Laird Norton Tyee would like to thank the dedicated members of our Advisory and Research Team for making this survey possible.

Academic Advisors:

Jim Chrisman and The Mississippi State University Center of Family Enterprise Research

Jim Chrisman is the interim director of Mississippi State University’s Center of Family Enterprise Research. He also holds a joint appointment as a research fellow at the University of Alberta’s Centre for Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise. Jim provided oversight to the research for this project and provided insight on what the research findings mean for family businesses.

With four management faculty members dedicated to researching family business topics, the Center of Family Enterprise Research is one of the leading research centers for new information affecting family businesses both nationally and abroad. Along with its research efforts, the Center disseminates research and statistics to family businesses throughout the country and holds periodic conferences and symposiums addressing the issues affecting today’s family businesses. Some of the main areas of research at the Center include the creation, development and transition of family businesses, the strategic management of family businesses, the differences in organizational behavior of family and nonfamily businesses and also the determinants of economic performance of family businesses.

J. Kirk Ring

Kirk is currently an assistant professor at the Barton School of Business at Wichita State University. His primary interest is family business research and he recently completed his PH.D. at Mississippi State University this fall, with an emphasis in entrepreneurship and family business. While at MSU, Kirk played a key role in developing this survey and analyzing and interpreting its data. The information within the survey was used to support his dissertation, “Stakeholder Salience in the Family Firm,” which analyzes how family firm stakeholders influence the decision-making processes of family business leaders and how those decisions alter the performance of their firms and the performance of their families.

Pramodita Sharma and the Family Enterprise Research Conference

The Family Enterprise Research Conference (FERC) is dedicated to developing a community of scholars interested in conducting research into understanding family firms and creating usable knowledge in this field. The goal of the conference is to enable scholars to design and develop research projects that are theoretically sound, empirically accurate and of practical significance to family firms.

Pramodita Sharma is the co-founder of FERC. She is a professor at the John Molson School of Business, Concordia University in Canada, and is also the editor of Family Business Review – an academic journal publishing the latest and most relevant interdisciplinary research on family firms. Pramodita lent her expertise in family business research to this study, analyzing the data and giving context to the survey's results.

Research Firm:

Jim Hebert and Hebert Research

Jim Hebert is founder and CEO of Hebert Research. He has a personal interest in family businesses and oversaw the data collection for this survey to ensure it was a representative sample of family businesses in the Pacific Northwest.

Hebert Research is a Bellevue, Washington-based firm providing both qualitative and quantitative research and statistical data to more than 3,000 local, national and international businesses and organizations. Hebert Research has provided statistical data to clients for more than 30 years. The firm is a recognized leader in applied statistics, marketing, economic and behavioral research. They employ more than 90 researchers including specialists in social sciences, medicine, public policy, economics and various areas of business marketing.