Negotiating When Business is Personal
Family-run businesses come with a unique challenge: the people at the conference table may also be at the dinner table.
Mindful Negotiating helps families navigate the conversations that come with running a business together, from everyday communication and decision-making to governance, succession, changing roles, and conflict. Our approach brings negotiation, facilitation, and family systems thinking together to help families have productive conversations without ignoring the relationships behind them.
When tensions cross between family and business, we can also provide support around mediation for workplace conflict, helping families address difficult issues before they become lasting divides.
Better Conversations for Family-Run Businesses
Our workshops, coaching, and facilitation are built around the situations family businesses and family offices actually face.
Facilitating Family Dinners
Turn family gatherings into opportunities for better communication, connection, and shared understanding. We help families create space for all voices while navigating the emotional dynamics that naturally come with being family.
Negotiating Family Systems
Understand how family roles, patterns, and history influence the way people communicate, make decisions, and handle conflict. Then learn practical ways to change patterns that no longer work.
Governance & Succession Planning
Clarify roles, responsibilities, decision-making processes, and future expectations. We help families approach succession and governance as conversations to work through together, not simply structures to put on paper.
Onboarding New Family Members
Marriage, inheritance, or joining the family enterprise can change the dynamics of both the family and the business. We help families establish expectations, communicate values, and create stronger foundations for new relationships.
Questions are Kind of Our Thing
We help families identify the business issue, the relationship dynamics surrounding it, and the conversations needed to move forward. Depending on the situation, that may involve facilitation, coaching, mediation, or customized training.
Yes. We focus on the human side of succession, helping families clarify expectations, roles, responsibilities, decision-making processes, and concerns before they become sources of conflict.
That’s exactly where this work can be especially valuable. Family and workplace dynamics often overlap in a family-run business. We create a structured environment where difficult issues can be discussed productively while keeping both the relationships and the business in view.
Some Conversations Shouldn’t Wait Until the Next Family Dinner
Whether you’re planning for the next generation, navigating a disagreement, or simply trying to communicate better, we can help make the conversation a little less difficult.