Family-Operated & Partner-Operated Companies
"Liuzza doesn't just help save companies, he helps save families."
Liuzza’s clients have included multitudinous family-owned and partner-owned businesses with two or more family members or partners in executive or leadership positions. In all the cases, serious ongoing issues impaired company performance and caused disarray among lower-level valuable employees. Almost all such businesses are challenged by these relationships.
Such situations often stress the business for years and are amongst the most difficult ones to deal with both internally and for outside advisers. Liuzza is deeply familiar with family business problems, having grown up in several multi-generational businesses and successfully dealing with them in the businesses he created and led and in his consulting career.
Family-operated businesses and partner-operated businesses share certain common elements that both add unique strength to the business and accompanying challenges to the business. The “strength” largely comes from the family members and/or partners having deeper and more tolerant long-term commitments to each other and therefore, to the business. The “weaknesses” come from the stresses and difficulty of the long-term commitments to each other and, therefore, tolerating the other’s “weaknesses” and challenges along with the resulting “costs” to the business.
His current approaches include dealing personally with each such family member or partner, helping them develop ways to communicate and understand each other’s different personalities, and setting up appropriate communication principles regiments. His tools often include personality profile training in order to understand the unique communication needs of each personality type, and solutions to inadvertently “triggering” each other. Triggering is often found as the basis for misunderstandings and unintended anxieties. Often, these approaches lead to the welcomed mutual creation of applicable “Rules of the Road” and, in the most difficult cases, “the Rules of Engagement.”
Of the client engagements mentioned above, all but one made either acceptable or significant progress on its problems. The remaining one had difficulty reconciling its personality and performance issues, lost most of its salesforce, and liquidated.