“Best practice is a technique or methodology proven by experience and research to lead reliably to an optimal result”.
So, if we implement and support Best Practice in our family business we should enjoy success – whatever that means for our business family and for our family’s business.
In an “ordinary” business the key measures of success are commercial (eg: revenues, profits, market share). Being objective, and largely arithmetical, they’re easily quantified.
In a family business, success is a combination of qualitative and quantitative measures (eg: sustainable business success + family peace and prosperity). This creates a lot of extra complexity and makes success harder to achieve, and even harder to quantify.
The Solutionist Model for Family Business Best Practice has been developed over more than 20 years through a process of genuine research, plagiarising clever people’s work, visioning, design, experimentation on live families (no valuable animals were harmed in our tests), performance reviews and extensive peer and survivor discussions.
The process establishes and propels both the family and the business along separated pathways towards “professionalisation”. For the business this means disciplined efficiency and profitability; for the family it means disciplined and fair behaviours towards all relevant stakeholders.
Note that the common keyword is “disciplined”. All complex organisms, both natural and manufactured, including family and business systems, require a degree of discipline (compliance with accepted rules) to survive and thrive in challenging, competitive and dangerous environments. Lack of discipline is the root cause of many family conflicts, business failures, and species extinction events.
As a family and its business get better at doing things well they become more skilled. They are also professionalising their respective operations. This just means they’re doing things better, which shouldn’t be confused with corporatising, which often has more to do with suppressing values and trading in the organisation’s soul to make more money.
The real takeaway here is that there is a tried and tested best practice model for family business that can readily be applied to almost any family and almost any business, no matter how large or small, no matter what state of disarray they’re in, and no matter where they sit in their respective lifecycles.
Sustainable Success doesn’t come through luck, although we all need some of that in the mix. Long term success is the (probable) outcome of long term, disciplined effort. That discipline requires implementation and adherence to something like a best practice process.
To read more, click on this link: FB Best Practice