In Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany, two brothers run a family business founded in 1867. The Tengelmann Group is enormous: 4,346 stores, 83,826 employees, sales of 11 billion euros in the year the...
In Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany, two brothers run a family business founded in 1867. The Tengelmann Group is enormous: 4,346 stores, 83,826 employees, sales of 11 billion euros in the year the brothers sat down for the interview we are about to draw from. And yet the most useful thing about Karl-Erivan and Christian Haub is not the size of what they run. It is how they divided the running.
Karl-Erivan is the chief executive officer. Christian is the chief family officer. One brother manages the company. The other manages the family that owns the company. Asked how this works, Christian put it in a single sentence that this entire essay exists to unpack: "He represents the company and its assets; I represent the family and its assets."
The interview appears in Governance in Family Enterprises: Maximising Economic and Emotional Success, a 2014 book by Alexander Koeberle-Schmid, Denise Kenyon-Rouvinez, and Ernesto Poza, three consultants who between them have advised hundreds of family firms across Germany, Switzerland, and the Americas. It is a book of machinery rather than stories: boards, councils, constitutions, checklists. But the Haub brothers' arrangement is the machinery at its most human, and it carries a lesson that scales down from an 11 billion euro retailer to a family shop with two siblings and a delivery motorcycle. The lesson is this: running the business and tending the family are two different jobs, and most families quietly weld them into one overloaded person until that person breaks, or the family does.
Before we go further, one honest note. Almost every company named in this book is huge. Tengelmann has more employees than some towns have residents. Nothing in your family needs to look like that for the principle to hold, and we will keep translating the machinery down to the size of business most of our readers actually run: the shop, the rental units, the farm, the small firm with a dozen staff. Governance is a discipline, not a budget line.
Think about what actually needs doing in a family that owns something together. There is the visible job: serve the customers, pay the suppliers, hire and fire, decide whether to open the second branch. Everyone can see this job. It has a title, usually, and the person doing it gets to be tired in public.
Then there is the other job. Someone has to make sure the brother in the diaspora still feels like an owner and not an ATM. Someone has to notice that the widowed sister has stopped coming to family gatherings and find out why before the silence hardens into a grievance. Someone has to explain to the next generation what the family actually owns and what is expected of them. Someone has to catch the small conflict while it is still small. In most families this job has no name, no title, and no hour set aside for it. It gets done in fragments, usually by whoever runs the business, in the exhausted margin around everything else, which is another way of saying it mostly does not get done.
The book's authors give this second job a name: the chief family officer, or family manager. In their description, this person chairs the family's council, and "provides the glue that keeps family members united through the challenges that they encounter," acting as "mediator, facilitator, and communication conduit." They note that people who do this role well are sometimes called trust catalysts, and that they are often "the polar opposites of the CEO," balancing the CEO's business-first instinct by "advocating a family-first agenda."
Read that job description again and notice something. Nothing in it requires a business degree. It requires standing, patience, and the willingness to spend real hours on the family as a system. In many African families there is already a person doing a version of this work without the name: the auntie everyone calls before a feud goes public, the elder who convenes the meeting when land is discussed. What the Haub brothers did was take that ancestral role, give it a title, and make it equal in dignity to the CEO's chair. That is the move. Not inventing the work, which your family already generates in abundance, but naming it, assigning it, and honoring it.
The Haub family has a motto, and Christian states it plainly: "Firm, family, fortune." Then he explains the order. The firm "is given priority over family and fortune." The company's health comes first, the family's cohesion second, individual wealth third.
At first hearing this sounds cold, almost backwards. Should family not come first? But sit with it and the wisdom surfaces. The firm is the tree; the family's unity is the soil; the fortune is the fruit. A family that prioritizes plucking fruit will kill the tree within a generation. A family that prioritizes its own comfort over the firm's needs will vote itself dividends the business cannot afford, install cousins the business cannot carry, and drain the thing that feeds everyone. Putting the firm first is not a betrayal of the family. It is the long way of loving it, because a healthy firm is what allows the family to keep being generous with each other for another fifty years.
Karl-Erivan says the family's foremost objective is "to hand over to the next generation a successful company." Notice what that sentence makes him: not an owner enjoying an asset, but a relay runner holding a baton. And notice what the motto does in a disagreement. When two owners clash over whether to reinvest or distribute, the family does not have to relitigate its values from scratch at nine o'clock at night. The order was agreed in advance, in calm weather. Firm, then family, then fortune. The argument is half settled before it starts.
