Family Enterprise Advisor Styles

Published: Jan 5, 2022
By: Natalie M. McVeigh
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Natalie McVeigh, a managing director in the Center for Individual & Organizational Performance, helps us understand what family business advising means, including the six disciplines of the field, and how to identify the right expertise for your enterprise.

Transcript

Natalie McVeigh: Hi, I'm Natalie in the Center for Individual Organizational Performance, as well as the Center for Family Business Excellence. You might be wondering what kind of family enterprise advisor or family business advisor to hire. And it makes sense. It's a really unique field that started 30 years ago, that's interdisciplinary. So it's a mix of management, psychology, legal studies, so that we can help you with all aspects of your enterprise, the three circles that intersect: your family, your ownership, and your business.

And each consultant has a different style. So we like to talk about six styles that help with family businesses over the years, family enterprises, or family office. Really, there's the counseling therapy. That's really about the past, how you can overcome some challenges you might have faced to really understand where you are today. There's also mediation, that's to really get through conflict that's been challenging you. We talk about these two styles as the reconciliation side of family business advising.

And then you have either direct or indirect work with families. That's facilitation, where someone's helping you organize meetings, making sure you're leveling the playing field or consulting, where someone comes in as the subject matter expert. "These are some best practices. These are ways we've seen it done. This is what the research says." Further past that, you get to mentoring, to really help raise the next generation's capacity. Through my own experience as a mentor, I can tell you lots of things about what I've done like you. And then you have coaching, which is the capacity building, where a coach helps you really understand what's in you, your true wisdom, to build skills that go throughout the future.

All six of these styles we have in our Center for Family Business Excellence. What you want to know is your advisor's background, their ability to skate between these different styles, their licenses, and their qualifications, and how they keep working on themselves to make sure they're the advisor that can work with your unique family enterprise system.

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RISE (Real Ideas to Stimulate Engagement) - Q1 2022

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Natalie M. McVeigh

Natalie McVeigh is a Managing Director in the Center for Individual and Organizational Performance and the Center for Family Business Excellence Group within the Private Client Services Group and has more than 10 years of experience as a consultant and coach.

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