“Family Business Advisory – what’s in it for Advisers?”
Nothing, if you love your current job and circumstances and don’t want to change anything. Stop here.
Lots, if you want to leverage your experience and wisdom to provide long-term, relationship-based advice that helps entrepreneurs, wealthy families, and family businesses achieve greater success in their private and business lives AND be well paid for leaving transactional work behind to operate at a higher level AND create opportunities to lead a more flexible professional lifestyle.
Technical Consultants transition careers comprising mainly compliance and transactional work into longer-term, retainer-based Adviser engagements as: Mentors, Sounding Boards, and Advisory Boards for SMEs, established family groups, and family-owned businesses.
Professional Benefits
FBIA training and FBIA/IQ Academy membership provide a broad range of benefits to professional advisers:
- Professional training and accreditation to confirm advanced adviser status confirms ability to undertake high level advisory work and suitability for roles as Chair of Family, and Family Business, Advisory Boards.
- Enhanced Family Business Advisory knowledge, skills and confidence, including uses of emotional Intelligence to manage human and family group dynamics.
- Shared training, network events, workshops and seminars.
- Tribal inclusion: membership of an active network of like-minded, uniquely collaborative and trustworthy advisers.
- Membership of a collaborative adviser community.
- Access to proven private and family business advisory tools, resources, programs, diagnostics, pro forma documents, and worksheets.
- Tailored personal coaching, mentoring, and practice-building guidance.
- Professional promotion through FBIA and IQC websites and digital marketing, including: individual Profile Page; “Find an Adviser” search functions; contributions to online publications (blogs, podcasts and videos), and other digital marketing activities.
- Referrals from FBIA and IQC to family businesses seeking expert services, including Advisory Board placements.
Personal Benefits
For some professionals, evolving from Consultant to Adviser realises a dream to lead a meaningful professional life doing worthwhile work. Other benefits include:
- Enhanced understanding of emotional intelligence, complemented by new skills that make our people more rounded, capable, and confident in all aspects of life.
- Pathway to better work : life balance – appeals to individuals seeking more rewarding careers with more control over their working lives, and those looking for stimulating and rewarding work after retiring from mainstream practice. (Note: also conserves super account balances for use during lengthy post-mainstream career lives).
Family Business Benefits
Family Businesses gain:
- Access to a large and diverse group of dedicated, well-trained, competent and collaborative professional advisers.
- Access to proven family business best practice processes.
- Confidence to engage complete strangers to help deal with complex and sensitive family challenges.
- Comfort that adviser competencies have been properly assessed.
- Reliable quality control standards.
- Constructive intervention if anything goes seriously wrong on an engagement.
Retire or Re-Fire?
To Retire as a professional is to stop applying your knowledge and expertise in response to client needs. That can feel like the end of being useful unless other activities fill the gaps that suddenly become evident in comparison to a formerly busy working life.
To Re-fire is to change, expand, or extend your professional career into new and stimulating activities.
Succession in Professional Firms
Many professional firms “refresh” their leadership teams on a regular basis – to attract and retain new talent, and to remain viable in competitive markets. This creates angst, and casualties, amongst mature professionals who want to keep working, but find themselves eased out for strategic, rather than performance, reasons.
Re-Fire Opportunity
Many family businesses, especially those working through succession processes, are frustrated by the limited scope services provided by their conventional, timesheet-bound, technical advisers. At certain times they need a more “Agile” Adviser with the time, ability and inclination to work closely with them on a broad range of practical challenges.
This presents a huge Re-Fire opportunity for advisers with the right training, experience, skills and attitude. Furthermore, it’s work that can be undertaken in collaboration with your old firm, or as an independent practitioner in the FBI Network, or both.
Typical Engagements
Most Re-Fire engagements provide Family Business Advisory, or Advisory Board services. They often involve collaboration with other specialist advisers to provide the full range of services the client needs, which may include:
- Succession, Sale of Business and Exit Plans – including valuations, capital raising, mergers and acquisitions.
- Family Business Advisory (Best Practice) – family and business professionalisation.
- Meeting Management: Alignment, Planning and Consensus Building.
- Conflict Management: Facilitated Conversations and Family Mediation.
- Strategy, Business and Family Plans.
- Stewardship, Legacy and Estate Plans.
- Leadership and Executive Coaching.
- Counselling, Psych. Support and Resilience Building.
- Next Generation (Business) Education and Career / Lifestyle Coaching.
- Family and Business Governance: Boards, Committees and Family Councils.
- Coaching and Mentoring.