Your family can borrow this whole cloth. It costs one honest conversation: when the business's needs and an individual owner's wants collide, which wins? Write the answer down. The specific order matters less than the fact of having ordered it before the storm.
The book makes a structural observation about power that every founder should read twice. "In a nonfamily business, the CEO function is often the strongest and most powerful function. In a family business, CEOs often need to tone down their egos, since the ultimate power in the firm resides with the family owners." The authors go on: with the exception of the founding generation, a family business CEO "serves the business and the ownership vision and values. The family and its legacy are at all times 'bigger' than the CEO."
They quote Marcy Syms, who led the American retailer her father founded: "If you are not the founder, you are not the original entrepreneur. Even though I'm the CEO, my father's imprint is indelibly on the business."
This is why the two-role split is not a luxury but a safety mechanism. When one person is simultaneously the boss of the business and the de facto head of the family, the two kinds of authority merge into something no one can question. Every business decision becomes a family decision; every family disagreement becomes a threat to the business. The Haub arrangement pulls those wires apart. Karl-Erivan can be challenged as a CEO without the challenger attacking the family. Christian can raise a family grievance without it reading as interference in management. Each brother's authority has a boundary, and the boundary is what keeps both authorities legitimate.
The book offers three workable patterns for families deciding who leads, and they are worth keeping as a list, the only one in this essay:
Downsize any of these to your scale. The "nonfamily chairman" of a small trading business can be one trusted outsider, a retired accountant or a respected family friend, who reviews the numbers quarterly and can say what a sibling cannot. The point is never the org chart. The point is that no single person holds all the power and all the information alone.
Here is the obvious danger in the split: the sibling running the firm starts to feel like the one doing the real work, and the sibling tending the family starts to feel like a junior partner with a courtesy title. Left to feelings, the arrangement curdles. What keeps it standing is what the book calls fair process, and it defines the term precisely rather than warmly: "'Fair process' means that decisions do not lead to emotional conflicts, because they follow clear and formally accepted rules."
Fair process, in the authors' telling, has three parts. First, the rules themselves are written down and agreed: rules for succession, for distributions, for who may work in the firm. Second, some defined body, not an individual, ensures the rules are followed, so that judgments about, say, whether a family candidate is qualified are made against agreed criteria rather than by one person's mood. Third, everyone affected can see the rules and the reasoning, so decisions are accepted even by those they disappoint.
Watch how the Haubs run on these rails. Owners' rights and duties are explicit: dividends and board eligibility on one side; loyalty, confidentiality, and a marital agreement protecting business assets on the other. When an owner violates their duties, it is Christian's defined job, as family manager, to warn them. Repeated violation can end in expulsion, but only by a qualified majority of owners' votes, and never including the vote of the person concerned. Notice what that machinery does emotionally. The warning comes from a role, not a resentful relative. The ultimate sanction requires the family's collective judgment, not one brother's temper. Nobody has to carry a grudge personally, because the rules carry it institutionally.
The book is candid that structures like these exist "in order to avoid conflicts," not to punish anyone. That is the spirit to import. A two-page family agreement, read aloud and signed at a family meeting, that says who runs the business, who convenes the family, what each owes the other, and how a dispute will be handled, does for a six-person family what Tengelmann's shareholder agreement does for theirs.
Here is where this essay goes beyond the book, and we say so plainly. The authors write for families that already have companies, boards, and advisers. Most of our readers are earlier than that: a first-generation business, a plot of land, a family pot that several relatives feed. The principle transfers whole. Every family that owns anything together already has both jobs, whether or not anyone is doing them.
So do the naming deliberately. Identify who actually runs the enterprise, and say it out loud so quiet rivals stop auditioning. Then identify who will tend the family: convene the meetings, track the temperature of every branch, hold the list of grievances before they fester, keep the diaspora members informed enough to stay owners in their hearts and not just on paper. Make sure it is not the same person, if the family has more than one capable adult. Give the second role a name your family likes: family manager, family chair, the convener. Agree what each role owes the other, in writing, while everyone is still smiling.
This is exactly the work the Family Council module in LegacyPot was built to hold: a standing place to name the convener, set the meeting rhythm, and keep the family's agreements where every branch can see them, so the second job stops living in one person's overloaded memory.
The Haub brothers inherited a century-and-a-half-old firm and still found it necessary to split the crown in two and write down the rules between them. Your family, at whatever size, can do the same thing this month with one meeting and two sentences: you will run the firm, I will tend the family, and both of us will answer to the rules we make together. Firm, family, fortune. In that order, and out loud.