No family stays together as an enterprise without a conscious commitment to a common purpose and a willingness to work together to accomplish specific goals.
We focus on the following building blocks when working with families:
- Develop a family culture based on shared values
- Respect the family’s history and guiding principles
- Create a family timeline for transitions and succession events
- Make a commitment to shared family learning program
- Develop an enterprise framework based on shared ownership
- Simplify the complexity of the enterprise where possible
- Conduct an opportunity and risk assessment to set priorities
- Build strategic relationships to enhance enterprise thinking
- Identify driving forces (opportunities) and key uncertainties (risks)
- Recognize and address disruptions that will impact future vision
- Develop current and future scenarios to explore alternatives
- Create a shared vision for the future of the enterprise family
- Develop key goals and strategies that owners will support
- Establish a risk process to mitigate and manage enterprise risks
- Conduct periodic scenario planning and revisit to refine on an ongoing basis
- Measure family satisfaction with the strategies and outcome
- Establish a governance structure to support enterprise goals
- Identify a suitable decision-making approach that the family supports
- Develop clear levels of authority and accountability for each board & committee
- Monitor progress with performance metrics
- Cultivate every family member as a leader across the branches
- Conduct skills inventories and identify missing skills to be developed
- Formalize an objective leadership selection process
- Implement an honest feedback process for family leaders