An appraisal of family enterprise advisors as enhancers of both group performance and individual family member employability profiles

A survey of the challenges faced by family businesses indicates that they face fundamental strategic challenges every 2 years and 50 days on average. In some sectors and circumstances the regularity is shorter, with a minimum timespan of 20 months, or longer, at a maximum of 3 years. Tackling such challenges effectively often requires the dedicated support of a spectrum of advisors and consultants, typically those with expertise in law, finance, management and behavioural issues. Such support and advice is appraised in this report through the eyes of both an entrepreneurship academic and an experienced international family business advisor, using the family advisory themes of impact, relationships, variety and socioemotional wealth identified in Reay et al’s (2013) recent examination of the role of family business advisors. The findings reinforce outcomes of current academic research and add several new dimensions worthy of further study, including evaluations of the extent to which the family element extends or shortens the timespan between major issues compared to non-family enterprises, and an assessment of the long-term benefits of investing in the
necessary time to develop an effective client brief and buy-in compared to the provision of short-term solutions. The study also suggests that properly-managed collaborations across and between the various advisors used by a family business client can help develop even more effective and timely resolutions of the fundamental major strategic issues that tend to arise on a relatively regular basis in family business enterprises. In addition, the family advisor has an important role to play in helping to enhance the employability profile and performance of individual family members.