IT’S YOUR COMPANY by Jeromy Metz is a book aimed at family-run businesses. Metz offers several considered recommendations for maximizing the potential of those businesses. In this, he writes from experience—having inherited a family business from his father, which he then ran in Denver for over 20 years before becoming a consultant. Metz identifies four key problems (called “culture killers”) that can hamstring family businesses: ignoring expectations unique to family businesses; two-tier systems of performance rewards; misuse of authority; and entitled family members.
Metz believes that family businesses work best in situations “where people feel valued for who they are as well as for the work they do (rather than their DNA).” He distinguishes between two types of family business. There is the “Your Company” business, in which opportunity is available to everyone and favoritism does not occur. This is in contradistinction to what Metz calls the “We’re Family—You’re Not” type of family business, which, as he acknowledges, is not usually created by owners but inherited from previous generations. Such companies operate a one-rule-for-me approach to the workforce, bestow empty job titles on family members, have a high non-family employee turnover, and observe no distinction between the workplace and the home. Metz rues the inability of many placed in that situation to rectify the problem, because, as he sees it, creating a more equitable work environment is low-hanging fruit—a low-cost adjustment that has positive ripple effects throughout the company.
To be sure, some of the advice here is straightforward stuff; Metz’s leadership principles offer only minor variations (and sometimes not even that) on any number of similar rules advanced by others in the business management genre. But when his focus narrows to the business, there are many nuggets of wisdom. Metz has no truck with entitled family, going so far as to describe them as incompatible with a “Your Company” culture. He emphasizes instead family accountability and maintains, quite correctly, that merely being a member of the family should not guarantee anyone a job. It is sound advice, and any GM of a family business would do well to remember it.
With an insightful perspective on the conflicting expectations that can occur in family workplace environments, Jeromy Metz’s IT’S YOUR COMPANY offers sage advice for the family business owner.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader