We use strength-based, principle-based solutions for your family’s succession planning.
Continuity Planning for Family Enterprise
As a business owner, you thrive on identifying opportunities early, balancing the risks and accepting ambiguity while making important decisions.
What if scaling, selling or planning a family generational transfer of your business can strategically utilize the same attributes you’ve mastered and deploy them in new ways?
What if you invite other members of your family business into the conversations early, sharing the responsibilities of figuring out the future?
What if we create a process and environment that makes all members of your family business feel comfortable, heard and open to share their perspectives, hopes, dreams and fears about the future of the business and their role within it?
We’ve designed our Continuity Planning discovery process with the above considerations.
You will not hear about the 5 D’s (Death, Disability, Disagreement, Divorce, Debt), which is a common practice in traditional business succession planning.
Instead, we flip the traditional fear-based approach on its head. Click here for a sample 1 page continuity plan we recently completed!
Our Continuity Planning Process
1
Book a no obligation discovery chat:
Spend 1.5 to 2 hours with us (in person, virtual or by phone) to talk about your hopes, dreams and ideas for your family, your business, current and future ownership.
What’s working well and how can we build on this to make things even better?
What do you want to see change within your family, business and ownership?
What areas are you hoping to bring more clarity and focus to?
2
Discovery and
engagement:
We’ll arrange 1 on 1 discussions with the family business members you select.
We plan two meetings where review the observations and present them anonymously to the family members you select to be included.
3
Deliverables and
outcomes:
We’ll provide you with a roadmap outlining strategies (including timelines and responsibilities) that will:
Boost family relationships
Help you build a sustainable business
Bring clarity to why the family ownership remains committed to the long-term
Leadership and Mentoring
Common questions we hear from clients as they ponder the future of their family business:
What if I don’t feel they are ready… or will ever be ready to handle the responsibilities and manage the risks?
How will I know when it’s the right time to invite my children into the business and eventually into a leadership and ownership role?
How do I decide which of my children should take on an eventual ownership role? Are they even interested in pursuing the ownership path?
We design and facilitate meetings to help you explore answers to these and other questions.
Best of all, we include and engage family members early on. When they feel they are part of the process and their perspective is important, you tap into their intrinsic motivators. They will gain insight and be able to identify their strengths, understand the knowledge and skills gaps, and work hard to fill these.
We design and facilitate workshops, exercises, coaching sessions and individual one-to-one chats that highlight and share the aspiring leaders’ greatest strengths and opportunities.
Upon request we can provide a copy of the following resources:
Leadership Playbook
Cultivating an Ownership Mindset
My Ownership Intentions worksheet
Owner reorientation discovery process
Strategic Planning for Family Enterprises
Should the usual processes and activities involved in strategy planning work well for family run businesses?
To answer this question, we need to understand what makes family businesses unique in the first place.
Here are a few of the main differentiators:
Family businesses think longer term – in decades, rather than quarters and years
The owners instill their own values into the organizational culture
The owners and their families make more meaningful contributions to their local economies and have stronger reputations
Family businesses have flatter organizational structures to enable quick decision making
Owners are usually heavily involved in the operations of the business
Transition of power to subsequent generations and/or professional leaders is slow and usually not planned well
