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Understanding Family Business

December 21, 2006 Issue #062

Our work is dealing with family-owned businesses - helping to strengthen the success of the business while at the same time maintaining healthy family relationships.

Our informal and low-key approach is highly successful and in many situations we become an adjunct of the family business - because we care! And our accessibility is without equal because we become friends as well as a professional resource for our clients.

Many of our clients start as visitors to our web site. They are first amazed and sometimes even overwhelmed by the amount of information that we make available to the public - and there are no charges or user fees. That is such a fantastic change from the experiences most people have as they use the Internet. Even more, the web site is not a high pressure selling environment - just hard facts and proven strategies, based on over 40 years of working with family businesses.

Many people are curious about the amount of traffic we get and one of the more frequent questions our visitors ask is "How did the Family Business Experts web site get to be the highest ranked family business resource on the Internet?"

Well, to be perfectly frank, that was not our intended goal. Like many of our family business clients - where we are at is not where we had intended to end up! We wanted to develop an electronic brochure for our company - and in doing his research, one of the Family Business Institute partners, David Jones, discovered a medical doctor in Montreal by the name of Ken Evoy. Ken posed a rather simple but compelling question - "Why build a web site when you can build a web business?"

We became "true believers" and as they say, "the rest is history!"

Site Build It! is the brain-child of Ken Evoy and we consider it to be the best software system available to building a successful web site for your business. It is easy to use, comprehensive and inexpensive. Evoy's material explaining the dynamics of presenting and selling products and services on the Internet is a short course in "Web Site Education". It should be on the reading list for every CEO and every sales and marketing director. To learn more about Site Build It, click on this link

Site Build It!

David asks me to remind all of our readers that Site Build It! is currently having a 2-for-1 sale... it's a terific bargain even at full price, and much better at half price. With a no risk free trial, get one for your business and the other for that difficult-to-shop for person on your list - grandchild, niece/nephew, spouse...

Communication strategies are a crucial element to every successful family business - in fact we have a complete section our web site to address communication strategies.

I am always amazed at the "reach" of the many communication platforms available to all of us entrepreneurs interested in using our web sites and the Internet to more effectively promote our businesses. One feature of our web site is called Family Business Profiles.

Our last Family Business Profile was on the Worcester Wreath Company - a family business in Maine. We have had nearly 20,000 people read the story! That is a much higher result than normal - no doubt it had to do with the patriotic theme of the Wreath Across America program - a program designed to honor our veterans.

I guess the point I am trying to make here is that while we gather with our families to celebrate the Holidays - there are many thousands of our service men and woman standing in harms way - that we remember them in our thoughts and prayers - and wish them God Speed in coming home safe - and to thank them for their sacrifices.

"Merry Christmas" to all of you, from all of us!

Don Schwerzler

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Here's another article that we had been asked to write for another publication.

Professional Intervention

Professional intervention is usually needed because running a successful family business is substantially more difficult than running a non family business. There are many contributing factors.

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