Finally! An Exhaustive, Practical Family Enterprise Guidebook

If you haven't tossed this book in your shopping cart yet, it might be the best thing you do today.

Build an Enterprise Family To Last: Proven Strategies to Thrive Across Generations, by Sara Hamilton and Margaret Vaughan Cox, feels like a text book, but in the very best way - not that it will put you to sleep or that it will weigh down your backpack, but rather that is overflowing with practical wisdom and beautifully offers the best of the thinking about family enterprise planning between its covers.

With, eye-catching frameworks and charts on seemingly every single page, the authors have offered readers an easy to use guidebook to help them apply the concepts they've presented so logically. 

The book carries a vital theme throughout, placing focus separately upon the family journey, the enterprise journey, and the personal journey - acknowledging that if the family enterprise is to thrive, placing perspective on the family, and the individuals within the family is absolutely essential. 

What I appreciate most is that the authors don’t present sterile models - they acknowledge real tensions, tradeoffs, and challenges faced by those working in family enterprise together while offering tools to address them. The only downside I can see to this book is the potential for overwhelm; with dozens of visual models and frameworks to implement, there is no question that readers will appreciate the robust resources contained within, but will they take the time to implement and apply the wisdom? Perhaps the best antidote for this overwhelm is the design of the book itself, which makes it easy for readers to hone in on the resource most relevant to their own present-day growth opportunities. For example, for those families at a stage of transition as young adults start to consider taking on roles in the family enterprise, they can page directly to a framework that helps them to consider the roles available and their own path to stepping into these roles. 

This book is NOT one that you will read cover to cover and put on your shelf to gather dust - it is one that will remain on your desk for frequent reference. Deep gratitude to the authors for offering us this resource!