We have been sharing our experience and insights on family enterprises for over 40 years.
Members of our team regularly share their experiences and insights on a variety of topics related to family enterprises with professional, trade, and other associations in the United States and abroad. We are available to give in-person and virtual presentations, or to facilitate workshops and roundtables.
Reach out to Jocelyn Deamer to learn more about our speaking engagements.
Popular Topics
Family Dynamics
Most people believe they are born with all the knowledge they need to be good family members. We all wish it were so simple. In this session we learn how to better communicate and deal with our family members. In this session we will interactively learn about family patterns and develop a deeper understanding of why people behave the way they do. Words and actions that trigger people will become clear. You will gain the ability to send clear messages that don't contain emotional triggers-- triggers that can cause drama at best and family battles at worst. With an understanding of family dynamics, you gain a greater ability to understand others, yourself, and how to better communicate, which all lead to better family cohesion, harmony and love.
Family Business Succession: Realities, Resistance, Responsiblities
Succession may be the most difficult time in the life of every family business and there is no end to the advice one hears. We will discuss practices every family business should do to ensure continuity and success, and address specific succession questions such as timing, successor choice, and how to assure multigenerational family harmony.
Building Family Cohesion – Key to Sustainable Families and Businesses.
Multigenerational family enterprises have learned that developing and nurturing family cohesion and family harmony is the key to sustainable families and businesses. We will discuss the domains in which cohesion is built and explore actions that can be taken to help families work together efficiently and effectively to ensure their joint success.
Conflict and Communication in Business Families.
We’ve all heard it before, the top three things every family must work on is “communication, communication, communication.” We will talk about the essentials of good communication in families, the obstacles that need to be overcome, and essential tips for avoiding and resolving the often-emotional conflicts that every business owning family experiences.
Making Sibling Teams Work.
Whether siblings work together as leaders in a business, board members or merely owning assets together, brothers and sisters need to learn to work together efficiently and effectively to ensure their joint success. We discuss the things siblings should do to become an effective working group, including how to put aside potential conflicts and other emotional issues; parents will learn things about how to raise their children to be a team; and all will learn things that help families last for generations.
The Entrepreneurial Family Update.
Businesses are influenced by geopolitical events that range from tax policies, social norms, immigration emergencies to trade wars and international health catastrophes. Economic factors dictate our appetite for risk, our investment choices, and how we trade. We will discuss (1) how to mitigate the risk of future crises, (2) how to build organizational resilience, and (3) how our purpose guides our interactions.
Raising Children for Family Business Success.
Developing responsible and caring children is hard enough, raising children to work together adds another layer of complexity, combine all this with joint business ownership and it becomes a herculean task indeed. This talk covers steps needed to raise responsible children who want to work together, ideas to foster interest in and a sense of responsibility for the business, and some important basics of family dynamics.
Strategic Competitive Advantages of Family Business.
Family businesses can do things no other business can because of a single ownership group and the unconventional decisions such groups can make. This presentation takes a different approach to strategy from that learned in any business school by applying the work of former Air Force Colonel John Boyd to family business. The culture necessary to apply this strategy as well as the framework and implications are explored.
Creating and Rejuvenating Your Family Business Board.
Boards can be powerful instruments to support leadership and ownership in reaching and surpassing their objectives. At the same time, boards are often under-leveraged. Putting together an experienced group of board members is costly, and it is time-consuming not only to get a board up and running, but to maintain and nurture the relationships within the board, as well as the relationship between board and outside constituencies. We discuss how to create and energize a board, to make it an engaged, rather than a b-o-r-e-d board.
Business Family Governance 2.0.
Good family governance goes far beyond putting in place contractual agreements to prevent and mitigate conflict. Good family governance rests on a firm foundation of shared values and objectives, on family cohesion and continuous ownership education. We talk about leveraging the process to develop a family governance system that fits a family’s specific needs and address the most common challenges families struggle with.
Managerial Accounting.
While accounting started as a means to help businesses, it has largely been supplanted with ideas related to appropriate taxation. Managerial accounting seeks to restore the usefulness of accounting, especially as it relates to making daily decisions as well as investing and divesting. This presentation covers the importance of the managerial accounting framework, how to use it for better decisions, and further explain why fixed costs allocations, individual product margin, and other common practices can lead to decisions that damage long term business health.