Align, Streamline, and Succeed!
Building Bright Futures for Your Family Business
Assessment is the route to perspective
Every family faces communication barriers and conflict. When your family is also running a business together, those challenges can compound. Oftentimes, the bedrock of a dysfunctional communication system is an unseen force that’s gone unnoticed and unaddressed for decades. Identifying these challenges is a crucial first step to reconciling those barriers, and implementing healthy, effective steps for a streamlined system of communication and personal growth. Our assessment will identify the root of your challenges and prune away the toxicity so the healing and heart-to-hearts can begin.
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When you’re operating at the intersection of family and business, there’s bound to be some conflict and most often it’s because of poor communication whether that be from either a lack of skill, or failure to create effective communication channels. Regardless, when communication breaks down, the business and the family feel the repercussions and may begin to crumble.
Including a third party to assess and rectify communication pitfalls, problems with perception, and potentially hostile exchanges can be one of the greatest investments you can make in your personal and professional life. Our carefully curated FEAT assessment will open the doors to healthier, lasting communication strategies that will transcend your business relationships and bolster your familial ones as well.
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A 2023 Family Business Survey found that 65% of family-owned businesses said ensuring a generational legacy was a top, long-term priority. Keeping things in the family requires foresight, planning, and shared vision. This is where a structured and organized succession plan becomes invaluable.
A viable succession plan requires extensive planning and a shared vision from the family. We’ll take you through the step-by-step process touching on all the key components of succession success including: commitment, collaboration, development and governance.
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Many companies prioritize passion when they should be prioritizing purpose. Purpose drives connection and collaborative efforts. A meaningful shared purpose drives better communication, and better relationships at home and at work. A strong, mutually embraced purpose will drive passion and alignment for each stakeholder and the business as a whole.
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Though some generational family businesses have cultivated a reputation for expertise, they may fall flat when it comes to delivering their exceptional knowledge in a professional way. Don’t let a laissez-faire attitude get in the way of your overarching purpose: a quality product or service.
Our assessment can target the ways you can take your business to the next level through a deeper commitment to professionalism and tailored strategies for implementation.
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What may separate the long-lasting family-businesses from a flash-in-the-pan fad company comes down to your ability to adapt to the quickly changing needs of your customers and the rapidly evolving market.
How would you fare in another life-altering setback like COVID-19? Setbacks and changes large and small will arise, and our assessment will help you determine the state of your organizational health against a variety of probabilities.
Find insight in
360-Degree
Feedback
By gathering input from employees, family members, and other stakeholders, our comprehensive Family Enterprise Assessment Tool (FEAT) provides a holistic view of the organization's dynamics, communication, and leadership. FEAT sheds invaluable insight on the business's overarching health and performance. Embracing 360-degree feedback allows family businesses to address underlying concerns as seen from multiple perspectives.
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Asking the tough questions is a launchpad for discovering your greatest asset: your family. Well-rounded feedback is critical and we’ll help your team internalize the health of both your family and your enterprise by discussing 10 Key Areas of data one section at a time.
Your family assessment will unlock new perspectives and insights and you’ll gain new appreciation for each other’s strengths and respect for the ways your differences make your organization a living, well-rounded team. You’ll be able to have the long-overdue conversations that have been holding your empire back. It’s time to move forward.
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Our specific, comprehensive assessment approach (FEAT) gives a voice to anyone who has a seat at the table, placing a great value on all stakeholders.
Stakeholders include:
• Someone who interacts with a leader
• Someone interdependent with a leader
• Someone a leader needs to influence in an effective way
While the services of an outside coach are invaluable, our approach emphasizes that it’s not about the outside coach. It is about the relationship between a leader and those the leader influences.
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If you want a team of strong leaders, you have to first foster a team of hungry learners.
Research shows that the ability a team has to learn is directly related to their ability to make lasting changes. The concept of “Learning to learn” is vital to your organization's longevity and prosperity and requires employees and stakeholders at every level to present a united front when it comes to alignment and ownership.
Through consistent communication and a systematic approach to accountability, workers, leaders, and all stakeholders can focus on continuous development and overcome leadership challenges that beset every enterprise.
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Conflict is normal, natural, and can be a catalyst to greater understanding and connection. If left unchecked, however, conflict can become toxic and poison an otherwise thriving organization from the inside out.
By gathering feedback, perspective, and insights from all stakeholders, our team will create tailored solutions to overcoming your family’s unique communication challenges that may have offset your progression for decades.
Some conflicts are passed down from generation to generation and seem as ingrained in the business as the succession process itself. Learning to have productive conflict is transformative. Opening the flood of healthy, productive communication will empower you to create stronger family bonds and healthier relationships.
