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Element of Succession Planning
The professionalization of
business should be considered as one of most crucial elements of a successful succession plan. The sooner professionalization process is recognized as a strategic objective for family business, better odds are for successful generational transition for family business.
For example, my personal experience indicates that family business founders / owners are generally much better than professional managers in dealing with problems associated with risk and growth because they are stakeholder - it is their money being spent.
The founder/owner also tends to be more intuitive about business decisions because he/ she personally knows vendors and customers and more humanistic because they tend to personally know individual employees as well as personal situations of employees.
As business organization grows and matures, founder/owner typically becomes less visible and less involved in day to day workings of business. The usual trend is toward involving more "professional managers" (these can be family members or non family employees) who generally tend to be more bureaucratic and less personal in management style. As a result, individual members or factions of management. team functionally polarize between "personal" and "rational" approaches to solving even most simple management issues.
For family business owner, these differences can become a crisis issue involving basic family goals and business objectives: Are we a "business first" family or a "family first" business?
Outside Advice Sought
It is generally at this point when founder/owner seeks objective advice of an "outsider" because founder/owner is unable to get resolution of this dilemma from within family and within business organization.
Without resolution, management consensus will not he attained, and, as a result, business will produce a lot of expensive "commotion" but very little "locomotion" towards happiness of family and growth and prosperity of business.
