Family Business Director

August 26, 2019 Special Topics

Family Business Industry Spotlight: Auto Dealer Industry

This week’s post is a part of a periodic series called “Family Business Industry Spotlights.”  In these posts, we will share conversations with our family business advisory professionals who have deep experience working with family businesses in a particular industry.  We think the conversations promise to be of interest to family business directors regardless of their industry.  This week, we talk with Scott A. Womack about the challenges and industry trends facing families in the Auto Dealer Industry.

August 19, 2019 Dividend Policy

A Guide to Corporate Finance Fundamentals

Part 4 | Finance Basics: Distribution Policy

This post is the fourth and final installment from our Corporate Finance in 30 Minutes whitepaper. In this series of posts, we walk through the three key decisions of capital structure, capital budgeting, and dividend policy to assist family business directors and shareholders without a finance background to make relevant and meaningful contributions to the most consequential financial decisions all companies must make. This week, we focus on distribution policy.

August 12, 2019 Shareholder Engagement

Buying Off the Discount Rack?

Recent headlines around publicly-traded family business Nordstrom, Inc. illustrate the challenges family business directors face when making hard decisions about family management, stock ownership, and whether to sell the family business. In this post, we take a closer look at where Nordstrom finds itself, and the range of options available to the directors for moving forward.

August 5, 2019 Performance Measurement

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 Performance Measurement

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.

July 22, 2019 Capital Budgeting

A Guide to Corporate Finance Fundamentals

Part 3 | Finance Basics: Capital Budgeting

This post is the third of four installments from our Corporate Finance in 30 Minutes whitepaper. In this series of posts, we walk through the three key decisions of capital structure, capital budgeting, and dividend policy to assist family business directors and shareholders without a finance background to make relevant and meaningful contributions to the most consequential financial decisions all companies must make. This week, we focus on capital budgeting.

July 15, 2019 Shareholder Engagement

Innovation and Family Wealth

Recently published academic research from Vasiliki Kosmidou and Manju K. Ahuja highlights the relationship between innovation and family wealth. Our goal in this post is to introduce some of the authors’ most relevant findings to family business directors, translating, as we do, into a less academic idiom.

July 9, 2019 Special Topics

Q&A: Five Questions with Edward Jackson

Addressing topics such as share redemption programs to the role of non-family directors in a family business, Family Business Director speaks with board member Edward Jackson of H.G. Hill Realty Company for his insights on questions common to family businesses. This post is part of a series of interviews with family business leaders and experienced advisors.

July 1, 2019 Special Topics

Summer Reading

Family Business Director is off enjoying 4th of July festivities this week. For our readers that are looking for some beach reading, we thought we would direct your attention to some of our more popular posts in case you missed them the first time around.

June 24, 2019 Capital Structure

A Guide to Corporate Finance Fundamentals

Part 2 | Finance Basics: Capital Structure

This post is the second of four installments from our Corporate Finance in 30 Minutes whitepaper. In this series of posts, we walk through the three key decisions of capital structure, capital budgeting, and dividend policy to assist family business directors and shareholders without a finance background to make relevant and meaningful contributions to the most consequential financial decisions all companies must make. This week, we focus on capital structure.