Family businesses are a cornerstone of the American Dream but aren’t easy. Among the unique challenges faced by family-owned operations are the difficulties of reconciling personal differences with professional demands, the gap between the work ethic and work culture of different generations, and especially succession planning, which is more emotionally fraught when the question is not just who will be the next CEO but who in the family will be the next CEO.
A Family Business Program
That’s why the University of Nevada, Reno, has recently added to its Ozmen Center for Entrepreneurship a specialized program specifically for family business owners. The program is the brainchild of Jeremy S. Lurey, Ph.D., and Chris Yount, MBA, who chair the Family Business Program’s advisory board.
The program offers workshops and virtual classes on family business finance, marketing in the digital age, and succession planning. In addition to covering the fundamentals, the faculty helps family businesses understand how to integrate AI and other new technologies into their operations.
Networking is a significant focus of the program, whose participants form an informal cohort of family business owners and leaders who are all “in it together.” Lurey and Yount believe that family business leaders learn more from sharing ideas and deep conversations with faculty mentors than they can from interviewing industry titans.
For Yount, the program’s point is to gather family business leaders (both students and faculty) to discuss the issues unique to running family businesses.
“Running a business is hard, and living in a family is hard,” Yount acknowledges, “and when those two things cross, it gets exponentially more difficult.”
One thing that makes it most difficult is when leaders facing these issues feel alone – even while working with their family members. The Family Business Program aims to cure that aloneness by creating shared knowledge.
The Expertise Behind the Program
The program’s designers are no novices. Jeremy S. Lurey founded Family Legacy 1st, a coaching and consulting service for family business owners, so he has worked closely with them on challenging issues for years. His colleague Chris Yount served for years as a third-generation leader of a family business; in his current role, he teaches as the entrepreneur-in-residence at UN Reno.
Lurey and Yount’s connections have also helped ensure the new program’s financial viability and expansion of services. Family Legacy 1st is helping to bankroll the program (along with other corporate sponsors such as Premier Client Insurance Services by Chvaroli and the investment agency Whittier Trust).
These firms also provide consulting services for the program’s registrants.
Benefits for Both Town and Gown
Launching the Ozmen Center’s Family Business Program also provides a rare opportunity to business students at the University of Nevada, Reno. It means those students are taking classes right next door to a cohort of experienced small business owners.
Lurey describes why this proximity is so beneficial: “The students are learning about business and entrepreneurship, but they may not have a class called Family Business Dynamics. They may not have an expert like Chris come speak to them. So our long-term goal is to integrate programs for those students.”
Lurey and Yount also hope that the program will be a way of giving back to the local Reno community. Many small family businesses are dealing not only with generational change and the trials and tribulations of leadership succession but also with the need to adapt to disruptive technologies and crowded, competitive markets.
Thinking of the many untapped opportunities for the Ozmen Center to provide training and consulting to local businesses and thus help the community, Lurey remarks, “To me, that’s the secret sauce.”
“We can’t wait to bring together this community to learn with and from one another,” Yount adds.
