An exercise to think about your business differently

Have you ever heard a manager refer to their team as “one big happy family”? It’s a cliché, for sure, and also doesn’t acknowledge the fact that many families (and many businesses for that matter) display some level of dysfunction. But take that family analogy for a minute and consider your company for the purpose of this exercise:

Imagine that your main stakeholders were your family and the people you cared about most and ask yourself these questions:

• If this company belonged to my family, would I be making the same decisions?
• If I were planning to keep this company growing to hand off to my loved ones, would I be allocating resources differently?
• Would I have a different management structure if this business were family-owned?

Now consider why you may do things differently, and whether you should make changes in your business based on that.

This exercise is worth your time, based on our findings relating to business longevity. Our research has found that family firms on average have a higher growth rate than non-family firms. Family influence is a strong determinant on business growth so maybe it is worth examining if you in fact should be thinking of your company as family.