Why Small and Family Business?
Small and family owned businesses maintain control best, when armed with solid plans, cultures intentionally aligned with the mission, clarity of purpose and an unambiguous vision. The combination of these elements produces an unimaginably sustainable competitive advantage.
Most folks don’t realize that Family Businesses create 86% of the jobs in America pursuing their version of the American Dream. Despite that, 70% will fail by the second generation and by the third generation 88% have failed. The reasons are many. Getting to the heart of them however is at the core of improving your odds. It’s what we do!
PathFinder Group can help your business reduce this risk of failure by pinpointing opportunities for accelerated growth that will provide you the options you hope for from your American Dream. Make no mistake about it, while growth is not a panacea it opens the door to solving many of the related issues that explain this poor track record of multi-generational success.
We use tools developed at MIT that leverage artificial intelligence to evaluate 18 value drivers pinpointing bottlenecks that unlock enterprise value and provide a faster ROI by benchmarking your answers against those from over 11,000 other companies in our database.
This assessment takes less than 15 minutes to complete and will identify any GAP between your assumed enterprise value and real value. It will also spotlight the greatest opportunities for growth as well as the “Red Flags” that threaten it.
Culture AS A Competitive Advantage
What Employees want to know?
There are essentially three overarching things your employees want to know. Where are we going (vision)? How will we get there (planning)? How am I doing (measures)? Get clarity on the answers to these questions, get good at communicating them and there is little you cannot accomplish.
At PathFinder Group, we believe that starts by understanding exactly where you are. We provide a seven-step process divided into three independent phases, beginning with a “Discovery” questionnaire. This proprietary tool was developed at MIT, takes 15 minutes to complete and leverages Artificial Intelligence to measure 18 Value Drivers. These drivers answer the questions related to “where your business is now” and importantly, the greatest opportunities for driving new growth immediately, while avoiding the greatest risks threatening it.
Profits are Linked to Company Culture
Companies emphasizing culture, significantly outperform their counterparts as presented here in an 11 year study conducted by J.P Kotter and J.L. Hesket.
Results from an 11-year study, contrasting cultures of more than 200 companies, shows organizations with an Adaptive culture consistently produced superior business results.*
* Corporate Culture and Performance: J.P. Kotter & J.L. Hesket
We provide you with an eight-step proprietary framework for developing your high performing culture. This comprehensive approach can be facilitated by our experts to meet your company’s specific needs or made available in a “Do It Yourself” format with “how to” tutorials to help you every step of the way.
This is so important that management guru Peter Drucker, decades ago, famously said: “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. It remains true today.
In our increasingly competitive business environments, your strong company culture is the only sustainable competitive advantage between you and your competition. It will enable you to delight customers, reduce costs from turnover and build institutional knowledge that drives greater profits OR you can fail at this, lose your edge and watch your competitors gain ground at your expense. We’ll show you how to leverage this powerful differentiator. It’s what we do!
Leadership Development
Identifying and Nurturing Future Leadership Today
Patrick Lencioni tells us that organizations have to be both smart and healthy if they are to succeed in today’s hyper charged competitive environment. He also goes on to say that most organizations have the “smart” side of this equation down pretty well. It’s the “healthy” side where the transformative opportunities exist for creating a sustainable competitive advantage. The healthy side challenges leaders to recognize the value of emotional intelligence, strong cultures and to budget for their development.
PathFinder Group can help you identify tomorrow’s leaders today and help them develop the skills needed to meet the challenges they’ll be asked to conquer in order to achieve year over year profitable growth. Ask us about the link between leadership and “transferrable value”. It is the “WHY” behind leadership’s importance.
Successful family businesses recognize the importance of attracting high caliber non-family talent to their team. Contrary to popular belief family businesses do have something to offer this pool of talent that fills this leadership deficit and it’s found in the values that often differentiate family businesses from larger corporate career paths.
Process Improvement As a Practice
Efficiency vs. Effectiveness
Why are processes important? Documented processes add value to your enterprise. They provide the roadmap for others to follow that reduce costly errors from lessons learned, streamlining processes and driving increased profits. REMEMBER, each dollar saved goes directly to the bottom line and adds a multiple of value to your business. Save $500,000 in an industry that pays 7 times EBITDA and you’ve just increased your enterprise value by $3,500,000.
Documented processes can position the company to achieve scale and provide the focus that ranks them higher within their respective industry, maximizing value and delivering more control over available options for owners.