Family Constitution & Family Governance Increase Your Acceleration For Hyper Business Growth - SOCH

Family constitution and family governance increase your acceleration for hyper business growth.

Rhetoric, but let us ask:

Should you care to have your family constitution & governance?

In our work as a specialized consultant to global UHNIs & HNIs of family enterprises, we learned that mainly Indian family businesses are on the brink of permanent success with prosperity that they have never heard of or imagined or even fantasized about.

We found some significant challenges in Indian family businesses that are pervasively unresolved to accomplish this success. In our observations of over two decades, these challenges have become mainstream in their daily lives as if they have made a lifelong truce with these challenges.

However, some families who commit to outgrow, outlast and win over their challenges have accelerated to seize the lion’s share of the planet-size opportunity. They have begun creating abundance that lasts for generations to come.

We have listed below the most pervasive challenges of all that you may need to look into for family businesses that are yet to resolve.

#1: The Challenge Of Communication In The Indian Family

Communicating heart is an overbearing challenge.

Communicating honest concerns, fears, admissions and confessions are foreign concepts to many. And, communicating with and to self is virtually non-existent for Indian family businesses.

After working with us, several family businesses realised that they had been hurting themselves with self-created pressures and bottled emotions of what they truly feel for other family members, their dreams, and their business.

On the other hand, some family businesses and their members have taken precisely the opposite recognition of being grateful to other family members.

I Either way, in both cases, the family business miss an opportunity to convey and communicate effectively, objectively, and progress accordingly.

#2: The Challenge Of Perspective Towards Time And Money – Time Is Mercilessly Undervalued. Money Is Mindlessly Overvalued.

Our culture loves to consider time as an endlessly available resource to them, and we use it prolifically. This affects long-term planning and committing to the plan created by the family businesses. As long as millions and then billions of money is flowing – the moral sense for doing business with adequate time and related resources within the family goes for a toss at large (not with everyone but at large).

How can you make every family member give unshakable importance to time?

#3: The Challenge Of Focus

In every family business, the challenge of focus is most evidently seen. In our working with family businesses, many vehemently claim that they have a clear vision for the future, but, in the same room, when asked to other family members, they show a blank face or altogether alternative future, and they don’t match. The unstructured and unplanned way of dealing with personal, family and business matters creates a loss of focus for you and those working with you.

How could members focus on the present when their future points aren’t one, mean different, believed differently, and committed differently?

How could focus be primarily a non-mental act? How could it be an outcome of priority structure that the family leaders create and align their decision systems with it?

#4: The Challenge Of Not Challenging Enough

Often, family businesses think that the way they got here will work to get ahead. They assume that similar thinking processes, thinking patterns, and thinking tendencies will work in the future too.

We aren’t saying that every family business does not challenge enough. The challenge is that family businesses don’t challenge their thinking enough. They do not challenge critically enough as is required to produce transformational results.

They do not challenge in discussions and still feel that every decision is concluded with many discussions and challenging ideas. The key measure is whether this challenging attitude is collective, shared, and leads to creating a third decision – better than any individual’s decisions.

How could a dedicated and evolving practice be built at a family business where a regular debate on above helps them identify what thinking patterns are paying off and which ones are ready to be left behind?

#5: The Challenge Of Overly Betting On Technology In Incorrect Way

Technology is a beast – the one that can accelerate business error-free theoretically. It can create repeatability that man can’t compete with. However, technology needs business direction.

Technology is like an advanced bullet train that cannot run on an old railway track. It requires custom-built, specifically designed and advanced tracks to enable the bullet train to reach its goal of speed and safety.

Adopting technology on its value proposition without the business’s direction and structure is like putting the advanced bullet train on an old railway track. It can bring only disaster.

Having technology assessed without having a guide rail for business in the form of a business operating model is an invitation to trouble.

Over and over again, we have seen family businesses investing in technology without having any preparation and readiness of their business operating model for the technology to accelerate.

Such investments lead family businesses to the end feeling of being short-changed by the vendor or technology product isn’t effective or similar.

This feeling isn’t the fault of the family business or the vendor. Family businesses simply don’t know how to integrate IT with business. They just don’t know. Yet, they lose a lot of money before they realise that it is a massive deal of work before getting a vendor in play for technology.

Thus, technology must not be for short-sighted pain relief but for strategic advancements of business objectives most systematically and maturely.

Usually, in our share of experience, we see that the habit of quick wins is an issue leading to skipping of due diligence for business readiness with a rock-solid advisory. The money saved in this skipping makes family businesses sometimes pay fourfold if not tenfold more in midterm and lose irrecoverable time and business opportunity to compete.

#6: The Challenge Of Emotional Maturity And Spiritual Quotient

Emotional maturity and spiritual quotient are alarmingly low in family businesses, as mentioned by many family businesses who connect with us. They also shared that they are just inching close to bringing havoc on family and its prospects.

Emotional maturity plays a winning difference in creating family love, happiness and progress. Multi-generations today functioning together should demonstrate remarkable maturity, but it is not enough at large.

#7: The Challenge Of Alignment

Alignment is missing but not accepted among the family members.

This brings double disservice to family businesses’ prospects for hyper-growth and love.

Alignment isn’t about agreeing with each other. It is about jointly creating a new plane of understanding from a totally two or more different planes of thinking – resulting in an altogether advantageous newer plane of thought and solution right for all family members and the business. per-growth and love.

Why? What is the cry?

Well, the reason is unimportant. The key is that those family businesses who have already begun moving hold the courage and boldness, to be honest with themselves and their family business.

There are many reasons for family businesses to move. Owners and family members know it and still don’t do it!

At times, we wonder if this is a cultural issue too. Ours is the only country where the message of smoking kills on every cigarette pack shows a gruesome reality. Yet, the data suggests a multifold increase in both genders’ consumption. What does this data suggest? Why is the movement in the wrong direction? And, why do people remain unmoved in the right direction despite knowing the facts and realities?

Indian Family Businesses knowing what threats await them, are required to move. Unlike the cultural anchor to move slow, it is time perhaps to get unanchored and ask oneself: What if I don’t move? What if I remain where I am and do nothing? What will I lose? What will my family business lose?

Having said the above, there has been some hope.

We have received nearly 50 family businesses requests to help them, which hasn’t happened as did in the last few months.

Family businesses are choosing to move.

They are starting to realise the impact of these challenges and are looking to build a mechanism such as constitution and governance for their future. They do not want to miss the opportunity of creating a timeless abundance that they genuinely care for.

They have chosen to move. What are you waiting for?