Building an ethical culture is challenging and a basic requirement of the companies to embed transparency in their systems, creating a positive image; serving the internal and external communities. This paper based on detailed interviews of 12 family owned businesses over a period of 16 months explores how these companies build the ethical culture, identifying the ethical culture sustainability triggers, challenges and role of religion in such practices. The values, culture, community and social norms are identified as major ingredients of a sustainable ethical culture development and implementation of the ethical policies and procedures require institutional and structural mechanisms for effectiveness in family owned businesses. The findings at numerous occasions are in contrast to the literature, whereas, in other instances are similar. The religion, society, family image, the entrepreneurs themselves and their family members play a vital role. Non-interference in private matters of the employees, whistle blowing, code of ethics, training and awareness creation and a number of other factors play a leading role in ethical culture development in family businesses.

The long term sustainability and longevity of the business life cycle depends on correct understanding of the contextual constituents, triggers and dynamics, pre-startup planning, strategy and financial forecasting where business plans are developed to understand and forecast project viability, pitch ideas and secure funding. At the same time there is a lack of one page startup business model. Identifying this need, a ‘startup business strategy frame’ has been developed through learnings and encompassing design thinking, the business canvas and other strategy models and approaches. It provides a logical sequential flow and connects value drivers on environmental, strategic including operational and financial levels of proposed startup in a sequential format. To arrive at the frame as a logical conclusion a website www.strategizestartup.com is developed to build startup business model and plans in a time and cost effective process. The website assists the startups at each stage through a work and guidebook. The website takes the user from creative ideation by charting the context to build the strategy and measuring the financial impact. This startup strategy model will alleviate the problems for the first and second stage entrepreneurs to ideate creatively and strategizing. It also eradicates the issues related to reading and understanding long plans which could be an exhaustive and cumbersome process.