Family businesses need succession plan, market trends to stay afloat - Business Analysts

Business analysts have called on family businesses to put in place a succession plan and structures to make the companies viable and stay afloat. 

The analysts say most businesses across the globe are family businesses, forming about 70 per cent of all business with a strategy of ensuring sustainability, continuity and a plan for a succession, however, some falter and collapse after a few years of operation. 

Research has revealed that though family businesses wanted to grow aggressively, 43 per cent of these entities do not have a succession plan in place with only 12 per cent making it to a third generation. 

Kingsley Owusu-Ewli, Director of Tax Service at PricewaterhouseCoopers Ghana Ltd, during a family business forum in discussing and proffering solutions to challenges of running a family business, said a succession plan should be future-looking.

He said the plan should be about who would succeed the owner, be in management and lead the organization to the level optimal level. 

Mr Owusu-Ewli said particular attention must be paid to the business trends to know what had been happening locally and globally. That, he said would help the directors adapt well, know what others competitors are doing, where the market and country are going and learn from the news trends. 

He said all family businesses needed to adopt professionalism where the operations would not be run only by family members, but by professional managers, directors, strategists, who could in a very cost-efficient way, help put the business on the right footing.

Dr Elikem Tamaklo, Managing Director, Nyaho Healthcare Limited, who had gone through the complexities of managing his father’s health facility, said every family business must have a family and corporate governance standards. 

He said family governance would help the family to find a structure of making decisions which varied from how the business would make decisions, adding that both needed to be very clear for efficient and effective operations. 

Edward Eyram Gomado, Partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers Ghana Ltd, in his submission, said family businesses must not overlook exit and emergency plans, adding that where “a person comes in and there are issues of non-performance, there must be a way to exit such an individual from the business before the business takes a nosedive.” 

“One needs to also have an emergency plan so that when the unplanned happens in an untimely shape, form, and manner, there is a way to be able to sail the ship until you are able to find the right successor,” Mr Gomado said.