Reflecting on key business insights for privately held and family-owned enterprises: Trends, Challenges, and Lessons from 2024 - Active Directions

1. Investment and Strategy Alignment

Importance: Clear alignment between investments and business strategy ensures long-term growth while optimising limited resources.

Key Insights:

• Many family-owned enterprises excel in adaptability but often need to invest in tools and processes to align shareholders, boards and management.
• Business strategy should deliver investment and exit readiness, keep things simple and embed your investment readiness initiatives into your business strategy.

Actions for 2025: Regularly revisit your strategic objectives and keep the discipline up of the agreed cadence of meetings, reporting and communicating progress across the organisation. Distractions will happen and that’s okay – just agree as a team that you will get back to the strategy within a specific timeframe(i.e. next month).

2. Customer Experience

Importance: Exceptional customer experiences drive loyalty and strengthen intergenerational brand trust.

Key Insights:

• Many businesses see success by engaging skilled customer service consultants, despite higher initial costs.
• Streamlining onboarding processes for marketing and customer teams has proven essential to deliver returns quickly.

Actions for 2025: Invest in the time to map and document your customer experience and review and prioritise the areas of improvement. Start with the key decision points for the customer, and key handovers between departments to ensure a consistent customer experience. We recommend a review every 3-6 months and agree the next round of improvements.

3. Sales

Importance: Effective sales strategies ensure a robust pipeline, critical for privately held and family-owned businesses dependent on niche markets.

Key Insights:

• Sales performance is improved significantly through data-driven analytics tailored to operational structures.
• When seeking external support to improve performance, it is important to understand whether coaching support will solve the issue, or there is a need for more comprehensive change across behaviours, processes(stage gates), and utilisation of tools.

Actions for 2025: Build a specialised sales function to track performance and analyse sales data at a detailed level and reveal insights that can help drive decisions at a sales team, executive and shareholder level.

4. Marketing

Importance: A strong brand narrative rooted in family heritage can differentiate in competitive markets.

Key Insights:

• Marketing strategy starts with alignment to sales and business strategies.
• Build structures in place to embed sales and marketing alignment – particularly in historical sales-led organisations.

Actions for 2025: For sales-led and founded businesses, set clear measurable KPIs for marketing and share the wins. Ensure marketing is marketing itself!!

5. Delivery

Importance: Efficient delivery ensures customer trust and repeat business, safeguarding generational continuity.

Key Insights:

• Clear expectations and open communication leads to timely project completions.
• Proactive management of project timelines with input across sales and operations will support satisfied customers.

Actions for 2025: Sales and operations planning is not a one-time thing; it is a practice to train and learn as an organisation. Kick-off the meetings, reporting, and analysis, and know that it will take some time to achieve a level of accuracy.

6. Management and People

Importance: Effective management and a motivated workforce are vital for achieving business objectives, it strengthens resilience in volatile markets.

Key Insights:

• Mapping target versus interim versus current structures can be helpful to set a stepped approach to achieving the right management structure.
• Competition for talent is always there; and delivering quick wins on your recruitment, onboarding and exit processes will pay significant dividends in the long term.

Actions for 2025: Establish multiple avenues for capability building, coaching, and mentoring that is focused on individual needs and share the learnings with your team. Lessons are best shared!

7. Technology, Data and Reporting

Importance: Smart tech adoption enhances operational efficiency while preserving personal connections.

Key Insights:

• AI adoption in marketing and operations transformed customer interactions without diminishing personal touch.

Actions for 2025: Gradually implement AI tools tailored to your business scale. Start with simple functions to collate, analyse and present data and move on to the next level when ready.

8. Finance, Risk, and ESG

Importance: Financial stability, risk management, and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) are all critical to manage for businesses considering investment milestones.

Key Insights:

• The challenge of managing geopolitical tensions and supply chain resilience.
• ESG considerations are increasingly shaping customer loyalty.

Actions for 2025: Get ahead of your clients, potential investors, and regulations and start the process to formalise ESG action plans that demonstrate action.

Conclusion:

Looking back on the past year, it’s evident that businesses have made considerable progress while also encountering significant challenges. By prioritising strategic investments, improving customer experience, and utilising technology, companies can navigate the complexities of 2025 and beyond. Focusing on transparency, continuous improvement, and employee wellbeing will be essential for long-term success.

Thank you to our contributors:

• Andrew Rowe
• Andrew Sinclair
• Craig Rosewarne
• Gareth Gammon
• Jim Scollon
• Leanne O’Brien
• Michael Vincent
• Paul Stansfield