Best Practice

The primary goal of most business families is to have a happy family and a strong business, both on a long-term, sustainable basis. Achieving this means getting a lot of things right: for the individuals; for the family; for the business and for all of them, together… meanwhile you have to keep the business going!

Our advisory services are designed to produce these outcomes, with every piece of advice and action directed towards solving problems in ways that work for all stakeholders, in the family and in the business. We call this Family Business Strategies best practice.

We start with the following:

Family Alignment

When your family is out of whack – with each other, with your business, and/or with the world at large – nothing seems to go well: either in business or private life. Everything you do seems to make things worse, and eventually you stop trying.

If you value your family (and your sanity), it’s time to try a different approach. To get things running smoothly the family needs to be “aligned”. This means getting everyone on the same page, and happy about “the Plan”. By the time we’ve worked it all out, every member of the family should have clarity, certainty and a commitment to “the Plan”. This journey has many facets and objectives, including: education, communication, trust building, team building, negotiation, relationship repair and sometimes some fairly direct therapy. As the family gets aligned, everything becomes better… anything seems possible – even the stuff that looked so hopeless before the process began.

Family Legacy

Over many surveys, established business families consistently confirm that their priority is for their children and grandchildren to be good people rather than wealthy ones, although helping to make them both is their actual aim.

To work on the family legacy is to work on family alignment. The process leads to family stewardship…Now we’re talking brain + heart food!

Family Stewardship

Stewardship = responsibility for looking after and managing something well.

Stewardship of the family’s legacy required current family leaders to nurture what they’ve created and/or received from their forebears so they have somethi8ng better to pass onto their next generations. This legacy includes the human, intellectual and financial capital held within a business family. This capital therefore represents the totality of what the family has learnt, built and accumulated over time.

When a family commits to Stewardship it’s chasing a form of immortality: potentially, if future generations get it right, the family can go on forever.

Once the Harmonising of the family has been achieved the next few steps are:

  • Education on the 7 elements (Clarity, Certainty, Commitment, Strategy, Structures, Systems, Skills) of Family Business Success, then defining your own.
  • Family Structures
  • Family Business Structures
  • Professionalising the Family Business
  • Family Conflict Resolution

The following topics are addressed through the process at the appropriate stages:

  • Conflict prevention
  • Conflict resolution
  • Difficult conversations
  • Difficult meetings
  • Governance in business
  • Governance in the family
  • High performance Teams & Culture
  • High trust environments
  • Roles & Responsibilities
  • Leadership development
  • Negotiations
  • Significant Agreements
  • Succession Planning

As Solutionists we treat every challenging situation as a problem to be solved to produce the best possible outcomes for each individual, AND the family AND the business. We look at the whole picture to ensure that nobody, and no thing, is sacrificed for the sake of expediency. Our aim is always to:  defuse stress, confusion and conflict; minimise pain and hurt; repair relationship damage; increase learnings and skills; and maximise prospects for positive, sustainable outcomes for everyone involved.  Our job is to understand your situation, needs and wants and to then design and help to implement an appropriate solution.

We frequently cross conventional professional boundaries to address the mix of human, legal, financial and commercial issues that are almost always present. Your issues are addressed efficiently, effectively, constructively and relatively painlessly – even the problems that looked impossible!

The result will be a holistic solution to the entire problem that doesn’t sacrifice anyone, or anything, if it can possibly be avoided.

 

 

Although we are based in Auckland, we go wherever our clients ask us to!

Give us a call on 0800 765 837 or email rosemarie@fbsnz.co.nz to work out if Family Business Strategies is able to assist your business family or family business.