There is a book that teaches consultants, step by step, how to win your family as a client. It scripts their first meeting with you, tells them what to say to make you feel safe, what to say to make...
There is a book that teaches consultants, step by step, how to win your family as a client. It scripts their first meeting with you, tells them what to say to make you feel safe, what to say to make you feel urgency, how to structure the letter you will sign, and how to set their fees. It was written in 2003 by two respected practitioners, Jane Hilburt-Davis and W. Gibb Dyer, Jr., and it is called Consulting to Family Businesses: A Practical Guide to Contracting, Assessment, and Implementation. Families were never meant to read it.
You should read it, or at least read this, because a playbook works differently once both sides have seen it. The book is not cynical; it is, in fact, unusually honest, and the standard of conduct it teaches is high. That is exactly what makes it useful in reverse. If this is what good consultants are trained to do in a first meeting, then a family that knows the training can walk into that meeting with its own checklist and tell, within an hour, whether the person across the table has it or not. Most families in business will, at some point, pay an outsider for help: a consultant, an accountant, a lawyer, an advisor of some kind. The one idea of this essay is that choosing and briefing that outsider is a skill, the book teaches it by accident, and the whole skill fits on two pages you can carry into the room.
The book calls the first real encounter the chemistry meeting, and the name is honest: its purpose is to find out whether the two sides fit. What families rarely realize is how much evaluating the good consultant is doing in that hour. The authors give their readers a list of questions to answer during and after it: Who is the client? Are you and the client a good fit, and "do your skills fit the client's needs?" Is there enough energy and commitment for change, and where does that energy sit? Who holds the formal power, and who holds the informal power? Will the family commit time and money, and will it understand that consulting is collaborative, that "their participation is an integral part of the consulting process"?
They even script the emotional register. The consultant is taught to create a sense of safety with lines like "You are to be commended for seeking help for this," or urgency with lines like "If you don't deal with this, it will get much worse." Neither line is dishonest, but hearing them for what they are, techniques, is clarifying. And they are taught, crucially, to walk away: if the fit is poor, decline the engagement or refer the family to someone better suited.
Now turn every one of those questions around, because each has a family-side twin. If the consultant is asking "who is the client," your family should ask it first and louder, and we will come back to why. If the consultant is assessing whether their skills fit your needs, you should ask directly: what is your training, in what field, and how many family businesses like ours have you actually worked with? If they are gauging your energy for change, gauge theirs: will the senior person in front of us do the work, or a junior we have not met? And notice whether the person across the table is willing to say the professional's most trustworthy sentence, the one the book requires of its readers: this is not my expertise, and you would be better served by someone else. An advisor who has never said it to anyone should not be saying yes to you.
Here is the question that decides everything downstream, and most families never ask it. When a family business hires an advisor, who exactly is being represented? The founder who is paying the bill? The company? The son who made the phone call? The book's answer, argued over many pages, is that the best consultants serve none of these alone: they define the client as the family business system, the whole entangled organism of family, firm, and ownership. The sample engagement letter the authors provide says it in one line addressed to a fictional client: "my client is the family business system. This allows me to work in the interests of the business and of the family that owns the business."
Why does this matter so much? Because an advisor who quietly serves only the person paying becomes, in a family conflict, a weapon. The brothers cannot trust the succession plan if the consultant designing it answers to their father alone. The daughter running the company cannot open the books to someone reporting privately to an uncle. The Family Firm Institute, the field's professional body, makes this the very first obligation in its code of ethics, adopted in 2001: "At the outset of an engagement, the family business advisor will state in writing whose interests he or she is representing during the course of the engagement." In writing. Before the work. And the same code requires two more things a family should check without embarrassment: when the advisor refers you to another professional, they must disclose "whether there will be any referral fee or other fee sharing," and they may never imply that membership in the institute amounts to credentialing or endorsement. Impressive letters after a name are a starting point for questions, not a substitute for them.
