Family businesses are increasingly experiencing a lack of a formal, fluid channel of communication and disordered communication within their company. They encounter decentralized information and a lot of work in completing reports. This leads to difficulty managing meetings and completing their assigned tasks.
Based on a study from IESE, launched earlier this year, we decided to highlight some of the most relevant points concerning family businesses that influence the way they communicate and their relation to shareholders.
- Family businesses represent 85% of all Spanish businesses and create 75% of private sector employment, based on data from the Instituto de Empresa Familiar en España (Institute of Family Business in Spain).
- Nearly 80% of respondents considered that the existence of formal communication mechanisms promote family involvement within the business, strengthening the evolution and the growth of a company, helping them convey family values, contributing to the continuity of the company and improving the quality of family relations.
- Almost 60% of respondents said that in their companies there was no formal communication mechanism intended for family businesses. In the majority of cases, there are no established processes, nor tools, nor channels to communicate with stakeholders of the company.
- 64% of family respondents enjoy family meetings in order to convey corporate information. The majority of respondents acknowledge that the communications with partners and shareholders is not as fluid as it should be.
In this light, Private Investments Network presents a solution:
The Private Investments Network platform facilitates the use of a tool for managing corporate information by allowing family businesses to:
- Have a formal and fluid channel of communication with the possibility to segment stakeholders into groups
- Have centralized information with a historical record and the ability to conduct automated reports
- Have a simple tool to manage meetings with a historical record of calls, documents, and assigned tasks
- Display information about KPIs that are predefined and automated
- Manage documents on the platform at any time, including controlling access to them, as well as modifying the documents and creating several versions
- Identify the value of the business’s unlisted shares
- Have the option to open for intentions to buy and sell shares between shareholders and potential investors, while limiting their access and determining specific period of time for buying and selling
Furthermore, Private Investments Network’s key features continue to add value to different users of the platform
Family members:
- Have a straightforward family members’ forum system that allows users to open a topic and invite other users to see and comment on it
- Determine limited access and the possibility to designate view-only access to documents
- Have direct links with access to the meeting agendas and voting enablement
- Click to call, allowing shareholders to automatically call a basic help line service open from 9:00 to 18:00 on week days, including 6,000 incoming calls
Corporate Administrators and Managers:
- Enable voting with specific span
- In the details of the agenda, one can report an issue, describe every article and specify assistants
- Add documents and determine whether they are read-only or can also be downloaded and/or printed
- Report, during the meeting, the number of those present and remote assistants
- Have the possibility to create a new “Responsible” manager to validate changes of secondary managers
- Have the possibility to indicate, for every shareholder, the number of any series of shares
Board of Directors:
- Have a private portal created in the cloud in order to have a different server from the intranet for shareholders
- Have classified information that is restricted to the board of directors in a distinct environment
- Allocate one’s own corporate administration manager that can be the same or different from that of the general platform
- Have each system with its own information independently, without unwanted synchronization
Managers of large volumes of information:
- Intelligent search engine for the shareholders list
- Possibility to export to Excel the information available on the screen (investors list, the list of assistants to a meeting, and more.)
- More options to segment the permits of a manager
Are you in charge of managing corporate information in a Family Business? Tell us your experience by leaving a comment here.
Fdo. Helena Lopes y Sara Jokinen.
