GOVERNANCE ADVISORY
Advisory for Multigenerational Family Enterprises
Does your shareholders' agreement, family charter, or board structure exist on paper, but isn’t seen in the family’s behaviour in the boardroom, or in the family living room?
Do you see the governance failure as a failure of structure or a failure of courage?
A FAILURE OF COURAGE
Governance failure in a family enterprise is a failure of courage. I know this because I studied governance frameworks academically.
My MBA thesis examined succession planning in family businesses. At the same time, I was living inside a family system that couldn’t implement what those governance frameworks required. I could articulate the principles with precision.
But what the family system didn’t permit was the ability to act on them if they went against the patriarch's preferences.
Good governance is not a document. It is a set of behaviours. And the behaviours it requires, transparency, accountability, the willingness to submit personal authority to institutional discipline, are precisely the behaviours that many family business patriarchs have seldom, if ever, practised.
My governance advisory work begins at that gap: designing family councils, shareholder agreements, board structures, and ownership protocols all built on the foundation of honest conversation, rather than being imposed upon families.
– TREVOR DICKINSON