In attendance: Ben Briggs, Lancashire Business View
What are the issues faced by family businesses that might not affect other firms?
Jim Akrill, PM+M
Tony Tinker, PM+M
Mike Damms, Chamber of Commerce East Lancashire
Jonathan Shorrock, KBL
Keith Melling, Napthens
Elaine Hurn, Taylors
Paul Cronshaw, Cronshaw Electrical
Bev Mercer, Bevlan
Glen Mattock, Harmsworth, Townley & Co
John Getty, PDS Engineering
Mark Hope, StoneHouse Logic
Claire Townley, Harmsworth, Townley/Eco-Life Gizmos
Amanda Dowson, Dowson’s Dairies
John Getty: One of the worst issues at the moment is that if a family business is in trouble you can have several members of the same family all working at the same place and that impacts very strongly on everyone. If the company has to start laying people off, you’ve got to decide how to do it in a fair way without hurting your own family. It is a dilemma and I know several companies that have had that problem in the Lancashire area.
Jim Akrill: That’s an issue we find all the time with family business because it’s very difficult to separate ownership, family and business because it’s intertwined.
Paul Cronshaw: There are emotional attachments and trying to separate that from business issues is sometimes very hard.
Claire Townley: In a recession it’s hard to switch off if you’re a family business. There isn’t such a thing as going home and stopping working. It’s really hard to separate what is work and not work.
Glen Mattock: Being in a family business means that we do talk about work a lot, but Sasha and Nathan – our two children – actually get involved. They choose to get involved. We do trade stands and stalls to promote our products to the schools and Sasha and Nathan come along, and they’ll quite happily stand behind a stall and talk to the customers and sell our products. That’s a great thing for them because it’s teaching them people skills which are invaluable.
Keith Melling: In non-family business organisations, people who are involved in the business are judged on their merits much more than in family businesses. You also have issues with that personal element to it and after a decision has been made there is still a need to sit across the dinner table from a brother, father, sister or other family member.
Elaine Hurn: A lot of firms employ family members because it’s a family company instead of looking at their skills base. There are times, such as now with the recession, when you need really special skills to survive. One of the things we’ve found is that you sort out the wheat from the chaff and discover that a lot of family members have been put on the board and been given a job with a high salary. The reality is that it’s very, very difficult when you know that a high salary is being given to someone who isn’t contributing to the business but happens to be a family member. What happens instead is they sack half a dozen shop floor workers who are vital instead of biting the bullet and getting rid of the family member.
Claire Townley: I always wish we could keep the business more within the family then we wouldn’t have all these worries about employment law and recruitment that seem to take up such a huge proportion of the time. It is the case that more family involvement would allow us to get on with moving forward.
Amanda Dowson: From our point of view we are a farming-based family and we’re on the third generation. We’ve got family members in the form of three fantastic kids, but our kids are seven, 14 and eight so we can’t compete with the local family run farm down the road with regards to producing milk. They’ve got the family man-power on hand to run the business far more cheaply than we can because we have to hire in staff.
We have changed the business tremendously into having an education centre and ice cream production because we can’t find staff who are as trustworthy or loyal as family members would be.
Tony Tinker: In large family companies they won’t allow family members to become an employee unless they’ve worked outside in 69the big wide world. Maybe this is something family businesses should sometimes consider before bring people straight into the firm.
John Getty: With my involvement with the Chamber of Commerce I talk to a lot of companies where the chief executive of a family business hasn’t drawn a salary this year. They haven’t taken any money out of the company and it is all for the benefit of the staff. In some ways that’s a marvellous thing, it’s quite laudable, but it shouldn’t be like that, it shouldn’t have to be like that. Everybody, including yourself, should be treated equally in the business.
Read the full discussion in Lancashire Business View 29.
