Corporate Finance & Planning Insights for Multi-Generational Family Businesses
This week, we conclude our series of posts on communicating financial results to family shareholders. Having focused on telling the story of the family business through the balance sheet and income statement, we turn our attention this week to the statement of cash flows.
When M&A markets are robust, as they are now, we find that some families start to think about selling the family business. There’s a good chance that families contemplating a sale have never sold a business before, and may not know quite what to expect. In this week’s post, we provide a brief overview of the steps involved in selling a business.
Everyone agrees that communication promotes positive shareholder engagement, but what does it look like to communicate financial results effectively? In this series of posts, we offer practical suggestions for presenting key financial data in ways that family shareholders find useful. In the last post, we focused on the balance sheet; this week, we turn our attention to the income statement.
Regardless of how much debt a family business operates with, access to credit when it is needed is essential. In this week’s post, Andy Gibbs describes the key factors affecting banks’ willingness to loan money to family businesses, and provides an overview of what the credit outlook looks like for 2020.
Everyone agrees that communication promotes positive shareholder engagement, but what does it look like to communicate financial results effectively? In this series of posts, we offer practical suggestions for presenting key financial data in ways that family shareholders find useful. We start in this post with the balance sheet.
The new year provides a natural opportunity for family business directors to think about the current condition of their family business and ponder what the future might hold. In this first post of 2020, we identify a handful of questions that family business directors would do well to think about.
Listing the best books one has read over the preceding twelve months is commonplace. Family Business Director eschews the humble-bragging endemic to such lists. Instead, we offer a list of four books that we plan to read in 2020. We confess to reading far more book reviews than actual books, and we selected these books, in large measure, on the basis of generally glowing reviews. Upon completing each book, we will report back in future posts with our own impressions and takeaways for family business directors.
While its status as a Christmas song is perhaps debatable, Merle Haggard’s “If We Make It Through December” is classic country music at its finest. The song captures the pathos of economic distress, with the recently-downsized protagonist lamenting his inability to provide the Christmas he wants for his daughter. Although we suspect Mr. Haggard was not writing in this direction, the song has always made Family Business Director think about breakeven analysis. As the year draws to a close, family business directors naturally evaluate the firm’s profitability over the course of the year. For some, profitability was assured months ago. For others, it remains uncertain whether they will make it through December without incurring a loss for the year.
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 recent book, The 12 Questions That Keep Family Business Directors Awake at Night, we address this week the question, “Does our dividend policy fit?”
As recounted in the Harvard Business Review article entitled “What You Can Learn from Family Business,” an academic study of family-controlled and non-family public companies found that debt constituted 37% of the capital of family-run businesses, compared 47% for the non-family companies. This finding is generally consistent with our experience working with family businesses of all sizes. In this post, we consider why family-run businesses might be a bit more debt-shy than their non-family peers.
