The Key To Family Business Success
ISSN 15465640

Understanding Family Business brings you articles and tips from Family Business Experts who understand family values and business systems.

If you like this e-zine, please do a friend and us a favor and pass it on.

If a friend did forward this to you, and if you like what you read, please subscribe at...

Understanding Family Business

David here. Don is on the "other side" of the country this week working with a family business in California, so he asked me to open the newsletter for him.

We always leave our itineraries with others when we travel so that contact can be maintained. Looking over Don's for this trip reminded me of a couple of things...

He's on an assignment that we would not likely have started had it not been for our online presence, which we started a few years ago to expand our ability to reach out to new clients. That ability to reach out is exactly why we are adding the Family eBusiness section to our site and to this newsletter.

He's scheduled 10-12 hour days, and I know some of them go even longer... when a group is making progress on issues, Don just can't bring himself to call for "down pencils". Since our contract fees are on a daily basis rather than "hourly", our clients are getting really full measure.

Am I leading up to a policy change for Don's rates to increase or contracts be lengthened to allow shorter work days? No! We don't believe in tinkering with what works well.

My apologies, Don - but I knew you would never mention this!

Reaching out by traveling around the country isn't the only way that our online presence has helped us expand our consulting practice...

• We are also able to answer many questions on a fee-for-service basis - the kind of situations that don't require full-day or on-site visits.
  Pay-as-you-go consulting in half-hour time blocks

• We have produced some publications that we sell, often enabling clients to download and get working right away no matter what time of day - or night! - or day of the week! it is.
  Our publications
• And we have a fr*ee service that lets you ASK THE EXPERT - very useful for those quick questions that you don't want to make an appointment to ask.
  ASK THE EXPERT - fr*ee family business advice

This past month has been busy for us at the web site - we launched a whole new section. General Aviation may be all about small air planes but General Aviation is not a small industry. In fact, family businesses play a major role in this industry - from providing the aircraft and services to the pilots themselves. Check it out and if there are any aspects of GA that you would like to see covered, use the ASK THE EXPERT form that can be reached from the Navigation Bar on the left of any page on our site to drop us a quick note with your suggestion - including family businesses to feature.

And. we have been working on the preparation and structure of our new Family eBusiness section for the web site. Originally, we had focused on a suitable approach a few years ago before family businesses had fully realized the NEED to be online. Now that the need is proven beyond any shadow of doubt, we are changing our emphasis to providing information and sharing our experiences to help you succeed with doing business online.

=====

Financial Management has a new article.

Service charges are often a drop in the bucket to the payer, but make big bucks for the merchant. Learn how one made $18 million a year - in a scam.

=====

Reminders...

Our Family Business Blog [Blog is short for "web log"] mini-journal will keep you updated about site changes and other family business matters. Check it out regularly on the site from the NavBar button. Better still, subscribe to the blog using the RSS feed information on any of our pages, such as

Understanding Family Business.

And remember to Take our fr*ee assessment on the 29 Leadership Practices...

Family eBusiness

Product marketing strategy

Looking for potential affiliates to help sell your products or services? Need to boost your products' / services' ratings - to get better visibility from the searches? Use Search Status to show Backward Links - the links that these potential partners and affiliates have with the other sites they do business with. Study those other sites to see what they are doing to attract partners and affiliates - or to see how you can improve on their model to attract the top partners and affiliates to your programs.

Want to set up a joint venture - so you can sell more of your product or service? Find out who the owner and contact persons are for a potential partner - get all the site's WhoIs information.

Need to know how your competitors are doing at the major search engines in promoting their products or services? Find out how many pages are indexed at each of the 3 majors.

Want to know what pages they are keeping quiet by not having them indexed - the pages that might reveal their powerful new product or promotion strategy or pricing model? Search Status will highlight the robots.txt file that directs search engines to stay away from that page. But you will then know about the page and can read all about their great "secret"!

Comments, requested topics, blog messages...!