Your family matters
We are a highly experienced team of family business advisers, with forty years’ experience of advising family businesses and family offices around the world.
Having worked with some 200 families in business, we have developed the deep knowledge and practical experience to help families in business deal with their issues in order to flourish over successive generations.
Philip Rubenstein
Director
Philip is a strategic family business adviser, having worked with families and family offices in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America. He writes extensively on family business issues, including a book on the history of a fifth-generation family business.
Philip has served on a number of senior management teams and as a trustee on various charity boards. He has an MBA from London Business School.
Peter Leach
Principal consultant
With 35 years of experience as a business adviser, teacher and facilitator, Peter has worked with some 200 business families across the globe.
He is Adjunct Professor in Family Business at Imperial College Business School in London, Special Advisor to BDT & MSD Partners International LLP and a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.
Peter is author of Family Businesses: The Essentials, published by Profile Books. Watch Peter speak about his approach.
Working closely with our clients, we advise families in business through the different stages of their life cycles – helping them to recognise and solve tomorrow’s predictable problems, today.
Purpose
Family businesses have a potent competitive advantage, being both dynamic and long term in their outlook. But even the most financially successful families can lose sight of their purpose in owning the business: in other words, what’s it all for? We help our clients identify and align around a shared vision and intent, which enables them to move forward together and impart a purposeful narrative to succeeding generations.
Governance
As families and their businesses evolve, the need for a more structured governance and decision-making framework increases. Our role is to facilitate discussion and advise clients on the design and implementation of governance structures that are best suited to the particular needs and circumstances of their family.
Culture
Recognising that governance only works with the right culture, we work with our clients to articulate, codify and celebrate their values and culture as a family. This improves family harmony and enhances the family’s ability to speak to their stakeholders with one voice.
Participation
A family may put in place world-class governance structures, but they will only flourish if family members are both motivated and equipped to play an active part. We help clients identify the skills and support they need at all levels of family participation, be it as a business leader, a board director, a family council member or simply as a responsible shareholder.
Succession
No group of people has a greater power to destroy shareholder value than the shareholders themselves. Succession can be a highly risky matter, and our role is therefore to help families put in place an orderly, collaborative and practical framework to ensure a successful transition. We regard succession as a process, rather than a single event.
Alignment
Differences of opinion in family businesses are inevitable. The danger arises when these differences go unexpressed and lead to unresolved frustrations that bubble over the surface. We believe that acknowledging these inevitable differences – without letting them develop into conflict – is vital to the long-term success of any family business. We work with clients to create a safe, ‘no blame’ setting for difficult issues to be raised and discussed and for families to achieve an alignment of views.
Please contact us for an initial discussion.