Family Business Director

June 3, 2025 Current Events Planning & Strategy

Value Amidst Uncertainty

How Will Your Family Business Fare If a Recession Sets In?

The uncertain macroeconomic environment is prompting corporate managers to consider how a recession would influence their businesses. So, now is a good time to highlight this theme and for family business directors to consider the same. How will your family business fare if a recession sets in, and how are expectations affecting the value of your family business today? When discussing value, we find it helpful to group expectations into three primary categories: cash flow, risk and return, and growth.

May 27, 2025 Shareholder Engagement Special Topics

Video: Corporate Finance in 30 Minutes

Last week, we released our newest booklet, “Corporate Finance in 30 Minutes: A Guide for Family Business Directors and Shareholders.” Whether you read the digital copy, requested a physical booklet, or haven’t gotten a chance to look at it yet, here is a short video where Travis Harms discusses those three fundamental corporate finance questions that help family business shareholders understand the basics of corporate finance and ultimately result in more engaged and valuable shareholders.

May 20, 2025 Special Topics

Corporate Finance in 30 Minutes

A Guide for Family Business Directors and Shareholders

We are excited to offer our readers a physical version of our piece, “Corporate Finance in 30 Minutes: A Guide for Family Business Directors and Shareholders.” We have put this piece together to give family business directors and shareholders a vocabulary and conceptual framework for thinking about strategic corporate finance decisions. We hope this provides a helpful resource for you and your fellow directors & shareholders.

May 13, 2025 Shareholder Engagement Special Topics

Understanding Family Ownership Roles

Family businesses are uniquely positioned to leverage the skills, goals, and offerings of their family owners. Some family owners may have different priorities, like creating a legacy, maximizing their return, or simply building a career. As a family business director, knowing these different goals and the types of owners that make up the family business shareholder group is key, and engages and enables the owners who may want to expand their role and contribution.

May 6, 2025 Valuation

Does Your Family Business Have More Than One Value?

It is understandably frustrating for family business directors when the simple question — what is our family business worth? — elicits a complicated answer. While we would certainly prefer to give a simple answer, the reality that a business valuation attempts to describe is not simple. In this week’s post, we demonstrate why the answer to that question depends on why the question is being asked.

April 28, 2025 Current Events Shareholder Liquidity

Market Volatility & Shareholder Liquidity

Recent volatility in economic policy has contributed to stock market volatility. Of the 16 market trading days since “Liberation Day,” the S&P 500 has registered 11 daily index changes greater than 1%. A recent article on Bloomberg.com, “Billionaires Seek to Take Companies Private as Market Melts,” describes how some of the world’s wealthiest families are responding to the volatility. The theme of the article reminded us of the Owner Strategy triangle, and the benefits of being private which we see many of our family business clients take advantage of every day.

April 22, 2025 Planning & Strategy Shareholder Engagement

Next Gen Up

The transition to the next generation has been one of the main impediments to family businesses trying to establish a multigenerational enterprise. For many family businesses, this transition can be rocky (and often unsuccessful) due to the next generation’s lack of exposure to the business and last-minute succession planning. As more members of the next generation express interest in the family business, proactive succession planning and next generation engagement will be more important than ever to keep them involved and prepare them for the transition to come.

April 15, 2025 Capital Budgeting Planning & Strategy

Capital Budgeting and the Meaning of Your Family Business

As family businesses look into capital projects, they often utilize quantitative corporate finance tools, including net present value analysis, internal rate of return, and other traditional analyses. While these tools are informative when evaluating the feasibility of various capital projects, they are not quite as helpful in determining “what” and “how” to decide for your family business.

Before deciding on a capital project, family business directors must determine if the project is a more suitable use of family capital than alternative projects.

Knowing what your family business means can give you a leg up in evaluating these questions effectively and making the most appropriate capital budgeting decisions for your family business.

April 7, 2025 Planning & Strategy Shareholder Engagement Special Topics

The Patience to Prevail, Revisited

This week kicks off a time of economic uncertainty, with global financial markets in turmoil stemming from proposed retaliatory tariffs by the United States on effectively the rest of the world. Simultaneously, golf’s first major of 2025, the Masters, is poised to begin at Augusta National. While the Masters presents a radically different set of challenges from those presented in the Open Championship, the underlying themes and skillsets required to prevail remain the same and are just as applicable to family businesses facing challenges in times of uncertainty. With that in mind, we turn to some key thoughts for family business owners and directors to consider during these tumultuous days.    

March 31, 2025 Dividend Policy

Dividend Policy & the Meaning of Your Family Business

The intersection of family and business generates a unique set of questions for family business directors.  We’ve culled through our years of experience working with family businesses of every shape and size to identify the questions that are most likely to trigger sleepless nights for directors. Excerpted from our book, The 12 Questions That Keep Family Business Directors Awake at Night, we address this week the question, “Does our dividend policy fit?”