Family Businesses is Big Business Today. The Successes and the Pitfalls?
May 21, 2014
Hosted by Marcia Zidle
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Family-owned and operated businesses account for nearly 90% of US businesses--some 5.5 million such entities, they account for 75-85% of our GNP, and about one-third are headed by women. From Wal-Mart, Ford, and Mars Chocolate to local companies such as Vent-a-Hood, Frank Kent Motors, Hunt Oil, and Prestige Maintenance USA--all are family-owned businesses that continue to impact our economy and our community. Family business have unique characteristics, advantages, pitfalls, and composition as compared to publically-held companies. In particular, family businesses must keep at their forefront a notion of what "family" means while ensuring that all elements inside their company function appropriately. When they lose sight of this, they can easily fall victim to the dysfunctions of a family--and it will affect the business. They must also approach strategic decisions--including succession--in a way that preserves their business and their family. Delaying or ignoring these decisions often will have a detrimental effect on the future, not just for their family, but for the success of their enterprise. This session will address some of these decisions, pitfalls, and characteristics using examples--many first-hand. David grew up in a family business and today works with many family businesses particularly on strategy, expansion, and succession.
The Business Edge
Archives Available on VoiceAmerica Business Channel
Your entrepreneurial vision has taken hold. Your business is growing. It's everything you hoped for and more. Or is it? With growth come bigger headaches: more hiring, more capital, more customers to satisfy, more employees to deal with, more plates to juggle and more demands on your time. Whether you realize it or not, you are experiencing Growing Pains!
On The Business Edge, with host Marcia Zidle, The Smart Moves Coach, you will hear how to make the leap from running a stressful business that is always putting out fires to leading a successful company that operates like a finely tuned management machine. You will meet savvy, street smart entrepreneurs and business leaders who’ll share their stories of success and even missteps as well as practical solutions to the unique challenges faced by growing companies.
Marcia Zidle
Marcia Zidle, The Smart Moves Coach, works with entrepreneurial ventures and small to medium size companies to build and leverage their leadership foundation to move from Start-Up to Scale-Up to Successful Enterprise. In other words, she helps them take the growing pains out of growth.
Coming from a unique entrepreneurial and corporate background, she’s both street smart and strategic as she guides CEO’s and their management teams to focus on the right priorities - the right talent - the right alignment - the right performance to get the right results that will satisfy their investors, customers and other stakeholders.
With 25 years of management, business consulting and international experience, she brings an expertise in executive and team leadership; employee engagement and performance; personal and organization change; emotional and social intelligence. Her clients range from privately owned businesses to mid-market professional firms to divisions of global companies in the following industries: healthcare, financial services, insurance, manufacturing, transportation, high-tech, hospitality as well as governments and nonprofit agencies.
Marcia's "claim to fame" is as a global citizen, living as an expatriate with her family in Scandinavia and Australia. In fact, one of her children is an "Aussie.” She’s traveled in over 30 countries throughout Europe, the Middle East, Far East and South Pacific.
