Nuclear Family Business

Both Ray and Mike have extensive experience - good, bad, and ugly - with traditional broadcast radio, which lends itself to the discussion of family business from many perspectives - ownership, management, employment, and advertiser. Just like all media, radio is ever-changing, but has remained a stalwart institution, weathering a constant wave of new competitors for decades. We welcome Austin radio veteran (and Nuclear Family Business producer) Chris Mosser in for a roundtable on radio, and why we all still love it.

An inherent feature of family businesses - your mom or your brother is often also your boss or your assistant. And they're not always appropriate, and they're not always convenient - but romantic relationships within work environments are also very common. People, after all, wanna get down. What risks and pitfalls revolve around these dual relationships within family businesses? Ray and Mike, both speaking from experience, discuss these difficult but common collisions between family entrepreneurship and human nature.

Monica Ballard is a renowned creative marketing juggernaut with the Wizard Of Ads collective and Austin's Brand Guys agency, with whom she has guided many family businesses to heights of marketing success - she's made lots of business owners famous! But, as they say, it ain't easy. Mike and Ray pick the brain of perhaps our all time favorite commercial concept genius, live theatrical maestro, and ghost chaser.

What do you do when there’s an employee or a manager in your business whose behavior and performance are an issue that no one wants to talk about? Mike and Ray talk through how to look at the problem head-on and do whatever it takes to turn things around, especially if there’s a family member involved.

Family members behaving badly in a small business can look like a lot of things: laziness, dishonesty, problems with drugs and alcohol or just personal drama that gets dragged into the workplace. Mike and Ray take a look at some strategies to handle the problems that arise between family members working together in a small business and share some of their own personal stories of the clashes, missteps, and resolutions in their own business adventures with family members.

Family businesses come with the likelihood that mom-and-pop are eventually going to hand the keys over to the next generation. Mike and Ray talk about how founders and their children can prepare for that transition to happen gracefully so there are no Succession-style bloodbaths or power struggles on the horizon.

Brad Casebier of Radiant Plumbing has written the book, literally, about successfully running and growing a business with your spouse. Mike and Ray learn some lessons from Brad’s book The Survival Guide To Working With Your Spouse, and hear about the time talk show host John Oliver shined his spotlight on Radiant’s over-the-top TV commercials.

In any business, one of the key pitfalls is when everyone has a different idea of who’s doing what. Mike and Ray share the lessons they learned from setting boundaries in a family business and why success starts with setting up a definitive organizational chart that spells out clear and concise roles and responsibilities for everyone.

There’s no quicker way to sow mistrust and undermine company values in a small business than by letting nepotism read its ugly head. Ray and Mike talk about the many ways working with family members can cause problems inside your business, and how to guard against the discord that nepotism can create.

The first thing you think about when it comes to small business is…? Ray and Mike use a game of word association to peel back their views and lessons on what it takes to successfully run a small business side by side with family members.

Ray and Mike each talk about their beginnings in small business, and how the experience of growing or being thrust into ownership played a role in their appreciation of the hard work needed to live an entrepreneurial life.