Meet Brooks Family Business

Business experience. Ownership experience. Consulting experience. Experience counts.

John Brooks brings a variety of perspectives and expertise to his family business consulting practice. He understands the business issues, having worked in a wide range of management positions over 15 years for a Fortune 500 company. He understands the family ownership issues, based on over 30 years of active participation as a third-generation shareholder of two significant family businesses. And he understands that “best practices” can be a useful benchmark, but not always “best” for everyone, having helped family businesses achieve their goals for over 14 years.

John’s business experience includes working for General Mills in operations, strategic planning, mergers and acquisitions and financial management. He has also served on a number of boards, business and non-profit, typically in leadership positions. In addition to Malt-O-Meal and Intek, John’s board experience includes Langdon Warren Mining Corporation (Treasurer), The Blake School (Board Chair), Lakewood Cemetery (Vice Chair) and The Wayzata Historical Society (Treasurer).

John’s family owns the Malt-O-Meal Company and Intek Plastics, with combined sales of over $500 million. John’s grandfather founded Malt-O-Meal in 1919. Since its founding, the company has had only four CEO’s, with the two most recent coming from outside the family. Intek was acquired by the family in the early 60’s, and has been run by non-family members from the start.   

The idea of organizing the family into an educated, responsible ownership group came from John’s father, who was Malt-O-Meal’s CEO for nearly 30 years. As a result, since the early 80s, John’s family has been meeting at least annually as a family council to discuss and act upon issues associated with their ownership of both businesses.

Since 1997, John has provided consulting services to family businesses, specializing in governance issues. With a new client, John typically starts with the question: “What do the owners want?” He would then facilitate a discussion or conduct a survey to learn the answer to that question. Next steps would be customized to meet the needs of the family, but would typically start developing a plan to improve the governance of the ownership group and the business. Key elements of the plan would usually include organizing the ownership group via a family council, and enhancing the company’s governance by creating a board or advisory board or making recommendations to improve the performance of the existing board. John works closely with the family to implement the plan and prepares them to govern their shareholder group and business on their own.

Read The New York Times' recent interview with Malt-O-Meal's CEO by clicking here.
Read Pioneer Press' recent article on Intek Plastics by clicking here.