Owais Qarni
Founder & Principal · Accredited Mediator
Leads family business work: governance conversations, charters and, where needed, mediation. Works in English, Arabic and Urdu.
Family Business Advisory
Your family and your business need different rules.
A father is also a managing director. A brother’s salary is also a son’s inheritance expectation. The family firms that last are the ones that write the rules down while everyone still agrees.
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Or call 020 3930 1088
The predicament
Where the unwritten rules bite
- Roles by birth order, not by decision. Who does what, and who answers to whom, assumed rather than agreed.
- Pay and ownership tangled together. Salary for work and reward for owning are different things.
- In-laws and the next generation. Every marriage and every graduation changes the cast. The rules should not change with it.
- The founder’s chair. How and when it is handed over decides whether everything else was worth building.
The remedy
Rules the whole family helped write
- The family charterThe constitution behind the company
What the family wants the business to be: its values, who may work in it and on what terms, how ownership passes, how disagreements are raised. Mostly not a legal contract, but the brief for the documents that are.
- Roles and payWork paid as work, ownership as ownership
Family members who work in the business hold real jobs with market-referenced pay and someone to answer to. Ownership is rewarded separately, through dividends or profit share.
- Entry and exitDoors that open and close cleanly
How the next generation joins, and how anyone leaves: valuation, buy-out terms, what happens to shares on divorce or death. Decided calmly, these are policy. Decided in a crisis, they are war.
- The forumWhere each conversation belongs
A family council for family questions. A management meeting for business ones. And a shared understanding of which is which.
Who does this work
Someone the whole family can sit with
Shaykh Saad Al-Deen Al-Dhafiri
Islamic Board
The fairness question: what Islamic principles ask of a founder dividing roles, pay and inheritance among family.
Where the charter’s decisions need binding form, such as shareholders’ agreements or employment terms, they go to drafting. Where regulated legal services are required, these are provided by our partner SRA-regulated law firm.
Common questions
What families ask us
Is a family charter legally binding?
Mostly not, on purpose. Its power is that everyone helped write it and everyone signed it. The parts that must bind, such as share transfers and employment terms, are then put into proper legal documents.
Can we bring in a manager who is not family?
Yes, and for many firms it is the move that saves both the business and the relationships. It works when the ground is prepared: a real mandate, clear reporting lines, and owners who accept the difference between owning a company and running it.
Related services
Book a consultation
Write the rules while everyone still agrees.
A confidential conversation, with one of you or all of you, about what the family wants the business to be.
Book a consultation
Or call 020 3930 1088