Wisdom

A family business is like a garden, if it is not constantly nurtured by replowing, cultivating, fertilizing, and replanting, its soil becomes marginal. This applies not only to the process, markets and all the usual things that make up success in business but also its people… especially family members. They too need nurturing. Like the garden, there is a process to accomplishing this…

IT CANNOT BE LEFT TO CHANCE.

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin with it; boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

-W.H. Murray

“The demands on the business owner are enormous and wide ranging. While he’s leveraging his talents and funds to fill those demands, he usually finds he has to compensate more and more for his inadequacies by taking the last ditch contributions from his body. He stays up late, he works to long and he doesn’t exercise.”

-Leon Danco, PhD

Leadership in the family business is not related to the gene pool or membership in the “Lucky Sperm Club”. A family business must then necessarily be led by a competent leader with competent skills and while genetics plays an important part in generation to generation successor management, it cannot be the only factor. Like any occupation, there needs to be a process to train and groom these successors so that when the baton is passed they are ready to receive it.

“Everything requires time. It is the only truly universal condition.
All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.”

-Peter F. Drucker: Austrian-born American management consultant, educator, and author