THE company headed by WA Tourism Council chairman and inaugural WA Business News 40under40 co-winner, Manny Papadoulis, will be featured in a new book on family businesses in the tourism industry.
Jack Carlsen, a professor of tourism and hospitality studies at Curtin University’s School of Business, has been researching family-run businesses and, as part of that research, has studied the success of Perth’s Feature Tours.
His friendship with Mr Papadoulis, Feature Tours’ managing director, goes back to about 1990. At that time Professor Carlsen was commissioned by the Perth Convention Bureau to do the first convention delegate study in the State, while Mr Papadoulis was on the bureau’s board.
Professor Carlsen’s book will be published later this year by CABI Publishing, and is expected to be released in December. It is co-authored by Professor Don Getz from the University of Calgary in Canada and Professor Alison Morrison from Scotland’s Strathclyde University,
The book will discuss the manage-ment of small, family businesses, including setting business and family goals, and arranging a succession plan for the business. Professor Carlsen said this was a burning issue for family businesses.
“What happens to first-generation family businesses? How do they evolve into second and third and fourth-generation businesses, and if they don’t, what happens to them,” he said.
“What Feature Tours has done extremely well is handle the very difficult succession issue. From all the case studies we’ve done, succession is probably the real stumbling block for a lot of family businesses, and Feature Tours, Manny and the rest of his family have handled that issue extremely well.”
