Business Tv PWC Tells How to Behave when Your Son is the MD

More expert business advice from Paul George from the Business Families Team at PricewaterhouseCoopers, as he gives examples of the kinds of problems family business face, and effective ways to deal with them:


“There are obviously some different roles here and that can cause some different situations, difficult situations. I mean I think one leader of a fabulous UK business said to me the other day is the one thing you always have to remember is he’s married to the mother of his managing director and difficult decisions always have to be made. I think one family business leader told me he found it a big break through in his family relationships when he’d worked out that raising performance issues over the family Christmas dinner was probably not a good way to behave.
Yeah this stuff is difficult, this stuff is difficult and it has to be managed I think those who do it well are very rigorous about separating the different roles they play, about doing business especially the hard parts of business and difficult discussions in the right environment, in the office at the right time but this is not easy stuff and more generally if you look at some of the retorts about benefits of the family businesses some of the big problems in family business can come where family dynamics do go wrong, where there a problems within the family and it also easy for that to spill over, down into the business. Typically these are relatively non-political organisations, providing that the family is getting on well, can become enormously political if there is a problem within the family.
I think one of the key things is to have some clarity and structure around what the deal is. What the deal is within the family about the relationship with the business so at the sort of simplest level I think best practices for family owning businesses to have clarity about, you’re a shareholder, what are your rights in terms of getting involved in the business, can you turn up and view and if so when, can you work in the business, if so what experience do you have to get first, so its getting all that clear and understood I think is important and I think having a thought through process for making sure that the family are communicating with each other and people are getting together maybe once a year to have a serious discussion about what’s going on in the business and those not working in the business are not being excluded are also very important. So like so much of this stuff where there’s complexity putting a bit of structure around it helps enormously but again this is never going to be simple. This is real people we’re talking about and real families and we know that’s not simple.”

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