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PublicationFamily, Wealth, and Governance: An Agency AccountFamily firms often evolve into ownership constellations with multiple family owners. Building on agency theory, we argue that the growing complexity within a group of family blockholders gives rise to what we label family blockholder conflicts, defined as conflicts within a group of family owners. To curb family blockholder conflicts, families often separate the family from its assets and install intermediary governance structures. We explore four frequently applied structures (uncoordinated family, embedded family office, single family office, and family trust), which vary in their degree of separation between family owners and assets and consequently the extent to which the firm might incur family blockholder costs and the double-agency costs associated with appointing agents to oversee agents. We conclude with a discussion of the distributive effects of the four family governance constellations for family wealth over time.
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PublicationTrusted Advisors in a Family Business's Succession-Planning Process - An Agency Perspective(Elsevier, 2014-10-30)Family business succession is a complex and challenging process, in which family members often build on the support of trusted advisors who can be seen as the most relied external source of advice and knowledge that family businesses draw on. Based on an extensive literature review, this article aims to synthesize prior research on both advisors and succession to systematically describe and analyze the role of trusted advisors during the succession-planning process. Based on arguments from agency theory, we discuss potential benefits and drawbacks associated with the involvement of trusted advisors along the four phases-trigger, preparation, selection, and training-of the succession-planning process and outline how trusted advisors can mitigate but also enhance agency costs-in particular goal divergence and information asymmetry-during each of these four phases. Subsequently, we discuss four typical constellations of advisor involvement, which vary in their agency costs and thus have different levels of bias and efficiency. We thereby outline several inefficiencies that result from the common setup in which an incumbent and a successor both rely on their own trusted advisors or a team of expert advisors and propose a balanced and efficient model of advisor involvement as a potential solution which reduces the agency costs. This conceptual article contributes to research on succession, agency theory, and trusted advisors in family firms.
