Managing the Family, Managing the Business

Listen to navin Amarasuriya talk about different ways of managing the family, in order to manage the business.

In the family business that I’m a part of, we’re 5 generations old and we’ve been around for quite a long time so one of the things that I suppose was learned earlier on was that if these issues are not discussed then it could lead to problems down the road. If there’s a disagreement on a larger issue, perhaps there is a smaller project that everyone could come to some agreement on and work together and essentially establish the relationships between each other to then go and take on bigger challenges. A lot of families have foundations which actually serve this purpose, to not just imbue the values of the founder, values of the family, but to also provide a forum outside of the business where they can work together and collaborate and hopefully understand each other better. So it comes down to, I guess, managing the family and managing the business. Now, because it’s a family business and it’s privately held I guess managing the family through some kind of family council might be a good first step. So laying down some basic ground rules, making sure the different parties know how to engage with each other on a familiar level, and this could be even external to the business, but hopefully they will bring some of that civility into the business side when they do discuss issues of ownership, issues of future strategy, of direction, succession, that could be the way to just start it all off.