Of the approximately 32 and a half million family-owned businesses in the United States, none is more important than yours.
Your family business holds within it the values on which it was founded and built, setting it apart from others and shaping its culture and operations. It carries the hopes, dreams, expectations, disappointments, and triumphs that inspired and have sustained it.
A professionally created, human-authored book preserves the stories of your family business and those who built it, creating a legacy for generations to come. It draws in readers to understand the personalities of the company’s founders, decisions and events that shaped it, and how the business was nurtured and grown. A family business is set apart by the human bonds that shape it through every stage of growth. It is the shared aspirations and human connections, often extending over generations, that give a family business life and make it so much more than just an enterprise.
Our team at OneTrueLine will work with you to provide a thoroughly researched and professionally written account of your company, covering the milestones, transitions, challenges, and accomplishments that have occurred over time, all combining to make the company one of a kind with a story that’s worth preserving.
The Value of a Family Business History
Anyone with access to business records can create a timeline illustrating how a company developed over time. And while highlights are worth noting, they don’t reveal the rich stories behind them.
The tale of your family business is multi-faceted and unique. It is built on hard work inspired by the visions of its founders and the shared dreams and values of those who built and grew the company.
A professionally written and produced accounting of your family business cements those visions, dreams, and values into a tangible, lasting tribute to be enjoyed and shared with future generations.
What’s Included in a Family Business History?
The history of your family business is a story worth telling. Putting that story into writing allows you to celebrate major accomplishments and reflect on the company’s growth while giving credit to those who contributed to its success. The business, after all, would not exist without the effort of its founders, and would not have survived and flourished without leaders, employees, customers, community partners, and others.
OneTrueLine will follow your lead when telling the story of your company, but we are committed to including the people, decisions, and events that made the business what it is.
Challenging Times
While most people enjoy celebrating accomplishments, it’s also important to document the inevitable challenges and difficulties that are inherent to growing a business. Success seldom occurs without some failure before it, the two joining together to form the story of a company.
Recounting those difficult times presents your business as an authentic entity capable of rising above challenges while moving steadfastly forward.
Community Influence
Over time, a business becomes part of the community in which it was founded and built. In addition to a positive economic impact through employment, charitable giving, and financial support for community organizations, a family business benefits a community by helping to shape its culture and contributing to its traditions.
Celebrating the bonds between your business and the community in which it’s based creates goodwill and establishes the company as an important and lasting influence.
A Look to the Future
In addition to documenting your stories, your family business history provides a chance for you to share some of your visions and goals for the future. You might want to reveal plans for future expansion or your efforts to make your company more environmentally friendly. Providing a look to the future can be reassuring to readers, as it signals stability and continued growth of the business.
Unlock the Value of Your Company’s Legacy
Over time, a family business builds a valuable legacy that embodies trust, respect, and goodwill. Capturing that legacy in a professionally written family business history unlocks its value by enhancing the perception of your business among customers, business partners, and potential investors.
This tool, known as family legacy value or heritage capital, is beneficial in that it influences customer loyalty, reinforces branding, enhances pricing power, aids in employee engagement and retention, and serves as a framework for future management.
Your legacy is an integral part of your company’s brand identity, setting it apart from your competitors and enhancing customer relationships. Weaving that legacy into your business story provides a better understanding of not just what has occurred, but why. When customers and others fully understand the story of your family business, they’re more likely to trust it and view it as authentic, attitudes that consumer research has concluded lead to enhanced loyalty.
The OneTrueLine Approach
Three qualities permeate every aspect of OneTrueLine’s business dealings: trust, collaboration, and human authenticity. Crafting the story of a business—particularly a family business built on dreams and shared values—is a responsibility we do not take lightly.
Trust is Not an Option
Mutual trust is vital to a successful relationship of any kind, and OneTrueLine is committed to nurturing that trust through confidentiality, value alignment, and understanding.
We want to learn as much as possible about your family business, understanding that you must feel comfortable sharing personal memories, stories, successes and failures, important milestones, and memorable experiences for that to happen. You must be able to trust us to hold your stories carefully, and we must be able to trust you to relate them to us clearly and accurately. That requires the trust OneTrueLine is known for. With a full understanding of one another’s expectations, we will trust each other throughout the process of shaping ideas into a permanent record of your company’s history.
Collaboration Counts
The team at OneTrueLine doesn’t just write the stories of legendary family businesses. We serve as your creative partner to produce a work that creates lasting value and returns more to you than what you put in.
Together, we’ll work through OneTrueLine’s proven process, sharing thoughts and ideas along with way. You’ll be included in every aspect of the project including its scope, historical accuracy, timelines, schedules, our process, ownership and usage rights, and payment terms. With collaboration, we’ll achieve a product worthy of authority and praise.
Authenticity in Our Work and Relationships
Merriam-Webster defines authenticity as “the quality of being true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character,” a definition that pertains to both OneTrueLine’s work and our relationships with clients.
We understand that to achieve authentic storytelling, we must nurture authentic interactions with our clients. Authenticity is a foundation of strong relationship that’s built on trust, mutual respect, and collaboration.
We’ll work with your company’s founders and executives to capture their voices, understand how outside factors have influenced their decisions, communicate their roles within the company, establish authority on their terms, and tell their stories.
Together, we can build a family business history that authentically represents your business and presents a true picture of those who built it. Readers will gain understanding of the challenges you’ve faced and be moved to celebrate your accomplishments.
Our Process
OneTrueLine employs a proven, five-step process when producing a family business history. Because every client is different, the time needed to achieve each step can vary, but we are committed to staying true to your approved timeline and finishing the job on time.
