Successful family business relationships are key to holding a family business together. Some of the qualities families in business must have to be successful include: shared values, shared power, traditions, willingness to learn and grow, activities to maintain relationships, genuine caring, mutual respect, ability to support each other, privacy and boundaries.
Strategic business decision making is related to consensus decision making in family business. Families that use a strategic business decision making process are committed to discussing issues until there is full agreement to move forward and implement a decision. If a family is committed to working together for the long term, it is best to embrace this model.
I was privileged to be a featured speaker at Family Firm Institute’s 26th Annual Conference in Brussels, Belgium this month. This was my twenty-third year presenting at the Global Conferences of the Family Firm Institute (FFI)! Throughout my career, I’ve always enjoyed connecting with audiences through these speaking engagements.
I presented my session with Dennis Passis, owner of Gate Enterprises Inc., a mid-sized family business. Passis and I met at last year’s conference and our conversations about professional orientation led to the joint presentation. Our talk, “What Informs Your Work with Family Business?,” resulted in a lively, 60-minute interactive session with the audience.
Jesus Casado, FFI Board member, said, "This was the best session in the entire conference!"
During our session with the audience, we spoke about how the values and fundamental beliefs of family business counselors provide the foundation for their work with family business clients. We discussed how those beliefs set the quality and tone for client-consultant engagement and become a determining factor in creating successful outcomes for the family business.
Thank you to Family Firm Institute for once again bringing together such an interesting group of experts, as well as owners and members of family businesses from around the world!
Family Business Matters has extensive experience assisting family businesses. With many decades of experience, we understand the wide variety of challenges that families face as they work together to build, grow and sustain a thriving family business generation after generation. Through conferences, continuing education programs, family business retreats, speaking engagements and private family business consulting services, Family Business Matters has assisted more than 450 family-owned businesses around the world chart their way through family business issues of all shapes and sizes.
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In my last post, which you can read here, I gave the background of the Yost family, with whom I worked as a consultant. The Yosts own a group of successful car dealerships. Brothers Alan and Charlie make up the third generation of this family business, and both worked in the business. Alan is determined to find the easy way through everything, and he never excelled in the business. Charlie, on the other hand, transformed the dealership into an award-winning business with great profitability through 20 years of hard work.
When Charlie reached the breaking point and decided that Alan had to leave the business, it created a contentious situation that threatened to tear the family apart. The brothers had a buy/sell agreement that stated that Charlie would have paid Alan just under $10 million for his share of the business. Alan wanted more than the buy/sell would give him. He hired an adversarial lawyer who worked on a contingency and promised Alan he could “get a lot more.“
I worked as an advisor with the Yosts to help them make their way through this buy/sell agreement. In my meetings with the Yosts, I discovered that one of the most important core values of the family was their commitment to function from a place of integrity. This principle was demonstrated by the actions of the brothers’ grandfather, business founder Fred Yost.
Integrity: Firm adherence to a code of especially moral values, incorruptibility.
Alan had a wonderful, loving relationship with his grandfather. During Fred’s latter years, he and Alan had lunch once a week. In those lunch meetings, Fred told Alan the stories that only a founder of a business can tell. Those stories all contained a […]
Family business leadership and values-based leadership is the next window of development in the family business arena. It's important to make sure everyone involved in the family business understands the business mission and values. When a company takes the time to define its core values, a positive shift in the company culture can occur.
Family business structure and the concept of adapting and evolving applies to family-owned business. When creating solutions for a family business, the first step is to analyze the functions that need to take place to make the business work. Family business structure and efficiency can ultimately lead to higher profitability.
There are two types of family business nepotism - the bad kind and the good kind. The good kind allows business owners to take advantage of relationships with respected employees and colleagues to help find and hire employees with a similar work ethic and values. This kind of nepotism can actually help a business.
There are advantages to nepotism and there are disadvantages. The good kind of nepotism takes advantage of relationships with respected employees and colleagues to help find and hire employees with similar traits. Good nepotism has worked successfully for many family businesses and can foster an environment where employees feel that the employer really cares about them.
A family business advisory board can make a family business stronger, increase shareholder value and better position the company to capture the opportunities that are available in the marketplace. An advisory board is made up of outsiders who are experienced business leaders who can cause business owners to examine possibilities they might not otherwise consider.
An elder is a person who is still growing, still a learner, still with potential, and still continues to have promise and connection to the future. In relation to family business dynamics, an elder is a person who deserves honor and respect and who utilizes wisdom from long life experiences to formulate a legacy for future generations.
