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Family Resilience in the Time of Corona
Cash is King, but Value Creation is a Family’s Long-term Goal – Even During a Crisis
Wealth Strategy
To Enterprising Families around the World,
In this important time in history, family enterprises face significant new challenges brought by the Covid-19 pandemic and this turbulent era broadly.
As you experience, first-hand, the shocks of disruptions like Covid-19, and witness the impact on individuals, families, companies, economies, and societies, it is critical to maintain cool heads and focus on what needs to be done—at every level of your Family Enterprise and in your communities.
Families have been catapulted into crisis management mode and are constantly adapting as the pandemic, its repercussions, and rapid disruptions take hold.
As a family CEO expressed in one of our virtual working sessions:
“Everything changes dramatically every day. It is a permanent adaptation, with high levels of stress, while we are being constantly solicited for decisions. It requires high resiliency, both physical and mental, and most importantly keeping the long-term view.”
An active owner of a family enterprise stated to us:
“We now write the history as it comes. There is no visibility. It is important to constantly innovate and be ahead of shifts and turns. Some of our actions have a short window, and will set the benchmark for other businesses in our country and for our regulators.”
Families and family enterprises have weathered storms of great magnitude before – wars, economic crises, and upheavals of all kinds. The survivors have benefitted from the inherent strengths of their family enterprises: their family brand and family identity, their sense of purpose, their unity and alignment, their active ownership, long-term perspective, ownership stability, innovation, dedication to their community and stakeholders, and values-driven committed family members. These are examples of strengths to leverage and reinforce during this turbulent period.
We at CFEG believe that socially-minded, nimble, and united enterprising families will play a major role in meeting the needs of communities and nations in the coming months, years, and decades. The leadership of families like yours gives confidence to the world that there are great innovators and benchmark models for responding to crises.
Enterprising families know that one can’t control how a disruptive event impacts your industry, economy, and society, but you can control how you respond to it. Family enterprises, collectively, find ways to persist. You have our support to help you navigate this turbulence, plan for what lies beyond it, build your resilience, and facilitate dialogues among your ownership group, your family members, your boards of directors, and your organizational talent. We will all ultimately rebound stronger as societies.
Our team of experts at CFEG is prepared to help your family and enterprise move constructively through this period. We are happy to share what we are doing to assist family enterprises and what we see working in the many family enterprises we support.
Our well wishes to you,
CFEG Partners
John Davis, Andrew Hier, Eduardo Gentil, Courtney Collette, Helena McDonnell, Pascale Michaud, Maria Sinanis
The copyright on this article is held by Cambridge Family Enterprise Group®. All rights reserved. Articles may be available for reprint with approval. For permission to duplicate, distribute, or copy, in whole or in part, contact [email protected].