Family Business

Family businesses

Managing a Family Business

Not all entrepreneurs start a business. Sometimes circumstances dictate that they take over a family business, hence becoming entrepreneurs by default. The first venture I managed put me in this situation. Being the eldest, after my father had a stroke, I was compelled to manage our small drugstore chain. It was far from my dream business and it was the start of a neophyte’s nightmare.

Managing our business is quite challenging. Just like any other family business, it is full of emotional issues. There are so many role overlaps, because of so many unwritten rules. However, with good communication and respect, conflicts were resolved.

If you were tasked to manage a family business, here are some recommendations that would help smoothen out the transition:

• Know what your responsibilities and areas of authority are. I should first have clarified with my parents what I was supposed to do, what I could not do, what kind of decisions I can make on my own, and what I must first refer to them. When I began, I was just dispatched to “manage” the stores. After looking around the store and greeting some of the staff, I sat down in the manager’s chair and wondered what I was going to do. One of the urgent things I wanted to do was to fire a certain staff for lack of cooperation. However, I was not allowed to do so because the person was a trusted favorite of my mother. This undermined my authority and made it much more difficulty to instill discipline.

• Learn first who can be your allies. So that you can quickly learn the business and garner support for your plans, you must have people who are on your side. I thought that being the son of the owner would make such tasks unnecessary. However, you cannot do everything yourself. This is a tricky process. You must weed out the sycophants from those who are truly productive. One tip: be extra careful with people who engage in flattery. Since I failed to get...