Corporate Finance & Planning Insights for Multi-Generational Family Businesses
The biggest threat to the sustainability of your family business may not come from competition or evolving technologies. It may come from the family itself. As a family business director, you should be attuned to this risk and take the steps necessary to help prevent, or at least de-escalate such situations. In this week’s post, we suggest a few paths forward.
This post is the first 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 balance sheet.
Over the weekend, the New York Times published an opinion column by Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders in which the senators decried the increasing prevalence of stock buybacks among the country’s largest publicly traded companies. Reading the column made us think about shareholder redemptions for family businesses. Do shareholder redemptions hurt or help family businesses? Of course, that question does not have a simple answer. Not all shareholder redemptions are created equal, so in this post, we’ll outline three possible redemption scenarios and identify what attributes suggest whether a given shareholder redemption will help or hurt a family business and its relevant stakeholders.
In our last post in this series, we focused on operating income, which is a critical measure for evaluating the performance of management since it is unaffected by financing and tax decisions made by the board of directors. Net income, on the other hand, reveals how those board-level decisions influence your family business’s earnings and ability to pay dividends. Everyone likes to talk about EBITDA and EBIT – and those are important metrics – but only net income measures the increase in the family’s wealth from owning the business.
The authors of a 2018 article on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation identify three components of an effective response by public companies to activist investors. We think the recommendations translate well to family business boards dealing with one or more disgruntled family shareholders.
Now is the best time to think about how your family business is positioned for the next recession, whenever it comes. In this post, we review some ways family business directors can prepare their companies to survive (and perhaps even thrive during) the next recession.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal chronicled the slow demise of the Woolrich Woolen Mill. For the first time in the company’s 170 year history, it will no longer have any U.S. based production. The Woolrich saga is a vivid reminder of how challenging the appropriate balance between dividends and reinvestment is for family business directors (and of the real-life consequences those decisions can have). For this post, we asked two (hypothetical) colleagues with differing perspectives to review and comment on the recent story.
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 2019, we identify a handful of questions that family business directors would do well to think about.
When engaging in shop talk about a client project, our colleagues inevitably start by asking, “What business is the client in?” In nearly all cases, the appropriate response to the question is a brief description of the client’s industry. But for a small minority of clients whose financial performance is truly extraordinary, the correct response is that they are in the “money making” business. For these clients, the particular “it” of what they do is secondary to the fact that they make a lot of money doing it. Has your family business joined the exclusive club whose members are in the “money making” business?
At a recent meeting with longstanding family business clients, management mentioned that one of their independent directors had introduced the term “lazy capital” into the family’s vocabulary. We had never heard that term before, but it perfectly encapsulates something we see at too many family businesses: an undisciplined capital allocation process that tolerates sustained underperformance. We ran across a couple articles this week that, while written with public companies in mind, made us think about the perils of “lazy” family capital.
