Compensation is one of the most discussed items in business. And in a family business it gets personal. Authors Aronoff, McLure and Ward answer the some of the most important questions when it comes to the family what is fair pay among family members? How do I determine appropriate pay for my child? What should I pay my shareholders?

Running a family business is like running any other business--with the addition of many extra challenges. A family-owned enterprise involves unique management, compensation, hiring, and other business issues regarding family member employees. 9 Elements of Family Business Success addresses the specific challenges faced by owners of family businesses, and it shows family members employed in the business how to enjoy their positions while helping the organization reach its highest potential. Every relationship between family members comes with its own unique set of dynamics. When transferred into the workplace, these dynamics introduce emotional factors and hot buttons that can make or break the business. In this comprehensive guide, Allen E. Fishman spotlights all the challenges such organizations face and provides practical advice for creating your own strategy to meet them--and strengthen relationships within the family, as well. Fishman provides solutions to the problems unique to a family-run business, along with handy checklists to ensure you're covering all the angles. You'll learn how to: Create a written policy for hiring, reviewing, and terminating family member employees Avoid family relationship tension regarding compensation Choose a successor and create a succession development plan Ensure good results-driven family communication and dynamics Maintain healthy spousal relations when you work together Recruit and retain talented non-family member employees 9 Elements of Family Business Success contains detailed case studies of specific challenges faced by real family business owners and employees. Each one explains how the owner or employee identified the problem and the steps he or she took to solve it. Apply Fishman's advice, and you'll experience all the benefits and avoid the pitfalls that come with running a family business.

Tax and Financial Planning for the Closely Held Family Business serves as a manual to help business advisers devise strategies for clients dealing with family issues. Guiding family businesses through the complex maze of organizational, tax, financial, governance, estate planning, and personal family issues is a complex, time-consuming, difficult, and sometimes emotional process. This book focuses not only on identifying the problems family businesses face, but on devising solutions and planning opportunities for both family businesses and their owners. Each chapter of this book contains creative planning opportunities that advisers can suggest and help implement in order to solve real problems in the family business.

. . . this Handbook is a good example . . . for those interested in giving a more articulated and solid flavour to their research. Andrea Colli, Business History The authors have taken a lot of pain in putting this Handbook together. As the name indicates, this is an excellent Handbook for researchers. Global Business Review The Handbook of Research on Family Business has collected and synthesized a broad variety of topics by notable researchers who share a common dedication to family business research. This Handbook provides a comprehensive treatment that advances the frontiers of knowledge in family business, provoking valuable thoughts and discussion. The Handbook serves as both an authoritative and comprehensive reference work for researchers investigating family enterprises. A. Bakr Ibrahim, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada Although family business research is a young discipline it is both necessary and important. For the wellbeing and future development of our society the survival of prosperous and passionate family business entrepreneurs is indispensable. In order to help the families in business to better understand how to succeed with their enterprises we need qualified and updated research. This book is the answer! Hans-Jacob Bonnier, Bonnier Business Press Group, Sweden and 6th Generation Chairman of the Family Business Network International This Handbook is a unique compilation of the most important and the best recent family business research. The field has grown so rapidly that this effort will be a mark for the research to follow. The Handbook of Research on Family Business will be the reference for scholars in family business for many years to come. It will also stimulate new ideas in research. John L. Ward, IMD, Switzerland and Northwestern University, US The Handbook of Research on Family Business provides a comprehensive first port of call for those wishing to survey progress in the theory and practice of family business research. In response to the extensive growth of family business as a topic of academic inquiry, the principal objective of the Handbook is to provide an authoritative and scholarly overview of current thinking in this multidisciplinary field. The contributors examine recent advances in the study of family business, which has undertaken significant strides in terms of theory building, empirical rigour, development of sophisticated survey instruments, systematic measurement of family business activity, use of alternative research methodologies and deployment of robust tools of analysis. A wide selection of empirical studies addressing the current family business research agenda are presented, and issues and topics explored include: validation of the protagonist role that family firms play in social-economic spheres; operational and definitional issues surrounding what constitutes a family business; historical development of the field of family business; methodologies encompassing micro and macro perspectives; challenges to the orthodox microeconomic view of homo-economicus firms by highlighting the virtues of family influence and social capital. Comprising contributions from leading researchers credited with shaping the family business agenda, this Handbook will prove an invaluable reference tool for students, researchers, academics and practitioners involved with the family business arena.

THE "FAMILY BIBLE" FOR FAMILY BUSINESSES, LARGE AND SMALL For many family business owners the most daunting issues aren't how to serve customers or make sales----they're how to handle the often complicated legal and tax issues involved in running a successful business. From business plan to intergenerational succession, J.K. Lasser's Finance & Tax for Your Family Business offers all the relevant tax and legal aspects of starting, running, and transferring a company. It provides an invaluable understanding of organizational structures, capital-formation alternatives, and compensation obligations and choices. Also included is a resource listing of family business institutes, centers, and Web sites. Critical coverage will help you: * Build a winning management team * Discover the best strategies for passing the business on to future generations * Estimate estate tax consequences * Understand the ramifications of buy-sell agreements within a family context

It's all in the family Family businesses are the backbone of any economy, but they can present a host of challenges that can affect their chances of success. The Complete Idiot's Guide® to a Successful Family Business is the most current and comprehensive book that tells the proprietors of family concerns how to deal with such unique issues, including expansion beyond the original family business, and family versus hired management. • 80 percent of all businesses in America are family-run • Written by a nationally known author team • Instructive anecdotes about successful businesses provide practical, hands-on-advice

Developing policies to guide decision making can help the family business avoid serious problems. The authors provide a step-by-step process for engaging family members in developing policies which cover issues such as: dealing with conflicts of interest; retirement timing; distribution of profits; loan programs; compensation and succession.

After seeking approval from his siblings, Mark Trevor hired Virginia Scott, a family business consultant, to enlighten his family about possibly unfair compensation practices in their 50-year-old family business. The ninth of Ben and Amy's 12 children, Mark believed that the family's current practice of providing equal salaries for different types of work and giving special allowances due to marital circumstances were unfair. His siblings, with ages ranging from 37 to 58, had varied opinions about this.Virginia initially thought that the case of the Trevors would be straightforward. She had more than 15 years of experience working with business families and she had been successful in making family members understand that each held a different perspective depending on whether they were involved in the family business as owners or managers or not at all. This is a perspective presented by Tagiuri and Davis (1992) in their three-circle model of family businesses. By making family members in previous engagements differentiate their family, ownership, and business positions, they had become more sensitive to the concerns raised by the other.This time, however, Virginia would need to work with each of the 10 living siblings as each has unique circumstances. Certainly, each would have their own views about how the family business should compensate them; after all, they are all children of the founders. Virginia would have to tread carefully, though, so as not to antagonize any of the siblings; but, she needed to deal with them firmly so as not to be pulled by one or the other into a triangle relationship where she will be forced to take sides. How should Virginia strike the balance and help the family members understand each other's perspective and accept a business compensation framework that would be perceived as fair by everyone? This paid engagement was preliminary but Virginia knew that if the Trevor's accepted the framework, this would lead to a separate, more substantial engagement focused on preparing the compensation structure for the family.