All posts by Rick Raymond

About Rick Raymond

Rick Raymond operates Richard Raymond Associates, Inc., an Executive Leadership firm dedicated to helping business leaders maximize performance. Rick comes from a family of small business owners - his grandfather and great-grandfather were small business owners, and he grew up listening at the dinner table to his father’s conversations about his construction business. Rick has a graduate degree in marine biology, and spent three years in the Peace Corps, working with the Chilean National Fisheries Development Institute where he worked on a fishing boat offshore of Cape Horn on the southern tip of South America. Rick then worked for Cornell University, educating teachers about the oceans. While in this position he led the effort to start the New York State Marine Education Association. Afterwards, working for the New York State Legislative Commission on Science and Technology, he started BrooklynWorks, a not-for-profit regional business-to-business exhibition to promote small business and manufacturing in Brooklyn, New York. Coastal Consultants, which he started in 1984 and sold in 2006, provided environmental planning, regulatory, engineering, and construction management services.

Continuing to manage in a stubborn recession

While there are encouraging signs of improvement in the economy, with some dealers reporting new sales, we are not out of the woods yet with the economy. We are getting warnings and reassurance about the economy, which for small businesses this means having a strategy that includes tactics for both an improving economy and a staggering one

Many of the tactics for shoring up your business as we entered the economic downturn still apply.  These are about weathering out the storm and maintaining a presence for your customers. Tactics for a recovering economy are intended to make it easy for your customers to buy from you, and keep them as fans of your business. Seven things you should be doing include: Continue reading Continuing to manage in a stubborn recession

Plan for Business Succession

Having come from a family construction business, my own environmental management business working with the marina industry, having worked with numerous businesses in developing team leadership and organizational strategies, and now teaching a course on family business management I am learning a lot about what makes family businesses successful and those that do not.

Family businesses have a lot of competitive advantages, many referenced by others who have responded to your recent article “Family is Everything,” such as a consumers perception of trustworthiness, deep understanding of the business developed across generations, shared values, a long-term perspective and an appreciation for patient money. But rarely do we hear about the 70% of businesses that fail in the transition from founder to second generation.

The lack of planning for succession, of “starting with the end in mind,” from early-on, is probably the number one killer of a family business. Continue reading Plan for Business Succession