Engaged Ownership: A Guide for Owners of Family Businesses (WILEY; December 2015; $34.95; ISBN: 978-1-119-17113-3), is the definitive owner’s guide to strengthening ownership of the family enterprise, providing practical advice and time-tested processes for family business owners and their advisors.
Engaged Ownership is written by Amelia Renkert-Thomas, the founder of Renkert Thomas Consulting LLC and advisory consultant for Withers Consulting Group. Renkert-Thomas works with family enterprises of all shapes and sizes on strategy, governance and ownership. She also trains and educates family members and family advisors.
Engaged Ownership guides family business owners and their advisors to show them how to build dynamic and effective partnerships with trustees, board, and management, and become successful stewards of the family′s financial, human, and enterprise capital.
Renkert-Thomas says, “This book came about because of the half-truths I kept hearing about family business succession being presented as best practices. For family businesses, ownership is less about money and more about the challenges ahead that can occur abruptly. I felt that these unique challenges needed their own guide that looks beyond vague notions of ‘best practice’ to provide real-world, workable solutions.”
A guide to engaged ownership is needed now, more than ever before. As the Baby Boomers retire, business founders and entrepreneurs worldwide are transferring ownership of privately held enterprises to their children in record numbers. This often triggers a radical change in the ownership and leadership of family enterprises, and if poorly managed, can put the business and the family in peril.
Written from the owners’ perspective and using the story of a fictitious family, the Owens, Engaged Ownershipprovides family business owners and their advisors the tools to succeed, including:
- A step-by-step process for family business owners to increase engagement, including defining roles, articulating shared vision and purpose and examining core capital
- A layout of the day-to-day practice of engaged ownership, including actionable steps that owners must take to develop and maintain engagement
- A framework for allocating decision-making among owners, board, management and family that leads to maximizing every form of core capital
- An understanding of three major challenges to engaged ownership - the managing owner, the trust and the non-family investor
Related Websites
Visit www.renkertthomasconsulting.com and www.engagedownership.com
Amelia Renkert-Thomas is a family enterprise consultant and founder of Renkert Thomas Consulting, providing strategy, ownership and governance consulting for family enterprises. She was the joint founding partner of Withers Consulting Group, an award winning international family business consultancy, owned by the Law Firm Withers LLP, to which she remains an advisor and freelance consultant.
Amelia’s work fills a void between family dynamics and management consultancy. Her work reduces and manages the conflicts that can be created by structures of ownership, such as voting and non-voting shares, trusts, partnerships, and foundations, all of which are very familiar to Amelia as a trained lawyer. Her work on ownership has been referred to as ‘the missing piece of the puzzle’ for family businesses.
She works with families and enterprises of all shapes and sizes, from entrepreneurs coping with the consequences of liquidity events to large multi-generational families with highly sophisticated business and investment structures. She helps families to design tailored governance structures, create more effective board structures, form and govern family offices, set up shareholder councils and make trusts more functional.
Her understanding of the complexities family businesses face stem not only from her consulting work but also from her own family background. She is the former President of Ironrock, Inc., her family’s 5th generation manufacturing business, and the granddaughter of the founder of Fisher Price Toys.