Creating, building, and sustaining a family business is not only a fundamental American dream (over 20 million family businesses in the U.S.– 92% of all U.S. businesses), but is also a powerful dream in most other modern capitalist economies (for example, over 75% of all U.K. businesses are family owned). The benefits of family businesses are manifold, genuine, and in many cases psychologically profound. Remember, though as you read this, that Solomon tells us, "It is better to have a friend that is near than a brother that is far away" which means in families and business it's important to have relationships that are from the heart and not just based on role-obligation or expectation.
Consider WIIFF (What's in it for the family). A family business:
1. Creates a heritage for the family and serves as a medium for perpetuating a family's history, traditions, pride, and core values and belief
2. Serves as a powerful testimonial to the success and potency of a family
3. Provides the ultimate career and financial safety net one’s children and grandchildren
4. Offers participating family members greater independence and control of their fate than a more traditional career path
5. Establishes a very special glue (a bonding material, as it were) that can hold a family together around a common set of interests, activities, challenges, opportunities, threats, milestones, relationships, and daily schedules
6. Demonstrates to an entire community (and various sub-communities) that this is a family to be admired and respected
7. Makes it more certain that individual family members will have the fullest opportunities as adults to “stretch“ developmentally and to self-actualize
8. Improves the chances that family members will be able to involve themselves in meaningful philanthropic activities and become pillars of their communities
9. Makes it more likely that financial advantages, non-trivial net worth (a.k.a. wealth), and “security“ will accrue to the family
10. Provides greater stability and welfare for its employees and for the community in which it operates
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