Family Business Consulting

Family businesses perform very well as compared to their non-family owned competitors.  While they offer an optimistic view of their futures, they face several significant challenges including succession and estate planning needs.  As consultants specializing in family dynamics, Agreement Resources professionals are ideally suited to working with family businesses.  We are keenly aware of the interactions between the family system and the business system, how they intersect, overlap and are mutually dependent.  With a view towards sustainable development we work in interdisciplinary teams to design systems that integrate the needs of the business, the ownership and the family.

Family businesses are organizational constructs unto themselves.  They combine family culture and personal values and often they use unconventional management strategies.  While they have some very clear advantages over non-family business they face many challenges that other organizations don’t have to contend with such as:

• Next generation competence
• Estate taxes
• Perceived unfairness
• Sibling rivalries 
• Complexity of extended family and spousal relationships
• Interplay of family and business interests

When family businesses go through transitions - be they ownership, leadership, or business focus - traditional corporate decision making strategies don’t always work.  Family dynamics become increasingly important and simmering rivalries can become catalysts to costly stonewalling.

Mediators and family business consultants from Agreement Resources, LLC can help family members better identify the underlying issues that are affecting their decision making.  Having a neutral party facilitate a conversation about what each individual wants out of the business and out of the family relationships can be very effective towards achieving resolution.