Keeping It in the Family
Successful Succession of the Family Business
Editorial Review
Keeping It in the Family is about how you, as the owner of a business, can plan and carry out the transfer of your company to your children or other family members. It's also about how a prospective successor to a family business can prepare for future ownership and management. It is a step-by-step guide through a very complex, often frustrating, and sometimes heartbreaking process. Looking at the good and bad experiences of business owners, successors, and families, it analyzes their brilliant strokes and their great mistakes; it also summarizes the lessons learned by others and suggests how they can be applied to planning for the continuity of your own family business.
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Wisdom to Share
A family-owned company can be either the most flexible or the most cumbersome of business structures. When only a few family members share decision-making authority, a company can be aggressive in the marketplace and quickly respond to changes in the business environment.
A succession process that either transforms an entrepreneurial business into a family business or extends family business ownership into the next generation can accentuate both the strengths and the vulnerabilities of the family and the business.
By mixing business dynamics with family dynamics, succession may produce new family stresses and throw a company into chaos, or it may form some very successful relationships among family members and carry the company to a new performance plateau.
To succeed, ownership and management succession must include pre-planning analysis, developing a succession plan, managing the ownership transfer, monitoring the transition, and finishing cleanly when the retiring owner hands over control.
A thorough analysis is particularly important in preparing for ownership succession in the family business because it can make the difference between a general plan that looks good in a management manual and a specific one that promotes ownership continuity of this business by this family.
A business owner takes a big step toward ensuring the continuity of the business by beginning to work up a strategy for marketing it to the family.
The most critical factor in assuring the continuity of an entrepreneurial or family-owned business is advance planning.
The completed succession plan should clearly describe the family's succession process and the actions that should be taken to ensure successful succession. It should work like an operations manual, with the important goals stated in priority and the steps set down in their logical sequence.
Just because the business changes family management and ownership, it shouldn't toss aside the outgoing senior owner's wealth of experience, capability, and hard-won wisdom.
Planning and managing the succession of family business ownership can be one of the most demanding things a businessperson ever does. But that last step, letting go when the business's continuity into the next generation has been secured, can be the most satisfying moment since nailing that first earned dollar to the wall. It's a rite of passage, the time for a celebration, not a wake, and it ought to be big, loud, and happy.
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