First, it is a way to honor family (parents or grandparents) who founded a successful business.

The FF can be used to develop a wide range of community-focused improvement initiatives – such as a scholarship program for worthy students or paying for cost of a teacher to maintain and/or upgrade their teaching skills.

One FF awarded a $250 gift certificate to an office supply company for "teacher of year" – so teacher could supplement classroom supplies without having to pay for these supplies with their own money. The FF can coordinate and do charitable work of business. The FF can be a great PR tool for business and it can also provide employment for a family member.

And yes, set up correctly, FF is tax deductible.

Start an ancillary business

Another successful strategy we recommend is to start an ancillary business.

For example, a family business that is in warehouse and distribution business can consider "outsourcing" delivery of their product to a family member. Now that family member has nucleus of a "contract delivery" business and can promote and sell that service to other businesses. Another client had a daughter who became a CPA. The business could not afford to hire her as a CFO or comptroller – but instead family business became her first client as she set up her accounting and book keeping service!

If you would like to discuss these and other business building strategies – we would be delighted to hear from you!

To better understand responsibility diffusion, consider a one-person business. Quite simply, when something doesn't get done or done correctly, only one person is involved in chain of responsibility. Oh sure, one can try to blame it on bad luck, poor timing, etc - but most likely it can be attributed to poor judgment or poor execution - maybe both! Founders of successful family businesses understand this concept better than anyone because they fight battle of responsibility diffusion on a daily basis.

As business organization grows, excuse mechanisms that cause responsibility diffusion seem to grow even faster! Both Europe and North America are seeing much more emphasis on corporate social responsibility as our largest corporations exhibit some shocking evidence of responsbility diffusion - Enron, Arthur Andersen, World Com, Sunbeam, Im Clone, Investors Overseas, IBM...

Symptoms of responsibility diffusion

Here are some symptoms that could indicate your organization might be infected with responsibility diffusion:

1. When employees routinely do not show up for work on time - is it because of "traffic", problems with car, etc. Or do they admit they did not leave home early enough?

2. When work assignments are not completed on time, do you hear things like: "I would have finished work on time but I had a bunch of phone calls that I had to deal with"; or "There were other fires I had to fight." Or do your people admit they did a poor job of scheduling their time.

3. When you ask why a particular goal or objective was missed, do you get a lot of "its not our fault" reasons why goals were not met. Or does someone admit that perhaps he or she and their people did not work hard enough (or smart enough) to get expected results?

4. When a competitor wins a bid on some business project, did you lose bid because your price was too high; your quality of product or service was higher than what customer wanted to pay; competitor "bought" business. Or does someone admit they failed to do a proper job of salesmanship?

Getting picture? Listen carefully when explanations are being given! Remember old saying that - "success has many parents but failure is always an orphan"?

One of reasons responsibility diffusion is so pervasive is that when something comes off track, assignment of responsibility is often used to embarrass, shame and humiliate individuals.

Management sometimes uses assignment of responsibility like a club to ensure organizational compliance and in doing so they create an organization of lemmings.

I like notion put forth by Henry Ford: "failure is only opportunity to begin again more intelligently".

Family business owners, managers and employees in successful businesses tend to shoulder and incorporate responsibility as part of process of continuous improvement. In this environment, responsibility is considered a positive notion instead of a negative consequence. When using this approach, responsibility diffusion can be minimized and sometimes even eliminated!