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Any business requires 110 percent effort, but a family business demands personal and professional attention in a unique way. There is potential for a great amount of personal and family stress, even disputes. A professional mediator can make all the difference. Read about how a professional consultant can be one of the best assets available to a family business. You have worked all your life to build a successful business. Do you realize your chances are only 1 in 7 that your grandchildren will inherit your company? Too often, the business becomes entangled in family ties that undermine company success. Consequently, many owners find it helpful to develop a plan for the family and the family's role in the business. This creates a link between the family and the business. The starting point for linking family with the business is a Family Retreat. This is the forum for setting the stage for the family to work together as a team. The primary goal of a family retreat is the development of a Family Business Plan. This plan enables a family to work out a vision of how it sees itself and how it sees its business in the future. Retreat Outcomes Although the specific objectives of each Family Retreat will vary, typical outcomes include the following:
A communications profile of family members for:
Our Retreat Process We design your Family Retreat to meet your individual family's needs. Your retreat is the beginning of linking family with the business. An important result should be the establishment of periodic family meetings and retreats in the future. Our method for leading your family through its business planning process is thorough and complete. The cornerstone of this method - our more than 30 years of experience in working with closely held and family businesses to put their ideas into motion. Our practical business and behavioral management expertise brings an appropriate balance to the family business planning process. Our goal is to make your family's experience comfortable, and yet compelling, as we guide and contribute to the process. We expect you will eventually run your family retreats without our assistance. Therefore, we also coach you on how to effectively lead and facilitate your own retreats and family meetings. A Family Retreat will help you secure the well-being and future of your family, the productivity and future of your business, and the quality of your life. We invite you to contact us to learn more about how to design your own family retreat. "Strategic Routes"After a decade of downsizing, strategic planning is making a comeback in the organization. But the new strategy has little in common with the command-and-control methods of past business. Corporate Planning Adapts to Changing Business RealitiesA STRATEGIC PLANNING RENAISSANCE is emerging in corporate America. The new methods are abandoning the authoritative mindset of centralized planning for a style fitting the turbulent commerce of the '90s. Today, the task of charting a future course has been dispersed throughout the organization. Every employee, customer, and vendor holding vital information has a role to play in the process. This outward, "democratized," approach has arisen from necessity. In the 1980s, many companies found that traditional strategic planning did not fit the rapidly evolving rules of business, embodied in unpredictable markets, rapidly emerging foreign competition, new technology, globalization of labor and trade, and other trends. Senior managers once mapped out strategies in isolation, and often without the "in-the-trench" knowledge of market changes, arising threats, internal ability to execute, and competitor developments. The plan took months to draft and accumulated in a weighty document that was often obsolete before distribution. This cumbersome strategizing was impractical and dangerous in a world where product life cycles were measured in months rather than years. Over the past decade, many theories and techniques have been arising to address these challenges. While they embody diverse philosophies, many are based on common trends in the market. Your business should consider these themes when forming a plan: Broad participation.All levels of the organization can contribute meaningfully to planning. Insight from frontline staff is essential, as they are operating nearest the action and usually feel the early winds of change. They also may have practical insight regarding problems or conflicts that may arise during implementation. Quest for new opportunities.Market forecasting and other number crunching is important. But, todays strategic planning does not revolve around quantitative activities. Rather, your firm might explore intangibles, like identifying and testing unconventional avenues of growth. One such concept involves the business ecosystem -- a network of customers, suppliers, and rivals who cooperate with specific aims in mind. Their shared motives might include improving applied technology, opening an entirely new market, creating a sub-industry and sharing research. These parties co-evolve by feeding off each others resources, information and discoveries. Cross-disciplinary team.By combining diverse functions, skills, and experiences of its employees, a firm applies "think tank" planning that encourages cohesiveness. Such alliances may unveil open space opportunities -- market niches previously unrecognized because they didn't exactly match the competencies of any business function. From a team perspective, however, these opportunities are more easily defined and developed. An external perspective.Customer experiences, competitor moves, and industry developments should influence planning more than internal factors, such as budgets and past policy. Customer surveys, focus groups, sales force input, and other intelligence gathering helps you identify strengths and weaknesses within the firm. This feedback also can lead to policies which encourage flexibility and responsiveness. Managing the process.Don't carve the strategy in stone. Think of it as a starting point for flexible navigation. And don't leave the process to itself. You should continually compare actual results to expected outcomes -- and make mid-course adjustments as needed. This approach demands an efficient, two-way flow of information through the hierarchy of management. Creativity over analysis.As markets, technologies and strategies become less predictable, a firms planning emphasis must change from projecting the future to reshaping it through innovative and ambitious initiatives. This orientation encourages creative thinking among those involved in planning. By making a conscious effort to challenge, and even destabilize the status quo, the organization creates an environment ripe for generating major strategic shifts. To fulfill this role, a leader must be willing and able to move against internal and external currents. Accordingly, you should remain intimately involved in the process so that you can direct the major activities of business strategy. In its highest form, strategy-making is a perpetual and seamless management activity. But this capability is refined over time, and through considerable thought, sweat and risk-taking. Your strategic approach may not appear efficient at first. But the tangible gains will come. Perspectives will also change. When leaders begin to crunch more ideas and fewer numbers, they can change rather quickly.
