Service · Family Businesses
Family business advisory
Family businesses don’t die from markets. They die from conversations they never had.
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The succession postponed five years longer than reasonable. The conversation with the child who wanted in and wasn’t ready, or with the one who was ready and no one dared to call. The conflict between cousin-shareholders that festered because signing a protocol was easier than addressing it. The decision on whether to sell the company that the patriarch made alone, because asking for an opinion would have meant ceding power.
The statistic is well known: roughly 30% of family businesses survive into the second generation, 12% into the third, 3% into the fourth. What that statistic doesn’t say is why. And the reason is rarely strategic or financial. It’s about governance. It’s the family and the company’s inability to design the conversations each stage of the family cycle demands, before the cost of not having them becomes irreversible.
My work with family businesses isn’t writing constitutions that end up in a drawer. Nor is it facilitating weekends on country estates where everyone hugs and nothing changes. It’s helping business families read the particular architectures that coexist in their case — the architecture of real power among the branches, of the frontier between family and company, of the succession that’s coming, of the accumulated emotional patrimony — and design the spaces and conversations the next stage requires.
What I do
Lines of work with business families.
A representative sample — not an exhaustive list. In each case I adapt the scope to the specific family, in the form of advisory, workshop or training.
Design, formation and transformation of the governance of the business family and its companies
Family council, family shareholders’ assembly, protocol or constitution when appropriate. The document is the result, not the goal: what matters is having had the conversations the document structures — on family employment, liquidity, voting, the inclusion of spouses, the incoming generation. I also work on the articulation between family governance and the corporate governance of its companies.
Succession from founders to family or external CEOs
The hardest step for a founder. It usually fails because the founder can’t let go at the needed pace, and the incoming CEO can’t exercise the role without feeling like “the owner’s employee.” I work with both sides — from before the search through the first twelve to eighteen months, where almost everything is decided. It applies equally whether the incoming CEO is from the family or external.
Board professionalization
Bringing in independent directors, separating roles between the controlling family and the board, defining which decisions stay with shareholders and which are delegated to the board, redesigning committees. It’s a process of the family ceding power, often harder emotionally than technically. My role is to make that process safe enough that it actually happens.
Family shareholder agreements
Design and facilitation of agreements between family branches: voting, liquidity, orderly exit mechanisms, a predictable dividend policy, criteria for the entry of new generations. Work done before conflict becomes irreversible — not mediation once there are three years of accumulated fighting on the table.
Next-gen education
Individual or group programs with members of the next generation preparing to take on owner, director or executive roles. Focused on governance, reading boards from the inside, exercising shareholder power responsibly, and the psychological transition from “owner’s child” to “adult shareholder.” Small, selective cohorts.
Family office governance
When the family has an investment vehicle separate from the operating company, the family office requires its own governance architecture. I know this world from the inside: I am a trusted advisor to several families in Latin America and currently sit on the board of a family office.
How I work
The same four principles, with two nuances specific to this world.
01
Absolute confidentiality
Even stricter than with boards. Family information is more sensitive than corporate information.
02
Vendor independence
I don’t sell search, I don’t sell family office software, I have no commercial arrangements with private banks or law firms.
03
The client is the family, not the faction
If one branch hires me thinking I’ll represent their interests against another, I decline. My formal client is always the family body.
04
I work more slowly
4 to 6 family engagements a year. The processes take months or years, not weeks. Families expecting the speed of a strategy consultant aren’t good clients for this work.
Honest filters
Who this isn’t for
I’m not a mediator for active family conflicts. If there are three years of accumulated fighting on the table, an ongoing lawsuit between siblings or branches, or an unresolved marital breakup with shareholder effects, you first need a different professional — a family lawyer, a certified mediator, a family therapist. My work is preventive governance and cold redesign; hot conflict needs other hands.
I don’t work where the patriarch or matriarch says they want to change but privately isn’t willing to give up any power. I discover it in the first two meetings and, when it’s clear, I say so. Continuing would mean charging for a process that’s going nowhere.
And I don’t work with families where the next generation is being systematically excluded from the process because “they’re not ready.” At that age, most weren’t ready either. The real question is whether they’re being prepared or being written off.
Cases
Three anonymized engagements.
Mexico · Manufacturing · 2nd gen · US$ 300M
Five siblings, two active, three passive
The latent conflict: the active siblings felt they deserved more for working; the passive ones felt the active ones used the company as a personal vehicle. The founder, a widow and board chair, tried to hold unity together over breakfasts.
A fourteen-month engagement. A redesign of family governance: a clear separation between executive roles paid at market, shareholders with a policy-defined dividend, and a family council with a chair rotating among the five branches. Three independent directors brought in.
Four years later: all five siblings are still shareholders, the company grew 40%, and the monthly breakfast continues — but now it’s just breakfast.
Peru · 1st to 2nd generation · Founder aged 71
Eight years “preparing” the succession, with nothing happening
Three children, two in the business. An eighteen-month engagement combining work with the founder, the board, the family, and an external CEO search process.
An explicit design of the founder’s post-transition role: board chair with a defined agenda, barred from operations, custodian of purpose and of the relationship with historic stakeholders. The eldest child — who had assumed he was the natural successor — became vice-chair with a transitional role.
An external CEO in the chair two years later. The company doubled its value in four years.
Colombia · Family office · 3rd generation
Four branches, rising tensions, one table
Wealth fragmented across four branches with tensions over investment strategy and liquidity. A twenty-month engagement with the family, the committee and external advisors.
A full governance redesign: a professionalized investment committee with two external members, a predictable dividend policy, an orderly exit mechanism for branches that didn’t want to continue under the common vehicle, and a clear separation between family philanthropy and the investment vehicle.
One branch chose an orderly exit with an independent valuation. The other three report the best relationship in a decade.
