer us an opportunity on our conditions, we will deselect IKEA.”

Brodin realised that IKEA’s business model needed to change. He therefore led changes on several fronts. Ikea invested heavily in its online business, trying to catch up with rivals such as Amazon and Alibaba that were attracting many of its customers. It also tested out smaller store concepts including in the centre of big cities and shopping malls, which the company had long resisted and it offered shoppers new services, from home delivery to paying somebody to assemble furniture – through one of its biggest ever acquisitions, the odd jobs service TaskRabbit.

Brodin made it clear that he found it easier to make tough decisions because it was clear Ikea’s old business model was not working. He said “I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to embark on this journey unless there were signals we were not improving. You can say the effectiveness of our investments in the old model paid off less and less. We were losing share, in particular to online.” It is clear he has a strategic mindset, always looking at data and around him, to see how IKEA needs to adapt to how customer preferences are changing.

Brodin also mentions that he knew the changes had to be swift and this is where as a CEO and leader you tend to feel lonely. Brodin’s task was made harder by the presence of Kamprad, who founded Ikea as a 17-year-old in 1943 and gave it its unique culture, creating a complex corporate structure more impenetrable than the company’s furniture building instructions to not only minimise tax but prevent it from ever listing or being taken over. Kamprad in particular was unconvinced by ecommerce. When Brodin took over, Kamprad was frail — he died just a few months later. However Brodin was convinced that there was no other option than to break with the past and embrace ecommerce.

Brodin admits it took time to build up momentum inside the company for change. “As a leader, you need to be both the inspirer at the front end and engage yourself in the details, and you have to deal with the impossible problems,” he says. He cites two main difficulties in leading the transformation: “We have to accept that we will at least partly change our business model. And then, I would say, the scariness of the unknown. I had some scary moments. But it was also the idea that not doing anything didn’t seem very appealing.”

The plan seems to be working, with online sales up from about 6% of the total to a quarter. A new smaller store in a central Stockholm shopping mall has also increased annual footfall in the Swedish capital.

However, every change and transformation comes with its fair share of mistakes, trail and errors and adjustments to be done on the way. Brodin mentions that during the transformation, one mistake was to focus too much on the new smaller stores over the large stores that made up the bulk of the business. “We have corrected that,” he adds. It helps that part of the solution to the digital problem came from Ikea’s existing stores — instead of building new warehouses to fulfil online orders, Ikea uses its out-of-town shops, making them more efficient.

If Brodin has a mantra, it is “love the past, create the future”. His plan for Ikea has come in what he calls two “three-year sprints” so people do not over-intellectualise problems. The current sprint is about a year away from ending and Brodin thinks the next one might focus on sustainability and Ikea’s supply chain. It hopes to be climate positive by 2030 — reducing more emissions than its supply chain emits — but Brodin says it wants to do more to protect nature as well as climate.

He is evangelical about how sustainability must be for all price ranges, not just luxury products. He calls it a “dangerous myth” that “if things are affordable, it means it’s bad quality and bad for nature”.

As Brodin himself puts it, with regards the need for change, he says “We are never done. Next autumn we will start again, renew ourselves, ask what is the next big thing around the corner, and we can sense that the rate of transformation will continue.”

So if you are leading a business by just dealing with daily operational issues or trying to use yesteryear’s business model to produce positive results within today’s reality, I hope you learn a thing or two from IKEA and realise that the first step to change has to come from within you.