Making Strategy Work in Family-Owned Businesses

Three Keys that Unleash the Potential of Family-Owned Businesses: Strategic Corporate Planning, Strong Leadership Qualities, and a Focus on Organizational Effectiveness

Building, preserving, and passing along a family-owned business (FOB) is an alluring and prevalent dream in most all capitalist economies. The benefits of FOBs are striking and many—for the family, for their employees and their local community, and for the marketplace.

There are days, though, when it’s all too easy to forget about the many sources of gratification in growing your family's business. The very nature of FOBs tends to encourage a focus on day-to-day tactics at the expense of systematic and disciplined corporate planning. Instilling future generations with the right leadership qualities and scrutinizing organizational effectiveness seem like luxuries only more established companies can afford.

Your challenge is to maintain the "just do it" culture that got your FOB this far while learning to step back to gain perspective on the company's future. Careful corporate planning involves formalizing your family's dreams into your company's reason for being (Mission), its ideal future state (Vision), and its guiding principles (Core Values). It also involves creating a clear strategy map to guide your next several years. Making sure future generations have the appropriate leadership qualities is your FOB's insurance policy; simply being part of the family is not enough. All of these components, combined with the family's history, will yield valuable insight into what will optimize organzational effectiveness.

And you can continue to enjoy the many unique benefits of leading a successful family business:

• Create a heritage for the family and serves as a medium for perpetuating a family’s history, traditions, pride, and core values and beliefs.
• Serve as a powerful testimonial to the success and potency of a family
• Provide the ultimate career and financial safety net to one’s children and grandchildren and great grandchildren.
• Offer participating family members greater independence and control of their fate than a more traditional career path
• Establish a very special glue (as in a “bonding material) that can hold a family together around a common set of interests, activities, challenges, opportunities, threats, milestones, relationships, and daily schedules.
• Demonstrate to an entire community (and various sub-communities) that this is a family to be admired and respected and inspired by
• Make it more certain that individual family members will have the fullest opportunities as adults to “stretch” developmentally and to self-actualize
• Improve the chances that family members will be able to involve themselves in meaningful philanthropic activities and become pillars of their communities
• Make it more likely that financial advantages, non-trivial net worth (a.k.a. wealth), and “security” will accrue to the family
•  Provide greater stability and welfare for its employees and for the community in which it operates

We like the 25-year track record our solutions have in helping family-owned businesses realize their potential. If we can assist yours, we’d like to.