Succession considerations for family businesses

Posted on Mar 04, 2011 by admin_ao  | Categories: family business, succession  | Comments (0)

Are you a family business? Do you think about the future of your business? Are you caught up in managing the day-to-day of the business with little time to concentrate on the wider picture? Do you find it difficult to deal with the family issues of your business? If you have answered yes to any of these questions, then perhaps the Success Through Succession (STS) Programme is for you. The project aims to strategically assist family owned and family related SMEs in the border region to manage the challenges of succession and to increase innovation, growth and competitiveness. Two cohorts of companies will be recruited onto the STS programme, we are now open for recruitment for the second cohort of ten family businesses. Can you commit three full-days to this programme? There will be three face-to-face workshops and in between each workshop the participant company can avail of in-house mentoring (at the company premises), the STS programme manager assists the participant company in identifying what their needs are, examples as follows:- Financial mentoring - can the business afford to hire a key employee to take over the work of a family business member who wants to exit the business? Can the business develop in two directions? Legal - tax planning and legal shareholders agreements Psychology - identifying the strengths and weaknesses of family and non-family members in the top management team, improving working relationships between family members Business - What direction is this business really capable of going in? Are there new market/innovation opportunities? Throughout the duration of the 12-month programme, the STS team will work with the different various family members to work out their own individual needs and how this impacts upon the family business and the family unit in order to gain an understanding of the process of succession planning. It is not expected that succession will be an immediate outcome of this project but rather to understand how to go about the process and the implications of making the different decisions. At the end of the programme companies will have developed a succession plan and will have a clearer idea of where the business could go in the future. Anyone - young or old - can plan for the succession of the family business, remember succession will happen if you plan for it or not. If you are interested in finding out more about the Success Through Succession Programme please come along to the launch event which will be held on Wednesday evening 6th April at 5pm in the Four Seasons Hotel in Monaghan. The event will commence with refreshments (hot meal), you will be able to meet the STS Programme Team, hear about the topic of succession planning from key experts in the area and hear the story of succession planning in the words of someone who has been through the process before - a family business practitioner! To register your attendance for this event, please email: sts@dkit.ie or Telephone the Programme Manager for Ireland, Dr Cecilia Hegarty on Tel: +353 (0) 429370422 Meanwhile to read some background information about the programme please visit: http://www.rdc.ie/index.php/established-business-support/support-programmes/sts You can also download the progamme brochure for Ireland attached Dundalk Institute of Technology, in collaboration with the University of Ulster and Glasgow Caledonian University, is involved in this three-year project. The total project funding is €1.74m from the EU INTERREG IVA Programme with match funding contribution from the accountable departments in Northern Ireland and Ireland and Scottish Enterprise Ayshire, Scottish Enterprise Dumfries and Galloway and Cooperative Development Scotland.

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