For advisors who serve family enterprises
Research by The Northern Trust Institute, drawing on more than a century of advising some of the world's most significant family enterprises, identifies the practices that distinguish families who sustain wealth and cohesion across generations. They are not financial practices. They are relational ones: creating space for difficult conversations before they become crises, making values and intentions explicit across generations, and cultivating the capacity to navigate conflict before it calcifies. Advisors who help their clients build these capacities are providing a more complete service to families for whom the long-term integrity of the enterprise matters as much as its near-term performance.
This is the space in which I work, as a complementary specialist alongside the legal, financial, governance, and family office professionals already engaged with the family.
This is the space in which I work, as a complementary specialist alongside the legal, financial, governance, and family office professionals already engaged with the family.
The most experienced advisors to family enterprises know that the quality of the family's relationships is the single greatest determinant of whether the work holds. The succession plan that is technically sound but relationally unaccepted. The governance structure that is well-designed but undermined by dynamics that predate it by decades. The transaction that is financially optimized but 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
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 are conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of the International Coaching Federation, including professional confidentiality. I am happy to discuss how confidentiality is structured in the context of a multi-advisor client relationship before any referral is made, and to answer any questions that would help an advisor make an informed and confident referral.
The Assessment as a Referral Entry Point
For advisors who wish to make an initial referral without committing the client to a longer engagement, the Family Enterprise System Assessment is designed precisely for this purpose.
The written output can be shared with other members of the advisory team if appropriate, with the family's consent.
It is a structured three-session confidential diagnostic that produces a written summary of the relationship dynamics at play. It requires no ongoing commitment from the client, complements rather than duplicates the work already underway with other advisors, and can serve as a standalone resource or as the starting point for a longer engagement as the family chooses.
The written output can be shared with other members of the advisory team if appropriate, with the family's consent.