FAMILY-OWNED BUSINESSES
Building on future resilience
Consulting Firm for Entrepreneurial Family Businesses
Family businesses are entrepreneurial, risk-conscious, value-driven and focused on continuity. But the world is changing at lightning speed. Thus, flourishing and growing further is less and less obvious. So it is searching for the optimal balance between entrepreneurship and professionalization.
Without concrete support from an experienced partner, this often isn’t possible. Gwynt offers this assistance. For 20 years, we’ve been driving breakthroughs in business operations. We provide support in entrepreneurship and professional development, as well as with succession planning, for example.
Our solutions
Building Strategy and Innovation Together
1. Making values and goals explicit
Family businesses are often value-driven. However, professional management requires concrete goals and expectations. Therefore, the key is to make family and corporate values explicit and translate them into a tangible strategy and concrete goals at every level of the company.
That way, the direction and focus is clear to everyone. And employees can actively contribute to the realization of strategy and continuity with focused energy.
2. Letting go of ownership
Letting go is a lever for entrepreneurship and growth throughout the company. At the same time, it is perhaps one of the most difficult competencies for family businesses to learn. Letting go of ownership and transferring authority and responsibilities.
Letting go requires trust in each other. Do employees take ownership and start acting entrepreneurially? Everyone will have to learn new leadership styles, competencies and roles.
3. Collective innovation
In the ever faster changing world, continuous innovation is a must. Don't you? Then competitors walk past you in no time. By focusing on collective innovation, you actually make your company a leader.
Collective innovation involves engaging and challenging talents at all levels of the organization. It takes guts to experiment and collaborate with other disciplines or even with other parties. But it is precisely this collectivity and collaboration that leads to more energy and the necessary innovation.
4. Clearly structure organization, roles and collaboration
The organizational structure in family businesses has often grown organically. This can be detrimental to effectiveness in the long run.
Do you want to keep a growing organization manageable and working together optimally? Then it is important to define clear roles, responsibilities and consultation structures. Both within the organization and between family and organization.
Advantages:
• Everyone knows what they can and should expect from one another.• Coordination and decision-making no longer take place “from the top down,” but “horizontally.”
• Meetings have a clear structure, focused on effective and action-oriented decision-making.
• Employees are kept informed in a consistent and clear manner.
• You create a safe and supportive environment where employees seek each other out and talk to one another.5. Develop objective decisiveness
Family businesses often steer by intuition, and that is definitely a strength. Moreover, it becomes even stronger if you can back up intuition with figures and objective facts. Because when you know where you stand from established goals, management and staff can intervene and act proactively.
Also important: making the tacit knowledge held by family members and senior employees explicit. This will enable employees to act based on both the facts and collective knowledge.
The result is a more decisive company. People make quicker and better decisions and take the right actions.
Estate Planning
Succession planning is a hot topic for many family businesses. Can and will the next generation take over the business? Does the intended successor have the competencies needed?
The speed and magnitude at which new challenges are emerging is great. It is not always easy for the new generation to make the necessary strokes at the pace required.
We see through the challenges associated with succession processes. As a trusted partner, we have been privileged to support many family businesses in this regard. Together we build the bridge to the future and ensure continuity.
Want to know more about our approach?
Our specialists will be happy to explain our method further in a personal interview.
Please contact Dirk Harm Eijssen, Partner at Gwynt.
D.Eijssen@gwynt.eu