Consulting Services
Customized consulting to help your family business navigate succession, governance, conflict, and strategic challenges with expert guidance.
Why Family Business Consulting?
Family businesses face challenges that generic business consultants simply don't understand. The intersection of family dynamics, business operations, and ownership complexity requires specialized expertise.
We bring decades of focused experience helping family-owned businesses address the unique challenges that arise when family relationships and business decisions intersect. We understand that your business isn't just about profitability—it's about legacy, values, and creating opportunities for generations to come.
Our Consulting Services
Succession Planning
Comprehensive succession planning that addresses leadership transition, ownership transfer, strategic direction, family dynamics, and financial planning. We guide families through multi-year succession processes from initial assessment through post-transition support. Our succession planning helps you avoid the statistic that only 30% of family businesses survive into the second generation.
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Family Governance Design
We help families establish governance structures appropriate to their complexity: boards of directors or advisory boards, family councils, shareholder councils, and family constitutions. Strong governance clarifies decision-making, increases accountability, and enables families to work together effectively at scale.
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Conflict Resolution and Mediation
Professional mediation for family business disputes involving compensation, roles and authority, succession decisions, strategic direction, or family dynamics. We create safe space for difficult conversations and facilitate resolution that preserves both business value and family relationships.
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Strategic Planning
Strategic planning processes designed for family businesses, helping families align on long-term vision, develop actionable strategic plans, balance family and business priorities, and create accountability for execution. We facilitate planning that builds family alignment while driving business results.
Next Generation Development
Preparing rising leaders for their future roles through customized development plans, mentoring relationships, skills assessment and training, and integration into governance structures. We help both next-generation members and their senior generation parents navigate this critical transition period.
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Board Development
Establishing or strengthening boards of directors and advisory boards including board composition planning, outside director recruitment, board process design, and ongoing board facilitation. Effective boards transform family business performance through accountability and strategic guidance.
Family Meetings Facilitation
Professional facilitation for family meetings that address sensitive topics, make important decisions, educate family members about the business, or build family unity. We create structure and safety that enables productive family conversations.
Shareholder Education and Alignment
Programs to educate family shareholders about their responsibilities, the business strategy and performance, ownership governance, and long-term planning. Well-informed, aligned shareholders become advocates rather than sources of conflict.
Compensation System Design
Creating fair, sustainable compensation systems for family businesses that balance market rates, contribution, ownership, and family needs. Clear compensation policies prevent ongoing disputes and enable professional management.
Family Employment Policies
Developing policies that govern how family members enter the business, qualifications required, performance expectations, and career development. Clear policies create fairness and professionalism.
Our Consulting Approach
Customized, Not Cookie-Cutter
Every family business is unique. We don't apply one-size-fits-all solutions—we customize our approach based on your family's generation, size, complexity, industry, challenges, and readiness for change.
Comprehensive Perspective
We address family, business, and ownership dimensions simultaneously. Focusing on only one circle while ignoring the others leads to incomplete solutions that don't last.
Facilitative, Not Directive
We provide frameworks, facilitate conversations, and offer expert guidance—but you make the decisions. Our role is to empower your family to make your own best choices, not to impose our preferences.
Confidential and Professional
We maintain absolute confidentiality in all our work. Sensitive family business matters stay private. You can trust us with your most difficult challenges.
Practical and Actionable
We focus on solutions you can actually implement. Beautiful strategic plans that sit on shelves don't create value—we help you develop plans and structures you'll actually use.
Long-Term Partnership
Family business challenges aren't resolved in a single meeting. We build long-term relationships with families, supporting you through multiple stages of evolution. Many of our client relationships span decades.
How We Work With You
1. Initial Consultation
We begin with a conversation to understand your situation, challenges, and goals. This consultation helps us determine whether we're a good fit and how we can best serve you. There's no obligation—this is about ensuring we can genuinely help.
2. Assessment and Planning
If we proceed, we conduct a thorough assessment of your family business situation. This might include interviews with key family members and advisors, review of business and ownership structures, and analysis of governance and communication patterns. We then propose a customized engagement plan.
3. Engagement
Our consulting engagements are tailored to your needs—some are short-term projects addressing specific challenges, while others are multi-year partnerships supporting ongoing development. We establish clear objectives, timelines, and success metrics.
4. Implementation Support
We don't just provide recommendations and disappear—we support implementation. This might include facilitating family meetings, coaching leaders, helping draft governance documents, or providing accountability for follow-through.
5. Ongoing Partnership
Many families continue working with us after initial engagements conclude. We might facilitate annual strategic planning, provide coaching during transitions, or serve as trusted advisors as new challenges emerge. These long-term relationships enable us to provide continuity and institutional memory as your family evolves.
Who We Serve
We work with family businesses at all stages:
- First Generation: Founders planning for eventual transition and establishing initial governance structures
- Second Generation: Sibling partnerships navigating shared leadership and preparing for the third generation
- Third Generation and Beyond: Cousin consortiums managing complexity with dispersed ownership and professional management
- All industries: Manufacturing, distribution, service businesses, professional practices, real estate—our expertise is in family business dynamics, not specific industries
- All sizes: From small businesses with a few family members to large enterprises with hundreds of shareholders
What matters isn't your industry or size—it's your commitment to family business success and your willingness to do the work of building sustainable structures for the future.
Start a Conversation
If your family business is facing challenges with succession, governance, conflict, strategy, or next-generation development, we invite you to start a confidential conversation about how we can help.
There's no obligation in an initial consultation—it's simply a conversation to understand your situation and explore whether our expertise aligns with your needs. Many families find that even a single consultation provides valuable clarity.