Skip to main content

Family Business Services

Helping family businesses flourish

Supporting family businesses, their owners and their executives throughout their lifecycle – from start-up and growth, through to sale or succession.
Contact us
Submit RFP

Helping to solve your most complex family business issues

All family businesses are different, but all share a unique interaction between the business and its owners – the family. At the heart of our work with family businesses is our appreciation of the key challenges that can arise when families and business collide. Our specialists work with some of the largest and most diverse family businesses in the world to help solve some of their most complex family business issues.

Our unique approach helps family businesses review and optimise the key factors which contribute to sustained growth and longevity. From supporting families with the alignment of their family vision, values and goals, and helping to define a profitable business strategy, to designing a business structure which meets both family and commercial objectives, and helping to achieve strong business performance whilst ensuring the family remains committed and strong through the generations. Our aim is to help family businesses manage the constant shifts in perspectives, goals, and interests as a result of the ever-evolving, complex lifecycles of the business, the family, and the individuals within it.

Alignment

An aligned family and business strategy often forms the foundations of long-term success of a family business. From alignment of the values by which the family operates, the vision of the family and the family enterprise, and the family legacy, to aligning talent management systems and reward structures to these values, visions and goals.

Key Considerations:

  • Clarifying family and ownership values, vision and goals
  • Determining shared family ownership objectives
  • Articulating a shareholder mandate or steer for the Board
  • Developing distribution policies
  • Aligning Board reward structures to family objectives
  • Structuring equity reward effectively
  • Creating talent management systems for family and non-family employees
  • Developing policies for family employment and reward
  • Developing philosophies and plans for corporate social responsibility
  • Establishing and reviewing charitable trusts and foundations

Strategy

Strategic planning is essential to profitable growth in any business and often includes a review of the competitive landscape to help make informed decisions around market opportunities and a review of the options for financing growth. However, family businesses must also incorporate family preferences and issues during the planning process such as alignment with the family vision, and planning for family events and generational changes.

Key Considerations:

  • Aligning business strategy with family values, vision and goals
  • Separating family/personal assets from the family business
  • Planning for family events – births, marriage, divorce and death
  • Reviewing competitive landscape and market opportunities
  • Preparing for transactions – M&A, disposals, sale of the family business
  • Sourcing equity and debt finance
  • Accessing grants and incentives
  • Facilitating shareholder exits
  • Preparing for and support through generational changes
  • Planning for family and board succession
  • Helping to plan for and execute an exit

    • Structure

    It goes without saying that organisational structure is important for any growing business. For family businesses, this can mean structuring the business to meet both family and commercial objectives; carefully considering ownership shares, rights and responsibilities; designing and implementing appropriate management incentive structures; and continuously reviewing structure effectiveness – whether that be your Board structure, structuring to maximise tax reliefs, or realigning structure with a reorganisation or acquisition.

    Key Considerations:

    • Creating and reviewing ownership structures to facilitate succession– share classes, family trusts and Family Investment Companies
    • Structuring the business to maximise tax reliefs, such as BPR
  • Designing and implementing appropriate management incentive structures
    • Reviewing Board effectiveness
    • Assistance with changes in structure – reorganisations and demergers
    • Structuring and implementing acquisitions
    • Reviewing family and corporate governance practices
    • Managing tax and corporate administration
    • Designing and setting up a Family Office
    • Reviewing Family Office infrastructures

    Performance

    To be successful as both the company and the family grow, a family business must achieve strong business performance and ensure the family remains committed to and capable of carrying on as the owner. This means developing the next generation of family business leaders, and keeping your best talent engaged - both family and non-family members, managing risks such as issues with succession and those that can harm the family reputation, and helping to ensure shareholder expectations are met through rigorous reporting and benchmarking.

    Key Considerations:

    • Improving employee engagement
    • Educating and developing the next generation of family business leaders for responsible ownership
    • Planning to ensure shareholder expectations are met through financial statements, disclosures, and non-financial reporting
    • Reviewing accounting practices against regulations and policies for family/private businesses
    • Assurance – regulation and compliance
    • Prioritising, managing and measuring corporate social and environmental responsibility
    • Managing trading/financial underperformance
    • Helping to prevent and manage fraud in family businesses
    • Protecting image and reputation in a family business
    • Leading family meetings
    • Coaching next generation members

    Purposeful governance

    While the operational demands of running a family business can be all-consuming, it is important to take the time to consider how instituting purposeful governance practices can help overcome the challenges many family-owned enterprises face. With the right frameworks in place, family governance systems and structures can help facilitate communication between family members, aid decision-making and problem-solving, and can be key in helping a family business to run effectively over time.

    Key Considerations:

    • Reviewing family governance systems and structures
    • Developing ownership mandates
    • Drafting family constitutions and charters
    • Establishing decision-making frameworks
    • Managing family dynamics
    • Supporting stakeholder interactions

    We developed six customised solutions for our clients

    The resilient family enterprise

    Despite their reputation for resilience, optimism and agility, most family businesses have been under significant pressure to respond to the general health, safety, and welfare challenges introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the operational disruptions to their business. This series explores how the same traits that set family businesses apart are creating authentic opportunities for resilience, growth, and recovery.

    Family business challenges

    Few family businesses survive into the third and fourth generations, and oftentimes the culprit is misalignment between the goals, wants, and needs of the business and individual family members.

    Global Family Business Survey 2019

    Deloitte’s fifth annual global family business survey reports on the views of almost 800 family business leaders, and explores how family-owned businesses can achieve the right balance between the short and the long term—in the context of the unique family, marketplace and sociocultural dynamics that characterise the family enterprise.

    Get in touch

    Andreas Bodenmann

    Partner

    Christophe Aebi

    Partner

    Ferdinando Mercuri

    Partner