Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Hold your Tongue to Keep the Peace in a Family Business

In route home from an endeavor to bring a family back from critical mass, I have confirmed again that families who choose to take advantage of family synergy in business must give up some freedoms to download emotions to intimate inactive family members. More succinctly, families who work together all day put the greater family harmony at great risk if they go home at night and emotionally download to spouses and children the acrid details of their daily experiences.

For the complete article, click here.

Labels: ,

Sunday, July 16, 2006

What's the First Step in Succession Planning?

Succession planning can be an overwhelming thought. There is so much to be done. “I don’t even know what I don’t know.” There are so many potential issues. There are so many opinions. There are so many places where things can go wrong.

Correctomundo on all points. However, confirmation of your challenge is no reason to resort to ruminating, having no hope, disengaging from pro active behavior and just waiting for a wheel to fall off.

Visit our website to read the complete article.

Labels: , ,

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

About this blog


Seeking Successionsm will be mostly about business succession planning, my passion. I will be discussing the internal and external factors that impact the continuation of a business legacy through the next generation and some of my bizarre experiences as a dedicated family business succession planner. Trust me, if you walked in my shoes you would learn that facts are stranger than fiction.

To share with you some thought and philosophy, I believe that family owned businesses are the cornerstone of any economy. However, these potentially hyper productive entities, by their very nature, have unique challenges. In fact, a family owned businesses is monumentally impacted by an internal contradiction: Family is a forum of unconditional acceptance based upon the sperm lottery and business a forum of conditional acceptance based upon “what have you done for me lately.”  

With this as a foundation, based upon the combined 100+ years experience within TRG (The Rawls Group) I can further offer this contention that you can not run a family like a business and you can not run a business like a family. The inevitable excitement that I encounter on a daily basis is the unpredictable changes between family and business priorities.  

For the sake of discussion, I define a family owned business as one where in two or more people are in business together for reasons other than money.  If you are in business with a partner, you probably know him/her as well as or better than any of your immediate family.

My goal for Seeking Successionsm is to build a forum to inform business owners, partners, family members, key managers and vendors on the critical factors that impact Succession Successsm. I’ll define Succession Successsm for you on my next contribution.
Furthermore, since most of my clients are in business in which I have a keen interest, I may also write about some of these interests such as automobiles, beer, wine, boating, books, travel or what ever.

I’ll be in touch.