Being a separate entity is true for both public and private companies, big and small, whether owned by families or by socially unrelated people.
Of interest to me today are companies owned and established by families. Families establishing businesses are doing a noble thing. Yeah… coming up with an idea as a family and implementing it for the benefit of the family sounds really great. Families know that the prosperity of the business means the prosperity of the family financially; the downfall of business means the crippling of the family financially.
Now, let’s see how this great and noble idea can plunges into a pool of sticky mud in case professional caution is thrown out of the window.
The truth is most messed up companies in our country are small family companies (as far as I know). These small companies need the nurturing of the owners and because the owners are a family and because their prosperity depends on the company, one would think that they will know better.
But alas, no! Families sometimes decide to back off from nurturing them thereby topping up problems to the company; it’s a vicious cycle of a situational paradox!
If you can transform yourself into a magician and flash back to how the family was when the company was established, you will probably see a very good picture of the family in terms of relationships especially if it was owned by spouses.
As sweet hearts and maybe not earning much, they saw themselves as a team, so much so that their love relationship would be cemented by the financial strength that their budding would have upon its eventual growth.
If your magic ways could hear the conversation going on between the couple, you could hear words like; “sweetheart, I can just see a huge thing in ten years to come, you know what?
When we make the money I van visualize in my dreams as we open more branches in other regions; we are going to build a better house and each one of us will have his/her own car: oh God, I can’t wait to experience the life that is in store for us in the future!”
With such a loving mood, the company was well taken care of; everybody in the family fulfilling his/her obligations. But, businesses are businesses; the dreams of prosperity we have about them may turn up just to be that- dreams. They may fail.
Failing because of circumstances faced by every company within that class is not my point of discussion here. Rather, am referring to the failure that might occur because the couple have stopped loving each other, or at least one has stopped loving the other.
Believe me, the strains within the couple now becomes the strains within the company. No one among them is again thinking of the’ big thing’ they thought of in ten years to come. They are too busy concentrating on the quarrels that they are having at the moment.
Do you know that our Tanzanian company owners/directors/employees may even play around with a business proposal that would have turned their miserable lives to a totally prosperous future? Just hear them: “count me out of that company; you will know how you will proceed with the proposal yourself! I’m not part of it”, and so on and so forth” And the end result is the death of the company.
Thus, the company dies because a personal family relationship has ‘conspired’ to sound the death knell. Why is that so? It is because we cannot separate the business from the family affairs.
A company is a separate entity that should be managed differently from the way we manage our social affairs.
If we believe we cannot separate the two then we better not start family businesses because we cannot manage them. Establishing them is a waste of time and resources and inconveniences for the people who are employed in such businesses.
The author is a veteran banker currently working as a part time lecturer at Stella Maris, Mtwara University College, a constituent college of the Saint Augustine University Tanzania.
Email: assunali@hotmail.com
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