Your Name: Andrea Rubinfeld
Business Name: Family Founded, Inc., a company offering consulting services for family owned businesses
Type of Business: High Tech
Business Location: Rockville, Maryland, United States
Reason for starting
While working as a partner at a family business consulting firm, I was baffled that families were not better connected to each other and lacked the support networks they needed to overcome family business issues. Like my clients, I used to work in my family’s homebuilding company and would have loved to connect with other people working with their family…if only I had a way to connect with them. That “Aha!” moment led to FamilyFounded.com, a site dedicated to enhancing people’s experience working with family by providing peer-to-peer support and advice from top professional experts around the world.
How do you define success?
There are multiple ways I define success. One of them is by seeing traffic on our site, discussions started and people writing to me that our site is making a difference to them, positive impact on their business and benefiting their relationships. Second, making a profit is part of being successful to me. And finally, maintaining a profitable business on my own in a way that also gives me room to raise my family, be a good wife and enjoy my life is part of my definition of success.
Biggest Success
We are an early stage startup and one of our biggest successes has been building a top notch, incredible team of advisors, supporters, partnerships and users. This has taken a lot of work but has also led to much of our success. It has also been very rewarding.
What is your top challenge and how have you addressed it?
Our top challenge is generating traffic on the site and simply telling people about our product. We find new ways to address this every single day by having more family businesses tell their story on our site (and pass it along to friends) by having top notch advisors contribute to our site (because they believe and support what we’re doing and in turn), by participating in social media in new, innovative ways. We are finding more and more ways to address this challenge without breaking our budget.
Who is your most important role model?
Carley Roney, founder of TheKnot.com, has built an incredible business which is similar to FamilyFounded in that it serves to connect for people online. She also founded her company with her husband, with whom she still works, which is a great example of what can be accomplished in family business. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, she has accomplished all of this while raising multiple children, a challenge that I and many other women are work to figure out each day.