New Venture Lab: Equipping Christian Entrepreneurs

Growing My Business While Working with My Family

Question

I run a business with several employees and I want to keep growing the business and the value of my business so I have more to hand off to my children, but I now understand and agree with the vision to involve my family more and spend more time shepherding my family.  What changes would you suggest that help me to achieve both needs.

Answer

For related topics, please see considering hiring employees, hiring employees into a family business, delegating work without hiring.and absentee ownership.  To be clear on your question, it sounds like you are trying to achieve a scenario where you can work from home with your family and shepherd your family during the day, but still grow a company with employees, offices and other infrastructure.  In order to do that, I would recommend hiring a general manager to manage your business with all of the right incentives to think and act like an owner and then move your office back home where you focus on performing the highest leveraged, value-added activities that you are the most skilled at and whereby you can create the most value for your company.  This will allow you to both shepherd your family throughout the day and to bring your family members into your "family office" to assist you with the high-level management of your business enterprise while you mentor your children on entrepreneurship.

For example, let's say, your real skills are sales and marketing, while operations is not your favorite thing.  Then I would suggest hiring an operations manager to manage day-to-day operations while you focus on sales and marketing from your home office.  Not only is it a high-value way of investing your time, but you will likely be able to grow your company faster without the distractions of the daily operational headaches.

Another example is the scenario where a  person is really good at doing business deals.  In a similar scenario, you could move your mergers and acquisitions activity to your home office and focus on that while you hire a general manager for each of the businesses you acquire (again a good compensation plan is critical.)

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