What is the Greater Washington DC Family Business Alliance?
History
The Greater Washington DC Family Business Alliance (“The Alliance”) was founded in 2008 to provide a central meeting place for the DC area’s family businesses. Metropolitan areas throughout the country have benefited from centers that enable family businesses to share their unique experiences and learn more about best practices – both local and national – in the family business arena. Partners at Bond Beebe, a certified public accounting firm with an over 75-year history in the DC area, saw a need to be filled in the absence of this opportunity for the many family businesses they served. They believed that these clients had a unique set of challenges – and would benefit from better access to one another and the expertise of the area’s best consultants and professionals.
So the Bond Beebe partners spent the next year studying family business centers and alliances around the country and recruited other highly-respected DC area firms that would support a newly-created Alliance. Alliance partners grew to include firms focused on serving family businesses in the fields of accounting, law, wealth advisory, organizational development, insurance, conflict management and more. Together, these experts identified how the Alliance could best start to offer practical benefits to its family business members.
With the groundwork well laid, the Alliance initiated its newsletter and public forum programs for family businesses in 2010, and is inaugurating its membership, Inner Circle and advisory programs, and enhanced Web site / knowledge base in 2011. The Alliance plans to continue expanding its services in the coming years throughout the District of Columbia, Maryland and Northern Virginia.
Mission
The Greater Washington DC Family Business Alliance exists to serve owners, managers and others associated with family businesses in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Northern Virginia. The Alliance helps area family businesses achieve their business goals while maintaining healthy and harmonious family relationships – providing information and assistance, and promoting ideas and cooperation.
Family businesses share many similar challenges, including: definition of family-member compensation and roles; managing sibling partnerships; inter-generational communications and succession; and estate and legacy planning. The Alliance works to provide a structured, accessible forum for the exchange of experiences, ideas and best practices on these and related subjects.
We believe that those working in family businesses have an indispensable contribution to make in this exchange. Therefore, the Alliance is committed to providing a wide variety of venues in which family business members can directly share their own experiences and questions with one another. We also believe that professionals with extensive experience working with family businesses can add invaluable expertise to the Alliance’s dialogue. Our goal is to identify the very best experts in the DC area and elsewhere to educate, advise and support our family business members as needed.
The Alliance offers support to family businesses through a variety of media – suited to all generations and all levels of interest. This commitment is reflected in our current use of social media and on-line knowledge bases, as well as traditional newsletters and face-to-face consultations, open public programs and intense Inner Circle support groups. Listening to its family business members and professional partners, the Alliance will continue to adapt its services to meet the evolving needs and interests of the greater Washington DC family business community.
