For advisors who serve family enterprises
Research by The Northern Trust Institute identifies the practices that distinguish families who sustain wealth and cohesion across generations. They are not financial practices. They are relational ones. Advisors who help their clients build that capacity are providing a more complete service — and that is the space in which I work, as a complementary specialist alongside the legal, financial, and governance professionals already engaged with the family.
The most experienced advisors to family enterprises know that the quality of relationships is the single greatest determinant of whether the work holds. The technically sound succession plan that goes relationally unaccepted. The well-designed governance structure undermined by dynamics that predate it by decades. The optimized transaction complicated by unresolved questions of identity, fairness, and voice.
Families who develop the capacity to work consciously within this tension rather than being governed by it make better decisions together. Conversations that had stalled begin to move. Co-ownership relationships that had grown transactional recover their foundation. Next-generation members who had felt peripheral find their footing. The structural work their advisors have put in place begins to function as designed, because the relationships beneath it are no longer working against it.
A Practice Built for This Context
This is a practice in deliberate early growth, built around systems coaching methodology and the international family enterprise context. My training equips me to work across the full range of situations this niche demands, and I am actively building a referral partner network with the lawyers, wealth managers, and family office advisors who encounter these dynamics in their own client work.
Advisors making a referral to this practice are referring to a specialist, not a generalist, and can present it to clients with the confidence that the work is calibrated for the environment.
Advisors making a referral to this practice are referring to a specialist, not a generalist, and can present it to clients with the confidence that the work is calibrated for the environment.
✔
The FBCC (Family Business Coaching Course, Legacy Onward, Inc.) provides a structural framework for understanding the dual-norm tension that is unique to family enterprise: the simultaneous governance of the family and the business, each operating by fundamentally different rules. This training means the presenting issue is understood in its actual institutional context.
✔
ORSC™ (Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching) is one of the few methodologies designed for the complexity of multi-person systems: sibling ownership groups, multigenerational family boards, founding partnerships. It works with the system as a whole, addressing the dynamics that individual coaching cannot reach.
My credentials reflect a deliberate specialization in family enterprise, not a generalist coaching practice applied to a business context.
Situations That May Prompt a Referral
- A succession process that is structurally sound but stalling on the human side: The founder who is not releasing, the next generation who is not stepping forward, or a family that has not yet had the conversation the succession plan requires
- A co-ownership or family partnership where the quality of the relationship is affecting decision-making, and where the legal and governance framework cannot address what is fundamentally a relational question
- A next-generation integration process where rising-generation members need support developing their identity, authority, and voice within an institution built before their time
- A cross-border or multicultural family where geographic and cultural complexity compounds the relational challenges already present, and where a practitioner with international experience is relevant
Three-Circle Model of the Family Business System, developed at Harvard Business School by Renato Tagiuri and John Davis
Confidentiality and Professional Standards
All engagements adhere to International Coaching Federation ethical standards, including professional confidentiality. I welcome conversations about how confidentiality is structured within a multi-advisor engagement and am happy to answer any questions before a referral is made.
The Assessment as a Referral Entry Point
For advisors wishing to introduce relationship systems work through a defined initial engagement, the Family Enterprise System Assessment offers a structured, confidential three-session diagnostic and written summary of the key dynamics at play.
It complements existing advisory work, can stand alone or lead to further engagement, and may be shared with the advisory team with the family's consent.
It complements existing advisory work, can stand alone or lead to further engagement, and may be shared with the advisory team with the family's consent.
