<p>Sometimes, a company develops a new line of business that isn&#8217;t obviously part of the existing business. The question soon arises whether to separate the new business, and how to do it.</p>

Here are some basic ways of separating a business so that it’s more separate from an existing business:

• Putting it in a separate department or under separate teams with primarily shared services.
• Creating a separate division, with more dedicated personnel, with relatively fewer shared services.
• Creating a subsidiary of the original company.
• Creating a sister company under a new holding company.

There are obviously many variations of the first two, but if you consider them a spectrum, you can see that the two ends are very different.

Now, why might you separate a business?

• business reasons
• capital/financial reasons
• risk
• legal issues
• governance/management/leadership factors

Let’s cover each of these briefly.

1. Business reasons – you may want to separate a new business when it doesn’t mesh well with the existing one, such as no economies of scale, no shared customers, and relatively few shared resources. An example is a manufacturing company that wants to also provide advertising and marketing services. At some point, that second business is too different to function well inside the original company.
2. Capital and financial reasons – similarly, if the two businesses have different capital needs and rates of return, investors in the original business may not want to be in the new business, or vice versa. Consider a professional services business, like a consulting firm or software development. High margins, low capital requirements, and regular cash flow make those very different from a real estate development business.
3. Risk – this is a classic reason why real estate investments such as commercial buildings or apartment houses are often owned by separate LLCs. But it applies as well to businesses where the risk profile is very different – a web designer has very few risks (short of copyright infringement), but that business compared to the production of packaged snacks for people looks very different. You may want to separate those risks so that each business can be judged on its own merits and also so that risks from one business don’t damage the other.
4. Legal issues – some businesses have to be separate, such as because of ownership restrictions (such as licensed professions or S-corporations) or because the two businesses need different investors for some other reason. For closely held companies, a new partial owner for the second business almost always leads to creating a new legal entity to separate the businesses. It’s possible to allocate equity returns to specific businesses, but those lines don’t work if there’s a problem (see #3 – Risk).
5. Governance – if the businesses are different enough to consider separating them, it’s not a big leap to them having different capital requirements, different risks and returns, and different skills needed from the team. Sometimes, those differences can’t be well-managed inside a single structure, where a business creating cash may have that cash reinvested in a second business consuming cash instead of reinvesting in itself. Of course that can affect investors, but the sales and management team may feel that their prospects for future bonuses are being siphoned away as well. Sometimes, the second business just needs a different governance team entirely – board members with industry expertise, different strategic partners, management with domain experience.

Ultimately, the board’s job is to evaluate each new business opportunity as it develops with these frameworks in mind – not as a prescription, but as a mental model to watch the business as it develops and find a way for *both* businesses to be successful.

A question that occurred to me recently as an interesting angle: do children and adults with varying presentations of autism experience the placebo effect in the same way – meaning under the same circumstances and to the same degree – as folks with NT brains?

This short film, Employing the Full Spectrum tells the story of a family in Florida that built a car wash business around their adult son with autism. Most of the employees, in fact, are on the spectrum. The young men working there talk about what it means to them, and the father running the operation comments on the favorable qualities of the employees and makes it clear that this isn’t a charity.

What business would you build for adults on the spectrum? I personally think about hydroponic or aeroponic or organic farms, where clean and safe living conditions, hard work, and self-sufficiency can help ensure sustainability that government programs cannot promise.

The process was super-fast and painless. The pass allowed us to either enter through the exit immediately or come back through the exit at a designated time to avoid simply waiting in the line.

Today, I received an email from the park directing me to their new page on the “Attraction Access Pass.”

Six Flags offers an Attraction Access Pass for guests who are unable to wait in ride lines due to a disability, mobility impairments, or certain qualifying impairments. Beginning November 7, 2015 any guest requesting use of one of these special passes will need to provide a doctor’s note at Guest Services at the time they pick up the pass. This new program replaces our old Equal Access Pass program.

So get your note from your child’s doctor in advance and it will go more smoothly for you.

In the past, I’ve thought about the idea of setting up an organic farm where he and folks like him could be self-sufficient, eat well, have good, honest, work in a close-knit community setting, and ultimately build a future for themselves. I’ve spent time thinking about how to restructure and break down even computer-aided instruction in programming for kids on the spectrum. Kodable is a great fun introduction to concepts and thought processing, but it doesn’t teach coding and programming in a way that pays you money.

I’ve thought about using Amazon Mechanical Turk to structure specific tasks. I’ve thought about how to package up those common task types and create instructional programs to actually teach them. 

This article describes two smartphone apps that offer random tasks to people through that channel. The samples seem very human-oriented, i.e., things that computers can in fact not do. As a plus, though, they seem to be tasks that are out in the world rather than in front of a keyboard. For many on the spectrum, avoiding isolation, whether internal or external in source, will be a lifelong challenge. I like the idea of my son walking through a grocery store more than him sitting at a table typing alone in a room.

I can see that I should start building a platform for collecting these types of small alternative task channels (for lack of a better term) and categorizing them by a few major characteristics – online, offline, speaking required, reading level, type of output, freeform vs. structured. As with any NT person, skills will always have to match up; but I suspect these other characteristics can be critical deal-breakers for someone on the spectrum, and pointing a person in the right direction is hopefully going to be a big help.

What ideas or dreams have you thought of for the person on the spectrum in your life?

My older son is 8, and he’s certainly capable of many things. But I haven’t formalized the chores for him or my younger son, 6. Perhaps it’s time to do that. (And yes, I believe that self-care leads to self-reliance, which is the core of self-advocacy.)

I think dishes and the dishwasher, vacuuming, and picking up clothes as a precursor to laundry (have to install a washer/dryer in the new loft apartment we just moved into). I know that older kids at Reed Academy have learned to do laundry

What chores do your kids do? And at what ages?

One problem I see as a parent is what seems to be a disconnect between diagnostic, analytical, and assessment tools on the one hand and specific treatments/programs on the other. A physical therapist can assess a range of motion problem on a post-surgery shoulder and has a suite of exercises known to improve range of motion. A speech therapist can identify a lisp and use specific exercises to teach proper teeth, lips, and tongue placement. But in the more nebulous world of cognitive processing, it’s a world of best guesses.

IQ tests yield many subset scores, but no one has yet been able to explain to me which programs would be more appropriate for my son given his individual mix of skills and evident difficulties. For example, he is a great speller with a good memory for words. Teaching spelling seems like an unnecessary use of his classroom time, and his teachers certainly agree.

But other, more complex issues, such as breaking down his reading comprehension skills, do not, at present, have such tailored answers — at least, none that I’ve been able to uncover. It’s as if the psychologists who divine these distinctions have never corresponded with teachers who teach these skills

This article describes an early age (2) experiment that might create a diagnostic tool to classify kids with autism into different groups related to the way their brains function. The author correctly surmises that these sorts of precise tools may help guide children into treatment/program paths that will better address the precise nature of their difficulties with language.

It’s my goal that we learn how to match each assessed weakness with a specific set of programs and therapies to address that exact weakness. 

I wish research on things like the n-back “game” to improve executive function crossed over into the world of our kids. 

I’d like to say thanks to the Ridgewood Soccer Association, which runs a special needs soccer program alongside the large program for typical kids in town.

What made this special for me, and my sons, is that they could both participate in the same sport and share many of the same experiences while still having a good time appropriate for each of them.

Here’s a brief rundown of the season, including lots of extra gratitude for the RHS women’s soccer players who helped out every Saturday. Dylan’s in the grey shirt in the last picture!

Knowing that my community — not just the school district — cares about my son in this very visible way means an awful lot to me. I really like this town.