The Family Business Growth Handbook
Featuring the best thinking of top experts and experienced business leaders, The Family Business Growth Handbook covers every aspect of growing revenues and earnings, from planning, to financing, to motivating employees and family members. It is the complete resource for all family businesses that aspire to grow further and build for the next generation.
The Handbook provides answers to the very questions that plague you most:
- Your family is getting larger every year. How can you expand the enterprise to provide jobs and dividends for all who require them?
- Your company's niche is being threatened. How can you grow in scale and market power to ensure its survival?
- Your business and family face an imminent leadership transition. How can you meet the income needs of the retiring older generation without depriving successors of the cash required to run the business?
Whether you want to grow by developing new products, making an acquisition, or simply expanding sales, you will find a wealth of practical suggestions and noteworthy examples in this authoritative guide from the publishers of Family Business Magazine.
I. Principles and challenges
• Developing a growth philosophy and change-ready culture
• Turn destructive forces into opportunities
• Becoming a "Master of Growth"
• Profile: Branch out - diversify - and do more of what you already do
II. Benchmarking: Are you ready for growth?
• Best practices of fast-growth family businesses
• Relighting the entrepreneurial flame
• Test yourself: How entrepreneurial is your firm?
• For a more prosperous future, first purge the ghosts from your past
• How to tell whether your firm can handle new growth
• A diagnostic test for "growing pains"
• Profile: Orchestrating the first stage of growth
III. Organizing for growth
• How to find out whether your business is sustainable
• Seven keys to sustainable growth
• Making effective use of an outside board
• Recruiting directors who can help you grow
• Strategic planning made simple
• Why you need a real marketing plan
• Growing and diversifying under one umbrella
• Profile: Hiring an outside CFO as change-agent
IV. Growth fast-tracks: The Internet, expansion abroad, acquisitions
• The Internet as growth superhighway: Learning from the pioneers
• Designing an effective Web site
• How CRM can boost your bottom line
• Gearing up to go global
• Profile: A family company on the global fast track
• Alliances: Sharing the risks of entering overseas markets
• Profile: Love and due diligence in finding foreign partners
• How to think like a hunter rather than the prey
• How to succeed in the business of buying another company
V. Financing growth
• Creative financing without debt
• Cultivating your banker and selling your expansion plan
• Step up to the equity cash window
• Tradeoffs in going public
• Is there an IPO in your future?
• IPO do's and don'ts
• Profile: "I was too timid about taking on debt"
• Profile: "We grew too fast and ran into debt"
• Profile: "We didn't pay enough attention to costs"
VI. Growth and succession
• Create a family culture to support interpreneurship
• Budget for retirement to avoid killing the business
• Teach young leaders to take responsible risks
• Invest in the family's human and intellectual capital
• Profile: Thrash out strategic goals before changing leaders
VII. Getting all stakeholders on board
• How to win support for investing in future profits
• Profile: Building a shared vision
• The importance of business-literate shareholders
• Happy employees drive growth
• Incentives to align employees' work with your goals
VIII. Alternative views of growth
• Be the best you can be - not necessarily the biggest
• The family business isn't growing? Buy another one!
• Improving your profit-ability
• Profile: How big is too big?