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To fulfill our promise to you, we bring you current, top-notch information about our business world and other real-life insights from successful women entrepreneurs.  You will find up-to-date commentary and insider tips to help you move your business forward.  Most importantly, we offer you wonderful ways to learn, share, and promote your business.

Recent articles

  Balancing Family and Business

Leaving Motherhood at home and CEO duties at the office.

By Wayne Rivers, CEO Family Business Institute

Motherhood is the most difficult (and possibly the lowest paying) occupation in history. Mothers in family businesses have it doubly hard. In the Spring 1999 issue of Family Business magazine, Ronda Vecchio relates her experiences in balancing family and business over the last 17 years.

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  Will Your Children Follow you in your Family Business?

By Wayne Rivers, CEO Family Business Institute

 It’s 7:30 p.m. when you burst through the door clearly tired and frustrated. The children have already eaten, but rush to you, eager to share their joy that you are finally home. You barely acknowledge them as you  put a big stack of work on the table.
“Rough day,” your spouse asks?

“You wouldn’t believe it,” you reply. “The shipping department failed to get the Osborne job out last night like they were supposed to do, so our number one client threatened to cancel his business with us. I spent half the day trying to calm him down. Our biggest shipper is three days late with parts we need to finish four jobs and one of our trucks broke down 100 miles from here. It was a miserable day.”

If you are one of the children in a family business who hears this recitation, how would you feel? If you grew up hearing similar complaints night after night, how much enthusiasm would you have when your mother or father asked you to come into the family business?  Bringing children in to the family business and, later, succession planning may depend on your children’s memories of how you dealt with the stresses and rewards of the family business.

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  Your Children’s Compensation in a Family Business

By Wayne Rivers, CEO Family Business Institute

Believe it or not, the way we share money and allowances with our children when they’re young can influence their adult spending habits as well as compensation expectations when they join the family business. For example, how did you determine how much allowance to give your kids when they were young? If they spent their periodic allowances, did you give them more money to get through the week, or did you make them wait for next week’s allowance?

Many family business owners struggle over how to fairly compensate their children who work for them.

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  Value Disruption: Super Bowl Advertising is Now a Commodity!
By John Sutherland, President, Ennova, Inc.
 
It’s been reported multiple times that Pepsi would not be advertising in this year’s NFL Super Bowl.  Examining why provides a lesson in value disruption and differentiation in marketing.

Pepsi had been a major advertiser during the Super Bowl. According to TNS, the company spent $142.8 million on the 10 Super Bowl ads from 1999 to 2008, second only to Anheuser-Busch, which spent $216 million.
 
Instead, the nation’s second-biggest soft drink maker is plowing its marketing dollars into the “Pepsi Refresh Project” as its main vehicle for the brand. The project will pay at least $20 million for projects people create to “refresh” communities.  A website was created where people can list their projects, which could range from helping feed the hungry, to teaching children to read. People can then vote to determine which projects receive money.

But there is more going on here than  saving money.   When you unpack this story you reveal a truth about differentiation and the power of value-disruption.

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