Sunday, June 06, 1999
ENTREPRENEURS
Center helps family businesses
BY JOHN ECKBERG
The Cincinnati Enquirer
These days John B. Goering, a retired businessman and former educator, is more likely to spend his mornings in Crescent Springs on a tractor cutting hay than buried in a spreadsheet of revenues and expenses and worry.
The Goering Center for Family and Private Business, named for Mr. Goering, will celebrate its 10th anniversary Wednesday by honoring its founder — a former University of Cincinnati business professor and former lumberyard co-owner - and taking its commitment to help family-owned businesses up a notch.
Mr. Goering will climb off that tractor Wednesday and accept an award for having the money, the foresight and the wisdom in 1986 to endow the university with six figures of seed money for the center.
That initial contribution has now grown to more than $1 million in principal, and the Goering Center for Family and Private Business is expanding, as well.
Its Goering Center Institute: The Next Generation will be a formal series of classes for 25- to 45-year-olds who are either chief executive officers or on the CEO path, said Kent Lutz, director of the Goering Center.
“It will be a certification-based program,” he said. “We will have a mentor assigned to each participant, a mentor from the senior generation.”
The Institute is also seeking feminine perspectives and participation, he said, in an effort to broaden the scope of the organization that has 160-170 member businesses and worked with about 2,000 executives in the past decade.
Mr. Goering, who will be honored at an open house Wednesday at the Kenwood Country Club from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., said that when he endowed the center, its mission was to offer low-cost advice on critical issues facing family businesses.
“Communication — or lack thereof — is the heart of most family business problems,” Mr. Goering said. “Frequently, the younger generation doesn't have a full appreciation of the senior generation, how they struggled, didn't take vacations and didn't play golf.
“Now the younger generation comes along and they want to belong to a country club and have a boat and play golf and take a vacation.”
The center would make businesses more successful by offering programs and discussion groups on business trends, pitfalls and positive initiatives.
“The greatest frustration so far has been to get people involved,” Mr. Goering said. In some cases, by the time the soon-to-retire executive and the next-in-line have a meeting of minds, it may be too late.
Both generations may understand that steps toward succession need to be taken.
“But they miss the chance to do what needed to be done to resolve their problem,” he said.
“The younger generation says, "I'm going to work someplace else,' and at that point, the opportunity for successful succession within that family has passed.”
John Eckberg covers small-business news for the Enquirer. Have a small-business question, concern or quandary? E-mail him at jeckberg@enquirer.com and he will find the expert with the answers.
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