Family Businesses
Regardless of their size, family businesses have entirely different structures from manager-operated corporate groups. The core of any family business is always the owner, whether exercising influence as a manager, on the board, or at the shareholders’ meeting. This is the person the employees look to. He or she gives a company its corporate philosophy. That’s why every family business is unique. Processes, structures and corporate cultures are as individual as the owner families themselves.
This presents a major challenge for consulting firms. The only companies that survive here are those that allow for the individuality of their partners and employees. Business owners and consultants need to speak the same language. The advisors we provide you with need to have personalities as diverse as those of the business owners themselves.
Ongoing personal contact with the business owner and management is the basis for communicating about weak points, potential improvements, or constant regulatory changes – understandably and one-to-one.
In addition to ongoing areas of consulting on management, taxes, and law, family businesses have a particular concern with corporate succession, which must be decided sensitively and professionally in terms of both defining succession in advance and in drafting wills, so as to safeguard the company’s continued existence with long-term, balanced solutions.
Ebner Stolz sets a high priority on its partners’ and employees’ individuality. Our corporate philosophy is based on identifying with our clients’ needs and making every effort to assist them. That means we can find the right contact person for your family business. Someone who – like you – can fully identify with your company and give their all for it.
Our services at a glance
- Advising on Succession
- High-Net-Worth Private Clients
- Structuring and implementing appropriate corporate governance, taking due account of the various stakeholders’ interests (e.g., by setting up advisory boards, shareholders’ committees and supervisory boards, reliable partnership agreements and by-laws).
- Questions of employee representation law (general and group employee council) and questions of employee co-determination
- Legal and tax advice on succession and defining succession in advance, allowing for a fair balancing of successors’ interests and of management structures within the company (e.g., through usufruct models, family holding companies, separation of business assets from private assets, avoidance of risks from split-ups into interlocking owner and operator businesses)
- Implementation of family constitutions
- Moderating differences of opinion and change processes between generations and branches of owner families, and between different bodies (especially management and shareholders’ meeting)
- Bringing terms of wills and marital property arrangements into line with requirements of founding documents (e.g., clauses in pre- and post-nuptial agreements, limited group of approved owners)
- Performing functions of an advisory board or supervisory board, probate of wills
- Advising on asset structuring appropriate for risk