Closely held and family-owned businesses face all the challenges of widely held businesses in addition to those resulting from their unique ownership aspects. These unique aspects critically influence the owners in:
- Setting objectives
- Creating and implementing strategy
- Selecting alternatives for financing, liquidity, and deployment of capital
Because Hankin & Co. arrives earlier and stays later, we are able to assist our clients in addressing these unique aspects and to drive them to consensus resolutions that are responsive to the business and personal forces at play.
The forces that impact the decision making of closely held and family owned businesses include the following:
- Majority-minority
- Equal ownership
- Age differences of owners
- Objectives of owners (e.g. asset accumulation versus current income, etc.)
- Owner managers versus non-owner managers
- Family relationships among owners (e.g. founder-children, sibling-sibling)
In our experience, these forces, acting independently or together, often encumber or even paralyze the decision making required of a business. While the effects of this paralysis may at times be benign, the effects can also be extraordinarily detrimental to a business or owner under stress.
Hankin & Co. has found that using a variation of our Strategy Boot Camp with owners or relevant family members can be profoundly effective. The owner or family boot camps can be run in parallel with the strategy boot camp, allowing the owners or family members to participate in and be aware of the results of the strategy boot camp as it progresses. The strategy boot camp then shares the benefits of the owner and family boot camp. It is rare that conflict among the owners and family goes unnoticed by the management team, and too often such conflict has a debilitating effect on the business organization, its objectives, and its strategy. Resolution of such conflict is often a major step in rapidly improving business value.
Telephone (310) 556-4422 Fax (310)
276-9414