The Workplace Environment
Miscommunication, emotional disputes, and conflict are common occurrences in the workplace, costing companies immeasurable amounts of money and countless lost, and unproductive, hours. These situations cause valuable relationships to end in bitterness and anger, with creative and innovative work frequently hindered, or worse, eliminated. This results in the loss of new markets and potential profits, causing damage beyond measure.
Knowing when to call for help is a critical step toward resolving conflict and disputes in the workplace. Mediation can prevent such loss and damage.
Mediation is a process in which a neutral facilitator coaches two or more parties in finding a mutually agreeable solution. Professional mediators help these parties rebuild a "spirit of collaboration" and become "partners" in brainstorming, and designing solutions to their problems. Individuals need guidance with their own negotiations; they don't need someone telling them what to do. Mediation experts facilitate collaborative processes to establish synergy and cohesiveness in the workplace, which leads to the resolution of disputes and conflict.
Warning Signs
Very often, business owners, managers, corporate leaders, and business associates fail to admit their relationships are in trouble until it's too late for them to be saved. Watch for these warning signs of deteriorating relationships:
If you are experiencing any of the above, it's time to get outside help to save a troubled situation. Mediators facilitate "getting to the bottom" of a dispute, and help craft a complete and concise resolution. They help you put in motion a plan for resolving conflict.
Our Initiative
We help business owners, managers, corporate leaders, and business associates find solutions to disputes, conflict, and miscommunication.
Communication is the key to an efficient workforce, and highly successful business projects. Typically, miscommunication in the workplace is at the root of a dispute. Once miscommunication factors are identified, the parties to a dispute can be coached to establish true communication. Then, mediating an acceptable solution to the dispute becomes a matter of course.
The human factor plays an instrumental role in initiating and maintaining a dispute, and in creating conflict. Therefore, it is the focal point of our mediation and communication programs.
Our approach to conflict and dispute resolution actively engages individuals in educational and collaborative processes. We utilize state-of-the-art tools to facilitate implementation of "true communication." These tools include employee opinion surveys, job fit and 360 degree feedback assessments, team & individual personality trait and communication analyses, team building exercises, and management retreats.
Here are some examples of the types of disputes for which our Mediation and Communication services are best suited, and have been utilized by our clients:
Implementation of our professional mediation and communication programs can improve efficiency in your workplace, reduce the costs of your operation, enhance company-wide morale, and boost your profits.
Participants meet two to three times a year to help one another resolve critical business and financial problems, explore promising opportunities, share business and financial experiences, learn from expert speakers, and act as a general sounding board for each other, in a "no holds barred," small group environment of total confidentiality.
The CEO and CFO Forums are designed to help members openly share experiences and expertise with a group of their peers in whom they can trust and confide, find solutions to a wide range of issues that could undermine the success of their companies, sidestep mistakes that can result when they "go it alone," and effectively deal with the sense of isolation at the top.
We invite you to contact us for further information about membership in one of our CEO or CFO Executive Forums.
We have assisted several companies in identifying and selecting CEOs, general managers, chief financial officers, sales and marketing managers, plant managers, quality assurance directors, and other key personnel. Our search process follows a thorough, nine-step approach.
© Harvey A. Meier, Ph.D., CMC This article is for entrepenuers who want to master their deal-making skills. Nine guidelines are presented to help you optimize returns and minimize the risk of potential loss when making business investments. It is not intended as legal or accounting advice. You should consult an attorney, accountant, and/or business advisor/consultant, prior to making your business investments. Guideline #1 Get Your Money Back Plus A Fair Rate of Return
Guideline #2 Validate the Business Opportunity
Guideline #3 Management! Management! Management!
Guideline #4 Confirm the Market Niche
Guideline #5 Evaluate Products, Services
Guideline #6 Study the "Financials"
Guideline #7 Share the Wealth--Reap the Rewards
Guideline #8 Separate Fact From Emotion
Guideline #9 Build Your Team
Summary This article presents several deal-making guidelines. After using these suggestions, and discussing your needs with your attorney, accountant and business advisor/consultant, you will be better able to increase your chances of making a fair and reasonable return on your business investments. And, you will be more likely to increase the probability of recapturing all of the capital you originally invested. Nine Tips for Making Business Investments
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