Developing and Sustaining a Successful Family Business A Solution-Focused Guide

This practical and important book offers ideas, examples, and suggestions that address the challenges inherent to developing and sustaining a successful family business. It explores the complex dynamics involved in working with loved ones and how to pass a business on to a new generation. Structured around the story of a family that has built a successful enterprise, now facing the issues of succession, the book utilizes the solution-focused model to provide step-by-step instructions to creating good working relationships and orienting toward common goals while building trust, respect, and love. Complete with summaries, toolkits, and case studies, this book is an essential read for any member of a family business, as well as those who provide services to family businesses, including coaches, consultants, and non-family employees.

Introduction 1. A Family Business Framework 2. A Solution Focused framework 3. Intertwining Life Cycles of the Family and the Family Business 4. Education is the Mother of Leadership5. The Big Question6. Challenges for the Next Generation 7.How to prepare the First Generation for succession 8. The Solution Focused Toolkit 9. The Solution Tango 10. Conversations with the Siblings 11. Eight tools for the Next Generation’s future 12. Eight possible Scenario’s for the Future 13. The Decision of a Lifetime 14. The Dance of the Stakeholders 15. How to let go after Succession? 16. Three Family@business Governance tools 17. Three Family@business Management tools 18. The John & Annie Family Business, ten years later

Louis Cauffman is a business economist and clinical psychologist with a wide range of therapeutic training, ranging from Systemic Family Therapy to Ericksonian Hypnotherapy through all possible directions within the solution-oriented approach.