Here’s a new way of running family businesses successfully

India is known for its business families. India’s illustrious history of successful businesses shares one thing in common: most of India’s successful businesses are family-run and family-owned. Celebrated companies like Reliance, Tata Sons, Eicher are all operated by generations of the same family, either through birth or marriage. Similarly, there are many smaller, lesser-known family-owned businesses scattered across the country. Families that seek to make a better life for their children, who further try to grow their businesses to harness their enormous potential.

Family-owned businesses generally have three components: the family, the management, and ownership. Often, in these types of businesses, these roles overlap and need to thrive in harmony.

Some family businesses, like Eicher Motors, have hired CEOs in order to allow the company to thrive while maintaining family ownership. That is to say, they gave up the day-to-day management of the company and focussed on the long-run goals of the company. That system, however, does not work for every family. If a family member is unwilling to hire external managers, they must do the next best thing: train in management and operations themselves. 

Masters' Union School Of Business offers a specialisation in Family Business, seeking to provide manager-owners with the competence and skill needed to allow their businesses to thrive. These courses are industry concentrations formed with furthering family businesses in mind.

Masters’ Union’s course focuses on digitisation. The course zeroes in on four industries where family businesses tend to proliferate: real estate and infrastructure, automotive industry, retail, and services. Additionally, the course focuses on the main challenges faced by these kinds of businesses: the dynamics between members, sharing and preserving wealth, operation management, and sustainability of the enterprise. The key here is that students study via examining case studies, seeing what worked in the real world and what did not, and extrapolate. Additionally, the courses under this specialisation are taught by teachers who actively run family businesses. One of the masters, Mr. Naveen Munjal, is a part of the Hero-Munjal family and brings his real-life experience into the classroom.

The idea is to build an operator’s mindset as opposed to that of an owner: an owner would not want to take risks and would stick to tried-and-tested formulae they know to work and succeed.

Family businesses have been historically successful, we see proof of that around us all the time. These businesses, especially in today’s climate, need to innovate in order to reach new heights of success. In order to grow these businesses and retain ownership and management, the new generation of leaders needs to be trained to navigate an extremely dynamic marketplace and economy, and to disrupt the order. Education and training is the first step in creating a business that will last the test of the new world order, thrive, and create value for the family, the company, and the country.  

About the author:

Ria Sardana, is a Content Manager at Masters' Union School Of Business with over 7 years of experience in the Content Marketing Industry.

Note: The views expressed in this article are solely author’s own and do not reflect/represent those of Shiksha