Finding passion in your family business.

Passion -- as a business person, I believe it is our most precious and unfortunately rarest of resources. As a family business person, I also believe that it can be one of our greatest competitive advantages. It creates great brands, unparalleled levels of service and prosperous organizations.

Personal Passion

Passion permeates every aspect of our personal and professional lives. We are passionate about our spouses, friends, kids, sports, faiths and yes, as owners we need to be passionate about our businesses. Nothing motivates employees or moves product out the door like passion. It's infectious. Every great leader throughout history has had it and shared it. The people around you with will feel it and want to be part of it. But the tough part about passion is answering the questions. What is it? Where do we find it? How can we hamess it in our organizations?

Family Passion

First let's explore passion in the family. This is an easier environment in which to recognize passion. It shows up in intimacy between spouses, on your child's sports team, around the dinner table talking about current events or between two siblings and a channel changer! It evokes emotions of love, hate, anger, joy, rage and every emotion in between. It can be the glue that holds us together as well as the wedge between us.

Business Passion

Passion in business starts at the leadership level. If you or your business's leaders are not passionate about the product, service, customers, employees and shareholders then it's time for a leadership change. Once the family business leaders begin to embrace this zeal, you begin what I refer to as

The Reciprocating Circle of Passion.

You will find most employees will naturally be swept up in this new found excitement. Bringing about any change can often give new significance to our work and can lead to a renewed commitment. Soon this fervor will seep its way into the customer's realm. They will want to be part of an exciting value chain. They will realize a greater level of service and quality and will become addicted to it. With the proper mechanisms in place, your customers will provide feedback to the leaders about how to do it even better. That's the practical advantage of passion and it's the basis of continuous improvement.

Family businesses inherently have a competitive advantage. They can often tap the lifelong passions that exist between family members and channel them in constructive ways within the organization.

First Steps

As leaders of your family business you are probably passionate about what you and your company does. If you weren't, you would probably be doing something else. If you are not passionate about it, find someone who is. You owe it to your customers, your staff and to yourself.

Take these first seven steps in harnessing the passion in your family business:

* Communicate and identify within your family the things that they are passionate about.

* Develop ways that the active family business members can bring that passion to the organization.

* Find the purpose in your company like "saving lives" or "making people happy" or whatever it is that your company does.

* Lead by example and get your hands dirty.

* Share the successes.

* Don't accept complacency or mediocrity...starting with yourself!

* Support the other leaders when they have temporarily lost some passion.

You will be amazed at what comes out of your newly impassioned company.

Tom Starko is involved in numerous businesses and investment activities including commercial real estate, family business advisory services and his latest start-up 'Pixit', which offers photo restoration and editing services utilizing offshore resources. He is a third generation family business owner and can be reached at [e-mail]