Some five thousand businesses are listed on major stock exchanges in the U.S. They raised their funds on the equity market. Then there are the twelve to fifteen million of the rest of us-we took our equity from our family in cash, credit, and time.
Our businesses are family-based, regardless of whether family members actually work together in the business (and many do).
So, call those stock-exchange giants "big businesses" if you wish, but don't call our family-based businesses "small." Nothing that is capable of taking such a toll on our loved ones should be considered small.
Newspapers, talk shows, Internet sites, and management theorists all focus on the big players. Well, what about us?
We are different!
We stand at the crossroad of Prosperity and Purgatory.
We can live in the best of times. The vast majority of the people who are prosperous are business owners just like us.
We can also live in the worst of times. The chance of our businesses succeeding twenty years is 20 percent in a good economy. The chance of our marriage lasting that long is 50 percent. So the chances of our marriage and our family-based lifestyle business making it twenty years is only 10 percent at best.
This book fills the void in our resources by dealing with our struggle to reach prosperity and to transition that success to a prepared second generation.
It is about accepting the challenge of Prosperity's Litmus Test-because we have these businesses, we must provide more time for our families and more money, not less. And if we are not doing that, we must either fix the business or close it down and get a real job.
This book is about how to fix it and travel the happy trail of Prospering.
Tom Crouser is principal of Crouser & Associates, Inc. and is uniquely qualified to write about family-based business.
Not only has he consulted with family-based businesses during the last fifteen years, but he also founded and operated his own family-based printing company for the twenty-year period prior to that. There he worked with his father and mother. With Crouser & Associates, he works not only with his wife, Pamela, but also with his son, Edward, as well as other couples who help family-based businesses prosper.
So, Tom not only writes about family-based business, he lives it.
Tom holds a Masters degree in Business Administration and an undergraduate degree in accounting. He has taught operations management on the graduate and undergraduate levels.
And as a business advisor, Tom has the experience to write about family-based business. Tom and Pamela and their other professional teams have worked with businesses in nearly every area of the United States. Tom and Pamela have also worked with companies in England, Canada, Mexico and Australia.
Tom is author of Dead Printer Working: A Printer's Financial Survival Guide (1997), five audio training programs, and an industry-specific pricing guide.
When they are home, Tom and Pamela split their time between the family's home place in Charleston, West Virginia, and Amelia Island, Florida, where they are close to the grandchildren.
You may reach Tom via email at tom@crouser.
