Family Business Advisory

One family, two institutions.

A family and a firm can share the same people, the same table, even the same name, but they do not run on the same rules. The families whose businesses last are the ones who learn to keep both sets of rules, on purpose.

Book a consultation What good governance looks like

A family dining table set for a meeting rather than a meal, a notebook and pen at each place, a brass teapot with tea glasses at the centre, and a lattice screen casting a geometric shadow across the wood

The predicament

When Sunday lunch is also a board meeting

In a family business, every conversation happens twice: once as family, once as firm. A father is also a managing director. A brother’s salary is also a son’s inheritance expectation. A decision about who opens the second branch is also a decision about which child was trusted more.

Most family firms cope with this ambiguity for years, because love and habit paper over what documents should have settled. The cost appears later, compounded: the son who worked twenty years for a promise nobody wrote down, the daughter with equal shares and no salary, the founder who cannot retire because retiring was never defined. None of them is behaving badly. Each was relying on a different unwritten rule.

Roles by birth order, not by decision. Who does what, and who answers to whom, assumed rather than agreed.
Pay, dividends and expectation tangled together. Salary for work and reward for ownership are different things; families rarely separate them until it hurts.
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: the question that decides whether everything else was worth building.

The remedy

Rules the whole family helped write

Good governance in a family firm is not bureaucracy. It is fairness, written down while everyone still agrees on it.

The family charter The constitution behind the company: A written understanding of what the family wants the business to be: its values, who may work in it and on what conditions, how ownership passes, how disagreements are raised. It is mostly not a legal contract, since its force is moral and practical, but it becomes the brief for the documents that are binding.
Roles and pay Work rewarded as work, ownership as ownership: Family members who work in the business hold real jobs with real descriptions, market-referenced pay and someone to answer to. Ownership is rewarded separately, through dividends or profit share. Untangling the two removes the single most common source of quiet resentment, and it is also what fairness between children requires.
Entry and exit Doors that open and close cleanly: How the next generation joins, whether qualifications or outside experience come first, and how anyone leaves: valuation, buy-out terms, what happens to shares on divorce or death. Decided in the abstract, these are policy. Decided in a crisis, they are war.
The forum Where each conversation belongs: A family council for family questions; a management meeting for business ones; and a shared understanding of which is which. The discipline sounds small. It is the difference between a disagreement about the business and a rupture in the family.

Already past the planning stage? If a disagreement is live, between siblings, generations or branches, governance work can wait. A neutral, confidential process comes first.

Business Mediation

Who does this work

Someone the whole family can sit with

Owais Qarni

Founder & Principal · Accredited Mediator

Leads family business work: governance conversations, charters and, where needed, mediation, in English, Arabic and Urdu.

Shaykh Saad Al-Deen Al-Dhafiri

Islamic Board

The fairness dimension: 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, employment terms or amended articles, 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

What is a family charter, and is it legally binding?

A charter is the family’s written understanding of how the business and the family relate: values, roles, entry rules, how ownership moves. Most of it is deliberately not a contract: its power is that everyone helped write it and everyone signed it. The parts that must bind, such as share transfers, employment terms and dividend policy, are then implemented in proper legal documents that take the charter as their brief.

How do we pay family members fairly?

Separate the two things being paid for. Work is paid as work: a defined role, market-referenced salary, reviewed like any employee’s. Ownership is rewarded as ownership: dividends or profit share in proportion to shares. Once the family sees the two streams separately, most “unfairness” turns out to be a labelling problem, and the genuinely unfair arrangements become visible enough to fix.

Can we bring in a manager who isn’t 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 family shareholders who accept the difference between owning a company and running it. We help prepare exactly that ground.

The other half of every family firm’s future is the handover. Who inherits, who runs, and where the money comes from, planned before it is needed.

Business Succession

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.