Plan the handover while the business is still strong.
Vancouver family businesses often span real estate, trade, hospitality and manufacturing, with interests on both sides of the Pacific. The founding generation is ready to hand on, and the next may be across an ocean.
Where family companies get stuck
The business is healthy. The strain shows in a few places:
The family is in more than one place
Owners in Vancouver, Hong Kong and Singapore, each with a different view of the business.
The founder still decides everything
The next generation waits, and the company depends on one person.
Nobody outside the family speaks plainly
Advisers know what the family wants to hear.
The next step is undecided
Sale, professional CEO, handover or hold, each with different tax and family consequences.
A fractional executive brings an outside operator into the business without adding to the family politics. They put the structure in place, say what is hard to hear and allow the family time to decide.
Who this is for, and who it is not
Best for
- Owner-led and family-owned businesses at a succession or handover moment
- Next-generation leaders with the appetite but not yet the operating experience
- Businesses whose reporting and governance have outgrown how decisions get made
- Families adding non-family managers who need clear, well-defined authority
- Principals who want structure built without ceding permanent control
Not for
- Families seeking to hand the business permanently to an outside executive
- A purely advisory brief with no operating work attached
- Situations where the family is not ready to let an operator inside the business
- A single project a specialist contractor could deliver and leave
For families across the Pacific
We introduce the executive and stay alongside the family, wherever its members live, for the whole engagement.
Check-ins across time zones
We hold check-ins that suit family members in Vancouver and abroad, and raise drift before it becomes a dispute.
Experience to draw on
Your executive can call on 800+ operators, some of whom have worked inside multi-generation family enterprises.
Handover through us
If the executive has to step away, the next search starts from everything we know about the family, and we run the handover across time zones.
Fit across generations
The founding generation and the next often want different things. We match for someone both will listen to.
Every stage is built around the family
The stakes are relational as well as commercial, so the engagement is designed to protect both.
Discovery includes the family
We understand not just the business but the family's goals, values, and sensitivities. What must be protected throughout the engagement?
Culturally weighted matching
For family businesses, the right personality, communication style, and cultural awareness matter enormously. We take more time on matching than in any other engagement type.
Framing the engagement
How the fractional role is introduced to the team, including family members, is part of our process. We help frame it in a way that builds confidence.
Regular three-way check-ins
Active Fractional Vancouver presence throughout, not just at the start of the engagement. We check in with both the client and the fractional executive.
Common transition moments
A fractional operator is most valuable where the way the business has always run stops fitting what it needs next.
Each fractional role solves a different problem
The right role depends on where the gap is: operations, finance, growth, people or technology.
Our executives have led at
