Love your Family, and Professionalise your Business.
Professionalising the Family Business – Overview
Professionalising the family businesses makes it more efficient, profitable, and businesslike, without damaging its family feel and values.
Corporatising a large family business converts it into a large corporation, usually by way of public listing. In the process, the business loses many of the most attractive human aspects of being a family business.
A family may want to professionalise its business for many reasons, including: to achieve best practice status; to obtain finance; to increase its value in readiness for a sale or major restructure; as part of a succession process; or to increase core competitiveness – for survival and/or for greater profits.
Whatever the motivation, absent some inventive genius working on a killer computer app or global vaccine, the usual pathway to increase profits and sustainable business value is through the organisational and productivity improvements delivered through professionalisation. This requires nothing more exotic than applying sound business practices into the family business environment.
Business Alignment
An “aligned” family has got its act together well enough to be able to support its business, enthusiastically.
An aligned business has got its commercial fundamentals in good enough shape to be able to support the family, with enthusiasm.
Business Meetings
Effective meetings are fundamental to good business operations. They provide opportunities for staff members to get together, review performance and results, plan ahead, work things through, develop solutions, make decisions, and leverage their combined knowledge and expertise.
Regular, properly structured meetings inject discipline and purpose into the business and form an essential part of the professionalisation process.
Good meetings don’t happen by chance, they require a solid core process covering meeting procedures, problem solving and decision making, and need to be imbued with sufficient authority to enforce discipline on meeting participants.