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Author: Melinda Sherwood. Published in U.S. 1 Newspaper on
February 16, 2000. All rights reserved.
The Family Business: Drew Mendoza
The American family is not a dying institution, and
Drew Mendoza
(www.family-business.net) in Marietta, Georgia, has proof. "Family
business is growing," says Mendoza, "There are between 10
and 20 million privately-held or publicly-held businesses run by
families."
Not only is the family unit still in tact, it’s working well for
American
businesses, says Mendoza, who teaches "Making Sibling Teams
Work,"
at the Rutgers Family Business Forum on Thursday, February 24, at
8 a.m. Call 732-3445-7504. Cost: $185.
Mendoza, who grew up in New York and earned a BSW from University
of Buffalo, Class of 1977, studied family systems theory and strategic
planning at the University of Chicago. "What makes family
businesses
unique is the overlap of family matters with business matters, and
an overlap of family management and ownership issues," says
Mendoza.
"You have a group of people wearing a number of different hats
and asking things like `how do we make decisions on who our successor
will be when choosing between offspring we love or a manager who’s
been here forever? How do we make decisions among our offspring? How
does one sibling terminate a sibling or a brother-in-law?’"
Succession — who’s going to run mom and pop’s shop — can tie
up a business owner’s energy, and even create rifts in the family
or bring a business tumbling down. One way families can work through
that issue effectively is to bring in an outside board of directors.
"An outside board can provide beautiful counsel to the leaders,
but it also takes the issue of succession out of the kitchen, if you
will, and into the board," says Mendoza.
Rather than get preoccupied over succession, owners should focus on
building a long-term business strategy, says Mendoza. "Our
research
has found that having a strategic plan is a bigger contributor to
the continuity of the family business than having a succession
plan,"
he says. The elements of such a plan: "Knowing where you’re going,
how you’re going to get the capital, and the process by which you’ll
make difficult decisions."
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