coaching for
advisors of family businesses
Are the relationships in your clients’ families the biggest obstacle to successful implementation of your advice?
In addition to our work with families, we also coach other advisors to families. We help advisors decide how far they want to take their individual work beyond their profession’s typical scope of practice. Much of our work is about helping the advisor feel comfortable with the emotional and relationship issues in his or her clients’ lives so that they can be more effective.
We work with advisors to help them successfully connect to all parts of the family business system. We coach advisors on how to broaden the definition of “client” to the entire family and feel comfortable meeting with larger family groups. We work through the obstacles that concern advisors such as lack of trust, sense of unfairness, sibling conflict and incompatible business partners.
programs for advisors
Until recently, advisors to family businesses had few places to learn new, effective ways to assist their family business clients. The Aspen Family Business Group has developed a program to meet this need.
WHAT ADVISORS LEARN
- Identifying the family systems theory that best fits their practice
- Managing the influence of their own family legacy in their work
- Assessing the family and business
- Conducting individual interviews
- Identifying and prioritizing core issues
- Facilitating family meetings
- Creating family councils
- Creating and memorializing covenants
- Facilitating skillful communication
- Addressing feelings of being an imposter
- Conflict resolution
- Developing the human capital of the family
Our coaching helps advisors differentiate themselves in their marketplace.
Professionals working with family businesses quickly discover the unique concerns and conflicts generated by the merger of personal and professional lives…and the complexity of working with a multi-generational group.
My coach captures the essence of your question and spins it back to me with an inspired tale or a ‘must remember’ axiom. His guidance allows me to feel very much in control of my own journey while having someone there to help me distinguish and make sense of the mile markers along the way.
Training sessions for business professionals designed around the book, Working With Family Businesses: A Guide For Professionals, authored by The Aspen Family Business Group, are now available for your organization. This programming is designed for experts in a variety of fields, including attorneys, accountants, insurance executives, financial planners and investment bankers. The program “Working With Family Businesses” will help professionals appreciate the uniqueness of family business and learn useful techniques for working with clients toward their personal, financial and business goals.
“Recent studies have shown that 90% of advisors are dismissed by the successor generation within 6 months of the death of their parents.”
assessments
The Aspen Family Business Group assessment protocols help us to more efficiently and calmly “get the cards on the table” so that the real issues can be identified and addressed. During this process, we carefully guard the confidentiality of our clients individually and collectively.
We have developed a battery of proprietary on-line assessment devices. These include the Aspen Family Business Inventory, The Aspen Family Wealth Inventory, The Family Foundation Inventory and the Legacy Property Inventory. These devices enable us to quickly identify the strengths, challenges, areas of agreement and disagreement and knowledge gaps of new clients.
The protocol includes Interviews with individuals, couples, family branches, etc. to clarify the parameters of the situation before we engage the family in the next steps of our process.
Each inventory has 100 questions: the first 50 positively worded statements about the family are the same in all inventories. The second 50 questions in each of the 4 Inventories are specific to the specialized focus (Business, Wealth, Foundation or Properties). Each respondent indicates the degree of agreement or disagreement he or she feels with each statement. The inventories are then analyzed by our staff who prepare reports and feedback on areas of strengths, challenges, areas of agreement, disagreement and knowledge gaps.
We also find that utilizing assessment instruments such as the Meyers Briggs or the Hogan suite help us with individual and team development.