The engagement letter itself is the other half of this section, because the book prints a complete model of one, and it quietly defines what "good" looks like. The letter names the specific issues the family asked for help with, in the family's own terms. It lays the work out in phases, assessment first, then implementation, then follow-up, and refuses to promise a schedule for later phases before the assessment is done, because an honest advisor does not prescribe before diagnosing. It states the fee basis and asks for the family's participation rather than its passivity. It even levels with the family about the stakes, citing the field's famous survival numbers: "Only one-third of family companies survive to the second generation and less than 15 percent succeed into the third generation." Treat those figures as what they are, the standard statistics of the field as of the early 2000s, drawn from American research, rather than a live measurement of your country this year. But the direction of the warning has held everywhere: most family firms do not outlive their founders' grandchildren, and the families that beat the odds are disproportionately the ones that got competent outside help early and on clear terms.
Money is where vague arrangements go to become disputes, so the book's chapter on billing is one a family should be glad to have seen. The authors lay out the standard structures side by side, with the risks of each printed honestly: by the hour, clear and simple, but the family may hesitate to call because the clock is always running; by the day, the same trade with bigger units; by the project, a fixed price for a defined piece of work such as a family retreat or an assessment, which is predictable for the family but tempts everyone to pretend the work is more finished than it is, since family situations are, in the authors' words, rarely simple to fix; on retainer, paying for access over a period, which works best with an advisor who has already earned trust; and results-based, tied to agreed outcomes, which sounds appealing but stumbles on the fact that results in a family business are, as the book admits, a moving target with many emotional components.
The point of knowing this list is not to favor one structure. It is to have a standard for the conversation. An honest advisor can tell you, in one unhurried paragraph, how they charge, why that structure fits your situation, and what the total is likely to be; the institute's code requires disclosure of the fee basis in writing at the outset and an estimate of total cost "whenever possible." Evasiveness about money in the first meeting is not sophistication. It is the first sample of how every future difficulty will be handled.
One more test belongs in the meeting, because real family-business problems cross professions. The field's own definition of a competent family business consultant requires more than one discipline: behavioral science, management, law, finance, expert in one and conversant in the rest, and the book is explicit that no single advisor carries the whole toolkit. So the moment more than one professional is involved, ask the coordination questions the book itself supplies: Who will be the quarterback, the one person coordinating the others? How will differences among the advisors be managed? How will the billing be handled across them? The authors quote, with evident sympathy, a colleague's observation that advisors "are as difficult to herd as alley cats." If nobody in the room wants the quarterback job, your family will end up doing it, unpaid and untrained, in the middle of its own crisis.
Here is what to do before your family signs anything, and it fits in one meeting and one folder.
Go into the first conversation with any advisor carrying five questions, and do not leave without plain answers. Whose interests will you represent, and will you put that in writing? What are your qualifications and your actual experience with families like ours? How will the work be phased, and what does each phase produce? How do you charge, and what will this cost in total? And if other professionals are involved, who is the quarterback? A good advisor, the kind this book was written to train, will not merely tolerate these questions; they will visibly relax, because families that ask them are the clients the work goes well with. The advisor who bristles has answered a different question, and saved you a great deal of money.
Then keep the paper. The engagement letter, the written statement of whose interests are represented, the fee agreement, every report each phase produces: these documents are the memory of the engagement, and they belong in your family's Document Vault in LegacyPot, where the whole family can see them, this year and in ten years when someone asks why a decision was made and on whose advice. A family that files its advisors' promises is a family its advisors keep promises to. And if the moment comes when your family reaches for outside help, through LegacyPot's own expert desk or anywhere else, the five questions travel with you, because they are not about any one firm. They are about what your family is owed by anyone it pays to sit at its table.
The book stops at the consultant's side of the desk. We have taken you around to the family's side, where you have always belonged. The people who wrote the playbook expected only professionals to study it. The families who study it too are the ones who stop being the subject of the meeting and become, at last, its equal party.