Family enterprises are never boring. In fact, you might find in one family enterprise enough passion to sustain ten non-family firms. The challenge is to translate the unique assets of family business to a strategy, which enables growth and continuity.<\/p>\n
This I realized while studying Clinical Organizational Psychology in INSEAD Business School, following an intensive career as a researcher of organizational strategy and innovation. Fascinating case studies, I encountered, concerning well-known family corporations, persuaded me to make family businesses my own business, henceforth.<\/p>\n
Currently, I advise family businesses in Israel and abroad and continue to follow such firms as practitioner and scholar.<\/p>\n
To my clients I provide comprehensive strategic consulting services, which take into consideration the various needs of the family firm: in the managerial realm, in the financial realm, in the legal realm, and in the interpersonal realm. I have developed an integrative consulting model, which gives proper significance to each of the aforementioned aspects, without neglecting “the big picture”. At the same time, the model pays attention to family relations and their influence on the firm’s operations.<\/p>\n
Unlike other firms, family businesses have to deal with impositions that stem from family relations and from commitment to the family’s heritage and tradition. Such firms tend to treat the business as an extension of the family nest and to shelter it from the outside world, while clinging to old patterns of practice. As a result, family firms frequently find it hard to execute crucial changes needed in order to ensure the firm’s continuity and make way to business growth.<\/p>\n
The challenge is even harder nowadays, in the web era. To survive the harsh competition, they face in the local and global markets, corporations are required to be much more dynamic, innovative, and open to their external environment, than ever before. However, out of fear to interrupt the vulnerable balance inside the family and between family and business, many family firms show unwillingness to adopt advanced organizational and business tools, necessary for them to deal successfully with current challenges.<\/p>\n
Experience shows us, for example, that family firms tend to prefer uniformity and unity to a well-defined division of roles and to a differential reward system, based on position and performances, even when this undermines business interests. In other cases, family firms refuse to recruit professionals from outside, although they need new expertise in the organization. Sometimes organs in the firm fail to communicate and negotiate properly with each other, and as a result, damage the firm’s performances.<\/p>\n
Due to my thorough understanding of the unique needs of family firms and the special challenges they face, I assist my clients to create change and growth in crucial crossroads in the firm’s path. Together we shape long-term solutions for the firm.<\/p>\n
These include: forming a comprehensive strategic plan; creating a managerial structure and division of roles which fits the firm’s needs; appointing decision-making bodies for the organization such as board of directors composed of family members; establishing efficient inter-organizational communication patterns which serve to implement and facilitate the change process. When required, I recruit external specialists who join the process and accompany executives in the firm for a limited period of time, to enable them to acquire the expertise needed for their new roles and assignments.<\/p>\n
Crucial crossroads might be an intergenerational transmission, a financial crisis, or a new opportunity for expansion. My goal is to bring the business to a high level of professionalism, fit to international standards, while using to the optimum all its different kinds of assets: strategic and financial capital; human and cultural capital; reputation and heritage.<\/p>\n
I stick to an uncompromising approach. I promote an open and positive flow of communication between executives and organs in the firm, and at the same time, I treat business interests and goals as top priority. My consultation model strives to bridge between impositions dictated by family needs, on the one hand, and between the firm’s needs as a business, on the other hand.<\/p>\n
We are all familiar with the myth saying that one shouldn’t mix between business and family, but that’s only a myth. Currently, third of the largest firms in the world are held by families, and McKinsey consulting firm predicts a significant growth taking place until 2025 in the percentage of family firms among firms whose annual sales cycle exceeds one billion dollars. In other words, it is quite safe to presume that family firms’ impact in the global business market will only turn greater.<\/p>\n
This is not surprising, if we observe family firms closely. Evidently, the unique features of these firms serve in most cases also as a source of power and prosperity.<\/p>\n