We’ve employed this process time and time again and are confident in its effectiveness and value.
Step One: Building Client-Writer Rapport
Establishing a good rapport with our clients is essential, and we work hard to accomplish that early in the process of producing your family business history. We’ll meet with you according to your preferences—in person, over the phone, or through video chat sessions.
These meetings enable us to get to know one another and discover our most important values. And, as you share your thoughts and ideas about what you’re looking to create, we’ll get to know your speaking style, diction, dialect, and other elements that enable us to “find your voice.” This is critical to producing an authentic, personal telling of your company’s history.
We’ll provide recordings, video playbacks, and transcriptions of all meetings, ensuring accuracy and enabling you to review all information.
Step Two: Building an Outline
A good outline is the foundation of a book and necessary for building a logically organized accounting of your company’s history. It is not, however, set in stone.
As we get to know you better and discover more about your company through our research efforts, the outline is likely to change to accommodate new ideas, discoveries, and revelations.
After approving an initial outline, we’ll keep you informed of any changes that are made, assuring constant collaboration and teamwork.
Step Three: Open-Access Drafting
Open-access manuscript drafting has proven extremely successful for OneTrueLine, and our clients love it. All our draft work is done in the cloud in a shared document, meaning that at any time you can see where we are in the process of producing your corporate history.
Open-access drafting keeps you informed, us accountable, and everyone happy.
Step Four: Manuscript Revision
A good story may write itself, as the saying goes, but a crafted work showcasing your business and creating family legacy value for your company is likely to call for some revisions.
The very act of getting a company’s history on paper—or a computer screen—often reveals overlooked or forgotten events, ideas, aspirations, and people. Essential themes of your story emerge and become clear, often for the very first time.
This may cause you to want to shift some focus points or showcase information you hadn’t previously considered. We’ll work with you to do that, along with making sure we’ve fulfilled any promises we’ve made to readers and satisfied all other key objectives for your work.
Step Five: Finalization and Next Steps
At OneTrueLine, we are meticulous with our writing; editing; and finalizing copy, graphics, and additional elements for our clients’ books. Your corporate history will undergo line-by-line editing and thorough scrutiny of every detail.
Once the manuscript is finalized to everyone’s satisfaction, we can, at your direction, oversee any necessary post-production tasks, including ebook design, querying, or marketing for your book.
Frequently Asked Questions
How could a family business history benefit my company?
It’s difficult to overstate the value of a professionally written history of family business, as it brings to life the people who founded and shaped the business, along with the values, decisions, and experiences it was built upon.
A family business history, however, is not just for family members. It serves as a meaningful gift for important customers and other business partners. It can be used to draw in prospects, welcome new employees, or celebrate company milestones.
It also provides a lasting record for future generations and serves to inspire leadership through the examples of those who came before.
What will my family business history look like?
The scope and look of the project depends on your wishes, timeframe, and budget. It can proceed as a full-length commemorative book, or take shape as a narrative website, documentary, digital timeline, oral history, a series of recorded interviews, or another form. We’ll work with you to assess your situation and decide what format may be best for your needs.
What kind of information does a family business history include?
In addition to stories about how the business was started and those who started it, we include accounts of major milestones, challenges, and successes, and outline generational transitions.
Stories from customers and employees provide depth and color, and we’ll highlight your company’s commitment to the region and relate how those efforts have contributed to the success of the community.
Depending on availability, the book may contain historic photos, images of documents, and other archival materials.
How is that information gathered?
OneTrueLine employs professional, innovative researchers who know where and from whom information should be sourced. We like to interview founders and other key people when possible, tapping on their personal recollections and gathering anecdotes to provide color and context. We also gather material from newspapers, business publications, annual reports, marketing materials, and other sources.
All our researchers work under confidentiality agreements and cooperate with clients to make sure any confidential or sensitive information is properly handled and protected.
How involved with the project must our company be?
Your degree of involvement depends on how much time you have available, your personal interest in the project, and other factors. Some of our clients are hands-on in everything from sharing their stories to reviewing the manuscript, while others prefer to assign ownership of the project to a chosen employee or leave it largely to the discretion of OneTrueLine.
We respect your level of interest and availability when scheduling interviews, accessing company records, locating archival media, and completing other tasks.
How long is the process of producing a family business history?
Every project is different, but it normally takes between six and 12 months to research, write, design, and produce a professional history of your family business.
Time required depends on how long the company has been in business; availability and condition of historical records; number of interviews required; task completion times; book design and printing requirements; need to acquire photos, video, or digital assets; and other factors.
OneTrueLine will work with you to determine a timeline based on those factors and any special needs of your company.
How much does a family business history cost?
The price for a corporate history can vary tremendously, based on the size of the manuscript, depth of research, the number and location of interviews, how the book is edited, use of graphic materials, photography needs, design and printing costs, how the book is distributed, and other factors.
Industry research indicates a price range of between $2,500 and $10,000 for a basic history with a shorter narrative and minimal research and interviews, to $300,000 for a very high-end commemorative or institutional history. A mid-range project typically ranges from between $10,000 and $50,000.
OneTrueLine works with every client to determine a price point with which they’re comfortable and is transparent regarding what our costs entail and our fees include.
How do I get started?
All you have to do is contact OneTrueLine by calling us at (805) 901-4566 or clicking here to schedule a complimentary, 30-minute discovery call with Bryan Basamanowicz, founder of OneTrueLine. We’re looking forward to meeting you!
