Independent Advisor May Provide Creative Ideas to Avert a Crisis

(update a detailed case history of this client is available here)

Family owned businesses that operate without a succession plan face serious risks if and when the company president dies, the DeWitt Family of North Carolina learned that lesson the hard way when 78 year-old L.G. DeWitt passed way in 1990, unexpectedly leaving both L.G. DeWitt Trucking and North Carolina Motor Speedway in the hands of his wife and two daughters. “My father ran the two companies out of his head,” said Nancy DeWitt-Daugherty, L.G.’s daughter who assumed presidency of trucking company. “My dad did not have a chain of command. Everybody could go to him. When he died, there was a void.”

The problem facing the DeWitts is a problem facing many small and family owned companies: no formal organization chart or chain of command and often no modern business systems for the successor to fall back on. When the founder dies, the company faces a crisis. The void was the biggest in DeWitt Trucking, which was facing heavy, mounting debts. The racetrack was still profitable, but was trying to fend off growing competition with a manual accounting and ticketing system and outmoded facilities.

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Don’t make wellness a budget casualty

By Connie Roethel , for SBT Published October 17, 2008

As the economy tightens, America’s small businesses are struggling with ways to respond to today’s market conditions. In a recent Milwaukee Biz Blog, Steve Jagler, executive editor of Small Business Times, referenced a new poll of 516 small-business owners across the United States conducted by management consulting firm George S. May International. In the survey, American small-business owners ranked the following issues as the most important to them: the economy (23 percent); health care (20 percent); taxes (17 percent); the Iraq war (15 percent); energy (12 percent); housing (7 percent); and immigration (5 percent).

With health care ranked as the second-highest concern and, for many employers the second-highest cost, it seems imperative that efforts to keep the workforce healthy and productive should continue, despite serious concerns about credit, budgets and cash flow.

In years past, doing wellness programs on nominal budgets and sometimes at no cost was common. Staff and practitioners got by on minimal dollars, health fairs, creativity and free community programs.

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