- When it’s your own business it is very difficult to leave the problems at the office, manufacturing plant or the store. The business will most likely set your persona at the dinner table. Stress will usually be carried forward to the rest of the family.
- One area that must be considered, although a lot of my clients avoid this conversation like the plague, is family involvement in the business. It is my opinion that when a business is acquired, the entire family acquires it and because of that the entire family should be involved in and behind the decision. Not only should they be involved in the basic decision of “acquiring” a business, but they should also be involved in the decision on the type of business being acquired.
Why, you may ask? First, it usually requires a substantial dollar investment that will most likely have some affect on the entire family. As well, it will most likely require that all the members of the family make adjustments to their day-to-day schedules and life styles. If you are counting on others within your family to be actively involved in the business you better make sure they are truly behind it before you acquire it.
I had a client that acquired a business for his daughter and son. The daughter worked at it for all of three months and then informed her father that she was leaving. She really didn’t like the business and secondarily her fiancé didn’t like the city it was in. The son stuck around for five months and then he resigned, he also decided that he didn’t like the business. The father who really didn’t want to be involved in the day-to-day operations of the business was placed in a very difficult situation that could only be rectified by hiring a general manager.
Had the children actually liked the business and stayed, it would have created a completely different set of problems. Neither one of the children were really capable of operating the business as neither one of them had any experience at all in the industry and worse than that neither one of them had ever managed a business. A parent can easily have unsubstantiated expectations of their children.
- If you own a business you have to consider what would happen to the business if you become ill or incapacitated for a short or even worse, extended period of time. Who will operate it? The smaller the business the worse the situation will be. The more duties and responsibilities that you have the more duties and responsibilities that must be handled by other individuals in the event that you are not there.
As an example, you own a retail lady’s apparel store and although you have a complete group of sales staff you have always done all the buying. This weekend you are scheduled to go to the Atlanta Fashion Mart to place your orders for Christmas merchandise (the Atlanta Fashion Mart has four shows a year, one in advance of each selling season). A car accident, although not serious, puts you out of commission for two weeks (you will miss the show). As your business cannot survive without Christmas merchandise someone else will have to attend that show. Who will it be? Who can you trust? Who has the knowledge and insight within your organization to choose your Christmas merchandise?
- Everyone who owns any business reports to someone.
You may believe that if you own your own business that you will have the luxury of doing whatever you want, whenever you want. This is seldom (never) the case.
- A retailer in a shopping mall must adhere to the rules and regulations developed by the mall management. Rules that may affect areas such as financial reporting (a great number of malls require, as part of their lease, a percentage of sales), opening hours, advertising, product delivery schedules, maintenance, parking and signage.
- Most businesses operate with loans and/or lines of credit from financial institutions. These institutions will have reporting requirements both in timing, format and overall information supplied.
- Your business will be subject to local codes as to what you can, or cannot do on or to your property. In the minimum almost every community has codes that relate to environmental issues, fire alarms, garbage disposal and signage. Other communities may have codes that relate to hours or days that you can open or what type of business you can operate in a specific area.
- All businesses face rules, regulations and reporting requirements with respect to sales taxes, business taxes and employment issues such as workman’s compensation.
- Every type of business and company requires some sort of registration license or permit to do business.