Category

Performance Measurement

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September 3, 2024 Capital Structure Planning & Strategy

Mind the Margin

Why Margins Are an Important Metric for Your Family Business

The current economic state is driving operating costs higher for many businesses and eating into profits. Employers are combating this by reevaluating their hiring strategies, which include resetting labor costs and reducing starting salaries. Margin analysis can be a beneficial tool for evaluating performance, and becoming familiar with the typical margins of your family business will provide a touchpoint for identifying opportunities to preserve and grow profits for your family business. Since ‘typical’ margins vary from industry to industry, being able to benchmark to similar companies can give family businesses a better idea of where they stack up.

August 20, 2024 Planning & Strategy Special Topics

Review of Key Economic Indicators for Family Businesses

Coming off a run of economic data releases in the last few weeks, we take a look at the numbers and some of their implications for the broader economy in this week’s post. GDP growth in the U.S. economy measured 2.8% in the second quarter of 2024, outpacing growth of 1.4% in the first quarter. Following persistently elevated measures in the first quarter, recent inflation readings have cooled. The following sections provide a brief look at these economic trends and their implications, sourced from Mercer Capital’s National Economic Review.

April 9, 2024 Planning & Strategy Shareholder Engagement

The Green Jacket Guide to Family Business Surveys

What Can We Learn from the Masters?

It is that time of year. The azaleas are blooming at Augusta National Golf Club and nearly one hundred golfers are gearing up for their shot at a green jacket in the 88th Masters Tournament.

What the Masters has developed in terms of interest and legacy lies in the unique traditions as well as the initiatives taken on by the Masters Tournament Foundation. The Masters Tournament Foundation’s primary purpose is to support, develop, and globally expand the game of golf through clear messaging, marketing, and communications across generations of golfers. Their commitment to creating a more accessible and welcoming golf community is critical to the longevity of the sport itself.

There is no tournament in all of sports more desirable to attend than the Masters. From the iconic pimento cheese sandwich and Azalea cocktail to the 9-hole Wednesday Par-3 tournament, it is truly one-of-a-kind. Similarly, family businesses are unique with traditions of their own that drive shareholder engagement. A shareholder base that is involved and passionate is a critical factor in building a sustainable and prosperous family business. But as family business directors know…

August 7, 2023 Planning & Strategy Shareholder Engagement

How to Communicate Financial Results to Family Shareholders

Whitepaper Release

Everyone agrees that communication promotes positive shareholder engagement, but what does it look like to communicate financial results effectively? In this week’s blog we introduce a whitepaper that offers practical suggestions for presenting key financial data in ways that family shareholders find useful.

June 19, 2023 Valuation

The Hardest Thing to Do in Business

Family businesses are either growing or shrinking. Since shrinking is not an attractive option, we explore the three primary avenues of growth for family businesses in this week’s post, posing some key questions for your directors and managers to consider as they formulate growth strategies.

December 19, 2022 Planning & Strategy

What Is on Your Family Business Box Score?

A question for you and your board, what is on your family business box score? When the lights are still on and things are stable, it can be easy to continue with business as usual and not look too closely at key return metrics. Creating a box score, and maybe more importantly, updating it consistently, can help prevent complacency.  Establishing fundamental metrics important to your business and benchmarking your performance to peers or ‘opponents’ can help quickly convey how the family business is doing to you and your shareholders. In this week’s post, we consider three metrics for your family business box score.

August 22, 2022 Planning & Strategy Special Topics

Review of Key Economic Indicators for Family Businesses

With economic data for 2Q22 trickling in, we take a look at a few key trends that developed during the quarter.  Volatile equity markets, ongoing inflationary concerns, and rising interest rates drove headlines in the second quarter of the year. The information in this post provides a concise and unbiased look at some of the trends that manifested themselves during the quarter.

May 23, 2022 Special Topics

Peloton, Planet Fitness, and Family Business

Pedaling Too Close to the Sun

Think back to March 2020.  Many businesses and operations saw immediate stoppages and closures with no idea when they could restart. The fitness industry was no exception. Planet Fitness, the gym operator, completely shut down its locations and its stock plummeted. Peloton Interactive saw sales surge for its at-home exercise spin-bike and its stock soar. These two businesses entered very different seasons at the onset of the COVID-19 lockdowns and slowdown. Planet Fitness was facing a sudden and bitterly cold winter, while Peloton was spinning its way into summer.

We think there are three lessons that can prevent your family business from pedaling in place: understand what season your business is in, be prepared for slow-downs, and diversify prudently. Read more in this week’s post.

May 16, 2022 Special Topics

Review of Key Economic Indicators for Family Businesses in Q1 2022

In this week’s post, we take a look at a few key macroeconomic trends that developed in the, shall we say, busy, first quarter of 2022. Between volatile equity markets, mounting global geopolitical tensions, raging inflation, and increasing interest rates, a lot went on in the year’s first quarter from a macro perspective.

We hope that this blog post cuts through some of the “noise” and provides our readers with a concise and unbiased look at economic trends from the first quarter of 2022. 

November 16, 2021

Built Ford “Family” Tough

Ford, Rivian, and Lessons on Family Business Diversifications

Following Rivian’s recent IPO, the Ford Motor Company’s $1 billion investment in the electric vehicle startup is now worth about $18 billion. With this investment representing more than 20% of Ford’s total equity market capitalization, it raises some interesting questions for family business directors contemplating the role of diversification within their businesses and families. In this week’s post, we consider the what, who, and why of diversification.

