Portraits of Success: 9 Keys to Sustaining Value in Any Business

Description

Learn from the insider-outsider expert who knows how to build businesses that last! More than three-quarters of all U.S. businesses are closely held, and worldwide the percentage is even higher. Yet closely held businesses are fragile-more than two-thirds fail to survive the founder’s involvement. Portraits of Success offers solutions to the most common problems faced by closely held firms as they strive to create value that can and will be sustained by future generations of management. For the first time ever, business expert and consultant James Olan Hutcheson, the grandson of Olan Mills Portrait Studios patriarch, Olan Mills, shares with readers how closely held firms can prosper well into the future. In practical and inspiring terms, he presents proven management tools in tandem with illustrative examples from his clients’ companies and his own family’s business. Readers will learn how to: • Give the next generation of leaders room to grow. • Incorporate outsiders into the inner management circle as the business matures. • Keep clear chains of command as future leaders are being groomed and promoted. • Create a culture rich with business traditions, rituals, and myths. • Build shared beliefs among the business’s founders and its future management. In closely held businesses, personal relationships are of paramount importance. Hutcheson’s practical, prescriptive information from his experience as a consultant, and his revealing, personal anecdotes from working at all levels of the family business provide readers with a uniquely satisfying look at how to build lasting value within their own firms.