The construction industry has an extraordinarily high percentage of family-owned and managed businesses. These businesses face unique growth and development problems because they are, after all, "part of the family." Solving the problems of the family-run business is usually difficult, because emotion too often replaces common sense. No matter how objective people tell themselves they may be, most people can't segregate their personal feelings and emotions toward family members from the hard realities of business. The tendency to judge the performance of family members not by industry standards, but by their personal assets and liabilites, is one of the biggest problems confronting the familyrun firm. The first stage in creating "dead wood" occurs when excuses are made
