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UFB Newsletter Issue #038 Family Business Profiles Launches! May 03, 2005 |
ISSN 15465640 A free monthly e-zine with articles and tips from Family Business Experts who understand family values and business systems.
May 3, 2005 Issue #038 Family Business Experts https://www.family-business-experts.com http://www.familybusinessexperts.com
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In This Issue... 1. Our Managing Director Announces - 2. Business first family...Family first business Corporate Governance Follow-up 3. Legacy through Leadership LP14. Ensuring Job Performance Standards 4. Around the Family Business Experts web sites
1. Our Managing Director Announces - It has been exciting and busy for us since out last issue. Our first Family Business Profile is now on the site! Baxa Corporation's Brian Baldwin and his sons are a family business success story. Their individual expertise and the roles they play in the company are a perfect fit and create the ideal family business synergy. As I mentioned in the last issue, for owners who want to be profiled, or advisors who want to nominate a candidate, we now have the initial questionnaire form on the web site at Family Business Profile Questionnaire. Our readers will find inspiration from your success story, and you might even find good new business contacts! The AICPA's prestigious Journal of Accountancy featured our site and this newsletter as one of the "Smart Stops On The Web". That same issue of JOA featured an article "The New Importance of Materiality". A bit technical, it addresses what auditors and executives are doing under Sarbanes-Oxley to detect and prevent material control weaknesses. We addressed Sarbanes Oxley in Corporate Governance last issue, hopefully in a less technical manner! The Chairman of Hewlett-Packard has some interesting observations that pertain to the Corporate Governance issue that we addressed last issue. They are a quick but very insightful read in our Family Business section. And we're still busy! Work is almost completed on an entirely new section of the web site - Estate Planning. Much of the material we've found is quite technical so we're presenting the concepts and tools rather than the technical methods. You'll get into technical issues soon enough when you work with your professional advisors - our hope is to give you the "lay of the land" so that you can be more comfortable when you get into the process with them. We continue with the Leadership Practices series, since these practices are the foundation for the processes that must be in place in order to achieve success. Reminder: We've developed a couple of quick diagnostic assessments to help you. They are both fr*ee [at least for a while] and we try to deliver 48 hour turnaround of our analysis. Try them! The Holonomic Top Down Assessment asks you about a combination of the 12 Main Enabling Processes that an effective organization has to have operating in order to achieve the 6 Desired Organizational Characteristics of effective organizations. Where your assessment indicates one or more of these are not working in your organization, we'll feed back suggestions as to the underlying Leadership Practices that might not be working. Diagnosing from the other direction - Bottom-Up - we ask you to identify which of 29 Leadership Practices aren't present or working. From that, we point you to Enabling Processes and thus Desired Characteristics that probably aren't functioning.
Whether to contribute, challenge (or hopefully even praise) our newsletter, I encourage you to contact me directly Don, or our editor David. Enjoy, and here's wishing you, your family, your clients... much success! Don Schwerzler, Managing Director 2. Business first family...Family first business:
Corporate Governance - A Follow-up"Generally, when boards have not functioned well, openness has not existed. One of the signs of a poorly functioning board is a lack of openness between the company management and the board. If you look at companies that have stumbled and the boards that have struggled in dealing with their companies’ poor performance, you can see that in virtually all cases openness did not exist. For one reason or another the board was kept in the dark about the real issues in the company.” Quote from Lewis Platt, former chairman, CEO and President of Hewlett-Packard. HALO is an on-line assessment process that helps to streamline board member communication while improving interaction between directors and management executives. It is extremely flexible and can be adapted to measure individual units within an organization right up to the whole organization. Contact Don Schwerzler to learn more about HALO.
Our Tips and Recommendations
Easy-to-understand wealth transfer planning guide for entrepreneurs, business owners and members of a family business A proven holistic model for financial, tax and legal advisors to expand their family business practice Becoming a Wealth Transfer Specialist More businesses than ever are using the Internet to reach local markets. If your business isn't one of them, you're going to be left behind. BizPlanBuilder [Jian] Helps you create your business plan quickly by organizing your thoughts into carefully scripted text. Great spread sheet templates for the financial projections. Includes resources and not just blanks to fill in. Don't Let Your E-mail or Newsletter End Up... Use SpamCheck To Keep Your E-Mail Out Of The Junk Folder! [We rate 1.4 where 0-5 is clean and ratings can go over 16!]
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Project KickStart is the fastest, easiest way to plan and schedule projects. Project KickStart gives you the power to think through all aspects of a project before you begin. You'll create project plans and strategies guaranteed to get the results you want -- fast. Define project phases. Clarify your goals. Anticipate obstacles. Establish tasks. Delegate assignments. Set due dates. Check off tasks when they're done. Bump dates. And much, much more! Project KickStart for any project in your family business. Site Build It! "Why build JUST a Web site... when you COULD build a Web BUSINESS?" 3. Legacy through Leadership There are 29 Leadership Practices [LP] that are really the foundation upon which 12 holonomic or enabling processes[HP] are built, and which, in turn, produce 6 desired organizational characteristics [DOC]. We'll look at each in this section. LP14. Ensuring Job Performance StandardsEnsuring job performance standards involves setting performance standards that must be attained if the employee is to remain employed and receive average total compensation. A formal set of procedures exists to measure job performance and the outcome of the performance evaluation affects job rewards. Take our fr*ee assessment on the 29 Leadership Practices...
4. Around the Family Business Experts web sites Search the entire content site
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