August 16, 2021 Special Topics

Sanderson Farms Case Study

Cargill is one of the largest family businesses in the world. Earlier this year, we analyzed the Family Capital list of the world’s 750 largest family businesses; Cargill checked in at number 15 on that list, with annual revenue reported to be in excess of $110 billion. Cargill made headlines earlier last week for its acquisition (together with another family business, Continental Grain) of Sanderson Farms, a publicly traded poultry business (ticker: SAFM). It is not every day that family businesses acquire publicly traded companies, so the transaction is worth exploring a bit further.

April 19, 2021 Planning & Strategy

Getting to the Top

A Peek Inside the Family Capital 750

Late last month, Family Capital released its third annual ranking of the world’s largest family businesses, the Family Capital 750.  As the name suggests, the list includes 750 global family businesses with 2019 revenue ranging from $2.7 billion to $514 billion. in this week’s post, we share what we found when we scrubbed the data.

November 16, 2020

And Now You Know… The Rest of the Story

Revenue growth and profitability are critical measures for the health of any family business, but by themselves, they tell only half of the story.  As a family business director, you need the whole story.  We’re not aware that Paul Harvey was a financial analyst, but if he were, we suspect his favorite performance metric would have been return on invested capital, because it tells you the rest of the story.

August 10, 2020 COVID-19 Coverage

How Is Your Family Business Performing in the COVID-19 Pandemic?

One thing in short supply thus far in the pandemic has been perspective.  We know that GDP fell by more than 30% during the second quarter, but how does that translate into the actual financial performance of businesses?  Family business directors have been flying blind over the past few months, with no reliable way to benchmark the performance of their businesses. 

Earnings season for the second quarter of 2020 gives us the first opportunity to see how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting businesses. In this post, we elaborate on four themes that emerge from the data.

July 20, 2020

How Much Money Do Family Businesses Like Ours Invest?

To be sustainable, family businesses need to invest capital wisely. As directors, the investment decisions you make today can define the family business for future generations. Before making a significant investment decision that will be hard to reverse, it is a good idea to evaluate how other companies in your industry are investing their capital.

July 14, 2020

How Much Money Do Family Businesses Like Ours Make?

The goal of “maximizing shareholder value” is fast assuming its rightful place in the dustbin of financial history as more families embrace a broader vision of relevant stakeholders for their enterprises.  The freedom to develop a balanced scorecard of performance objectives that includes both financial and non-financial goals is one of the most rewarding aspects of family business. 

Embracing non-financial objectives does not mean, however, that a family business can be unconcerned about their profitability.  After all, operating efficiency helps to underwrite the various non-financial goals and values the family chooses.  So, our first comparison when benchmarking performance for a family business is to evaluate profitability.

July 6, 2020

Seven Questions Benchmarking Can Answer for Your Family Business

Introducing the 2020 Benchmarking Guide for Family Business Directors

Managing a family business without benchmarking data is a bit like shopping for clothes in a store with no mirrors.  Without context, financial performance is hard to interpret.  Directors are responsible for making long-term decisions that can influence the course of a family business for decades.  Access to relevant benchmarking data is essential for directors as they contemplate strategic financing, investment, and distribution decisions.

We have structured our 2020 Benchmarking Guide for Family Business Directors around seven questions designed to provide the necessary context for financial decision-making in family businesses.

September 9, 2019

Five Reasons Your Family Business Should Focus on ROIC

Return on invested capital is not a silver bullet – it will not solve all of the challenges facing your family business.  However, when we let the data speak for itself, the benefits of ROIC are undeniable. This week, we identify five reasons family businesses should focus on ROIC.

August 29, 2019

Are Metrics Really Undermining Your Family Business?

This month’s cover story in the Harvard Business Review takes aim at the misuse of metrics in businesses, highlighting the tendency of leaders to confuse numbers with strategy. In this post, we consider how to apply the authors’ suggestions in the context of family businesses.

August 5, 2019

Return on Invested Capital: Digging a Little Deeper

The best performance metrics address not just “what” performance has been in the past, but reveal the “why” behind that performance and give direction for “how” to improve performance in the future.  In last week’s post, we introduced return on invested capital (ROIC) as a comprehensive performance measure for family businesses.  In this week’s post, we will dig a little deeper with ROIC, demonstrating how we can use ROIC to answer the “what,” “why,” and “how” questions for your family business.

July 29, 2019

And Now You Know… The Rest of the Story

Revenue growth and profitability are critical measures for the health of any family business, but by themselves, they tell only half of the story.  As a family business director, you need the whole story.  We’re not aware that Paul Harvey was a financial analyst, but if he were, we suspect his favorite performance metric would have been return on invested capital, because it tells you the rest of the story.

April 22, 2019

Basics of Financial Statement Analysis

Part 4: Telling the Company’s Story

This post is the fourth installment from our Basics of Financial Statement Analysis whitepaper.  In this series of posts, our goal is to help readers develop an understanding of the basic contours of the three principal financial statements. The balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows are each indispensable components of the “story” that the financial statements tell about a company.

March 25, 2019

Basics of Financial Statement Analysis

Part 3: The Statement of Cash Flows

This post is the third of four installments from our Basics of Financial Statement Analysis whitepaper.  In this series of posts, our goal is to help readers develop an understanding of the basic contours of the three principal financial statements. The balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows are each indispensable components of the “story” that the financial statements tell about a company.  This week, we focus on the statement of cash flows.

March 4, 2019

Basics of Financial Statement Analysis

Part 2: The Income Statement

This post is the second of four installments from our Basics of Financial Statement Analysis whitepaper.  In this series of posts, our goal is to help readers develop an understanding of the basic contours of the three principal financial statements. The balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows are each indispensable components of the “story” that the financial statements tell about a company.  This week, we focus on the income statement.