Corporate Finance & Planning Insights for Multi-Generational Family Businesses
Our family business clients naturally want to know what their business is worth today. But an even better question asked by many of them is what they can do today to make their family business more valuable tomorrow. While the specifics of value creation are unique to each business, we like to use a common framework to help our clients identify pathways for creating value.
We present key elements of this framework in this week’s blog post, to get your family business ready for 2022.
We hope you had a great Christmas and a happy holiday season. To end the year, we summarize some themes and most read pieces from Family Business Director you may have missed throughout the year. Enjoy!
Where does your family business find itself during the current planning cycle? Are there investing convictions that your family business should double down on like Elon Musk, or is it time to follow the Gambler’s advice and take some chips off the table? And what does Charlie Munger have to do with this? Check out this week’s post to find out.
In this post, Travis Harms sat down with Dennis Hinton, Managing Director at North River Group, to speak about some common reasons family businesses seek non-family equity and how family business owners can achieve liquidity and diversification.
This summer, we partnered with Family Business Magazine to conduct our inaugural survey of dividend practices at family-owned businesses. This week, we feature an article that we wrote for the magazine summarizing the survey results. We hope you enjoy and gain some insights that can help you and your family evaluate your current policy and make plans for the future.
For most of us, Thanksgiving is a time to disregard normal dietary restraint in the company of extended family members that one rarely sees. For some enterprising families, however, Thanksgiving quickly devolves from a Rockwellian family gathering to a Costanza-style airing of grievances. So, in the holiday spirit, we offer this list of the top ten questions not to ask at Thanksgiving dinner. If you have trouble distinguishing between the board room and the dining room, this list is for you.
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.
The recent turmoil engulfing the Rogers family, controlling shareholders of the $20 billion Canadian wireless communications and media conglomerate Rogers Communication, piqued our interest. What can public family strife affecting the Rogers family teach us? Well, quite a bit. In this post, we summarize the family drama and provide three strategies to keep in mind to stave off harsh family infighting that can, ultimately, bleed over into your company’s ability to operate effectively.
Despite our best efforts, having four kids in the house means that we are a net candy importer over the Halloween weekend. Staring at the piles of candy in our house this morning brought to mind several recent conversations we’ve had with clients and prospects. The topic of those conversations was “lazy” capital. In this post we discuss where lazy capital comes from, what its consequences are, and how to get rid of it.
The most common valuation-related family business disputes we see in our practice relate to measuring value for buy-sell agreements. Far too often, buy-sell agreements include valuation provisions that appear designed to promote strife, incur needless expense, and increase the likelihood of intra-family litigation. The ubiquity of valuation provisions in buy-sell agreements that do not work is striking.
In this post, we explain the top five causes of valuation process failure, and determine that there is a better way in which a valuation process for a buy-sell agreement can lead to reasonable resolutions.
