Make the description specific, but avoid making it too restrictive. Make sure after writing the job description that there is a match between what you write and what the employee ends up doing, and what the employee earns. If all members of the family and business have a clear understanding of their own and each others' roles and responsibilities, the business is likely to function more effectively and the family more harmoniously. Designing a compensation plan for a family business is a challenging and critical task. Compensation is at the heart of more family-business concerns than any other topic except succession.
Compensation is a sensitive and complex problem.
Mixed messages can easily be sent that can damage the business and the family. It is easy to confuse a pay cheque with parental love and concern, or to use a pay cheque as a method to achieve emotional goals, but to do so invites problems. One key issue to resolve is to determine what is fair. This is a difficult area because each of us has different ideas of what is fair. A manager operating under a business-first philosophy would say that fair is being paid based on the job that is to be done, at the going market rate for the job.