7 Best Practices to Running a Healthy Family Business

The opinions expressed by contributors are of their own.

There is no business like show business. I have no doubt that Hollywood is in a league of its own, but my experience is that there is no business like family-owned business in the United States.

According to research by Family Enterprise USA, family-owned businesses are the engine of the American economy and create 80% of new jobs. Studies have shown that a lot of Fortune 500 companies are family-controlled. The family-owned businesses that make up our country's wealth contribute more than half of the private sector GDP.

While working with family can be rewarding, it also proposes a unique set of challenges, including the ability to separate personal and professional lives. It takes practice and a lot of patience, but it is possible to separate the home and the workplace. We knew it was important to the health of our company and our personal lives to be flexible in shifting from our traditional family roles to those of our business.

There is a lot to know about running a successful family business.

Acknowledging your own strengths and weaknesses as a leader is essential to the prosperity of any company, and partners with the expertise to fill in the gaps help to provide a supportive foundation for building a strong team. Due to the nature of our relationships, we took into account our different personality and learning styles when establishing roles in our family-owned business.

Without personal feelings clouding our professional judgement, we effectively manage a successful business together. Here is how you can do it.

Key skills to master

Family-turned-colleagues should know how to maintain a neutral work environment and avoid conflict.

1. Embrace transparency. Before going into business with family, have a vulnerable discussion together surrounding the collaborative dynamic you each envision, and set clear expectations to help achieve those goals. Make a genuine effort to remain respectfully straightforward in all of your business interactions, including triumphs, failures and uncertainties.
2. Listen objectively. Ego has no place in a family-owned business, and as such, it's important to leave your family dynamic at home. Colleagues who are related should apply the same respect and fairness to business dealings that they'd expect to receive, and strive to listen with neutrality no matter the topic.
3. Trust each other. When you're in business with your family, it's necessary to place complete trust in one another's abilities, decisions and intentions. This is why transparency and impartiality are invaluable — they are actions that breed trust. Likewise, having trust in yourself is paramount, and taking ownership of your actions is true leadership.

It is not for the faint hearted to work with family. When family members consistently apply transparency, nonpartisanship and trust as the cornerstones of their family-owned business, it has the opportunity to reach its fullest potential and make a lasting impact.

The challenges of a family business are related.

Best practices for a healthy dynamic

In addition to the key skills for maintaining a positive and conflict-free work environment, I have also implemented what I consider to be the four core best practices for a healthy family enterprise.

1. Clear boundaries should be set. Work should be done at the workplace. Talk about the pros and cons of work at the end of the day. When circumstances arise that require business conversations outside of working hours, commit to a 30-minute time limit to discuss and then revisit at an appropriate time. Work talk is restricted and weekends are reserved for family time.

2. Stay in your lane. Everyone knows that they have responsibilities. When trust comes back into play, it helps to prevent disagreements and conflicting opinions.

3. Enjoy extracurricular activities together. My brother and I are former elite runners, and still run together whenever we have the chance. Spending quality time together outside of work reminds us that we are a family.

4. You can learn from the losses. Allow yourself to feel the human emotions of a loss or a failure that affects the business, talk about it together, and then move forward. Don't allow business lows to affect your personal relationships.

To strengthen leadership, unify a team and foster loyalty, recognize company victories in their various forms. When you celebrate the wins in your family-owned business, no matter how big or small, you are driving motivation and cementing the connection between the family members that are invested in the success of your business.

Building a successful family business is the How-To.

• The founder wanted to give a candy with chocolate. He had no idea how hard it would be.

• 5 Ways to Strengthen Them is why your franchise depends on strong unit economics.

• There are 3 reasons that espresso could be your shortcut to productivity.

• Everything went wrong in my business.

• This first-time author turned his coaching experience into a best seller.

• Here's why the future of startups is outside of Silicon Valley.

• The CEO of GoDaddy has a secret to creating a culture of experimentation.