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Feedback helps a cohesive team meet goals, manage expectations, and communicate through conflict. Yet traditional feedback is often focused on the past. Critiques that fail to consider the complex opportunities that lie ahead miss the mark.
A feedforward approach to improvement is forward-facing, expansive and dynamic. Feedforward can help your multigenerational family business envision and embrace a positive, 360-degree view of the future and immensely improve the organizational health of your organization.
Align + plan effective strategy
Strategic planning is where we start to collaboratively tackle your business’s most sensitive issues, such as succession planning, governance structures, communication breakdowns, or conflicting objectives. By recognizing and addressing these obstacles, our carefully crafted approach to strategic planning empowers the family business to look to and envision a prosperous future. A strategic plan paves the way for sustainable growth and success. Our goal is to tidy up dysfunction and empower you to create a robust, thriving team with aligned values, vision, and purpose.
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Achieving a high level of business finesse requires a robust governance infrastructure that supports a streamlined approach to management that can withstand the inevitable generational transitions.
A structurally-sound system of governance will create a “separate-but-equal” effect on the two key areas of family business: the family and the business.
Good governance can improve organizational value by up to 30%, according to industry research. It creates clearly defined relationships and roles, and through more open communication, can improve transparency and trust between family members and other stakeholders.
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“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” The wisdom from this biblical Proverb extends to the realms of family enterprise, and is a perfect marriage of faith, family, and business. Our belief is rooted in the idea that, like a three-legged stool, these three components are strongest together.
A shared vision unifies a family and a business to set and strive toward attainable goals, by relying on each other’s strengths and through healthy communication. By aligning around a set of common goals, families can forge unbreakable bonds that will create a legacy that transcends the here and now. We’ll help you rally around a vision, create goals, and empower you to work together as a family team to achieve great success.
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Business transitions are an inevitable part of any organization, and for some it’s a determination between a short life-span, or generational longevity. It comes down to your ability to envision, execute and communicate your plans for the future.
Establishing clear boundaries and rules surrounding exits is critical to the long-term success of your organization during transitions and succession. While this can feel uncomfortable at times, an aligned vision of the organization's governance procedures can ameliorate these complex challenges.
By engineering a well-defined and organized exit strategy, you can prioritize both the needs of the company and the needs of the family member, leaving the business strong and your family members feeling valued. These outcomes are achieved through thoughtful planning and transparent communication. We’ll help facilitate these emotionally-charged conversations, and help you formulate an exit strategy that’s the most advantageous to your unique needs.
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Ownership alignment requires unity and emotional buy-in from all stakeholders. Achieving this allows an organization to move as one, rowing the proverbial boat as one with smooth, strong strokes in the direction all parties have decided to go.
This alignment cannot happen in entropy. We’ll help you identify ways to strengthen this alignment and root out ways your attempts for greater cohesion have failed in the past. Let’s unify your empire and your family.
Training for
a prosperous future
Developing tailored leadership and team coaching programs curated to the specific needs of your business is our purview. We’ll guide and empower your family with the skills and insights needed to forge ahead through the unique dynamics of working with relatives, navigating succession planning, and fostering a cohesive team environment. Through interactive workshops and coaching sessions, we’ll equip you with the tools to effectively communicate, delegate, and inspire.
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Recent research has highlighted a paradigm shift in the culture’s perceptions of leadership development. Leadership development is for anyone that has to work with or through other people to affect progress. Companies that achieve higher long-term profitability are the ones especially adept at leadership development.
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We excel with clients who are looking to achieve their goals and grow their legacy both in their family and their business empire. Your coach is a trusted advisor, partner, educator, strategist who champions you to discover your purpose rather than your passion. Passion will follow once you hone on your unique purpose.
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Alignment is critical when it comes to preparing the next generation of leaders to inherit ownership. If your family is not on the same page for how this process needs to roll out, it can be almost impossible. Our assessment tools will not only identify the areas that need reconciling, but training unique to your organization will help you to implement systems for preparing, training and aligning future family leaders.
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When you look down the road in 10 years, where do you hope to be? Industry research shows that vision-driven companies outperform their counterparts that fail to see a long-term plan for success.
Part of our services include this vision-centered strategic planning. We’ll discuss your vision for growth, how to adjust governance and continuity concerns, how your future vision supports your family’s core values, and how all of this will affect your family.
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Setting and achieving goals direct your enterprise toward a promising, prosperous future. We’ll provide a unifying infrastructure during the planning process that will allow all stakeholders to understand, align with, and support the core leadership’s plan.
This approach represents the family’s commitment to each other, and gives them opportunities to contribute his or her unique strengths to the enterprise. Where there is a shared goal and purpose, the shared victory of achievement will help solidify family bonds and business for generations to come.
