Family Firm Advisor · Entrepreneurial families
You talk about roles. About power. About money. About children. About who decides, who stays silent, who carries more and who will continue. And, sooner or later, about what will still be standing after you.
When the family, the wealth and the business sit at the same table, success no longer depends on numbers alone. It depends on the language you have for the hard conversations.
A family business is not an ordinary company that happens to have relatives in charge. It is a different model: the same people hold, at the same time, the business, the wealth and the relationships between them, and a single decision can touch all three at once. Treated like any other company, it runs for years and then breaks exactly where no one was looking: at the family table. Most family businesses are not lost because of the market, but because of the conversations no one had the courage to hold in time.
From the inside
Says he wants to make room, yet every important decision still comes back to him.
The children are in the business, but it is not clear whether they hold real authority.
The wife or husband feels the tension before it surfaces in meetings. The siblings love one another, but no longer see what is fair the same way.
What the numbers show
Not because the business is not good. But because the transition between generations happens without a common language, without clear roles and without a plan, and what is not clarified in time ends up, later, costing everything that was built.
That is how many family businesses never reach the second generation. The wealth of a lifetime can be lost in a single transition.
That is how many never reach the third generation. „From shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations" is not folklore, it is statistics.
Family businesses without a succession plan that is documented and communicated within the family. When the founder is suddenly absent, decision-making freezes.
And yet, only 3% of failed transitions break for legal or fiscal reasons. The rest, almost nine out of ten, break within the family: in trust, in communication and in heirs prepared too late.
Most families invest everything in the 3% that rarely gives way, and nothing in the 85% that almost always decides the outcome. This is exactly where I work.
Sources: Williams & Preisser, Preparing Heirs · Family Firm Institute · PwC Family Business Survey.
In Romania, the first generation of businesses built after 1989 is reaching right now its first real succession. There is no manual yet, and the window in which it can be done well does not stay open forever. That is why a common language is not a luxury, it is the condition for continuity.
Three systems, one table
What is unclear in the family moves into the decision. What is not said in time moves into the succession. What is postponed too long moves, later, into the profit.
Where the three touch, the most important conversations appear.
„From the outside, it looks simple: you work with your own people, you trust one another, you share the success. From the inside, you discover that there is no single «we». There is a we in the family, a we as owners and a we as the business team. And each «we» has different rules."
The role of a family firm advisor
Your consultants, lawyers and bankers are essential, each in their field. But in a family business, decisions are made between people, not between departments. My role is to hold the family together, as a unit, and to translate between what the owners want and what the experts recommend, so that everyone pulls in the same direction.
Entrepreneurial families have existed for generations around the world, and solid practices have already been built for them: family governance, councils, succession protocols, structures that keep the business and the family in balance. I have worked in this space for years precisely to translate that international know-how so that it works with our own way of being, with the legacy, the values and the reality of families in Eastern Europe.
Shorts · House of Legacy
A few minutes on the things entrepreneurial families most often postpone, exactly the ones that, later, cost the most.
The voices of the families
Three families I have worked with, on what changed after we sat down at the table, unscripted.
Tünde Bartha-Szél
Balázs Boga
Ágnes Gundisch & Zsuzsa Szekely
Proof, not promises
You are not buying a method, but the way someone reads a family and a business at the same time. And judgment is built over time, through education, experience, patience and the humility to help a family in the process of creating multigenerational wealth.
My method starts from a conviction: every voice in the family counts. We work first anonymously, so that everything usually left unsaid can be said. Only once we have a shared reality, built from each member's perception, do we lay out the way forward together. Because strong families are not born of luck; they are designed.
200K € → 3 mil. €That is how much Secoplan grew by the end of 2025, with the right structure, mindset and guidance. Growth is not luck.
See the family stories„I do not work for a single member of the family. I work with the whole family, and that only works if everyone wants to be at the table."
That is why a conversation started early, while the family is still willing, is worth more than one held under the pressure of a conflict.
Katalin OroszFamily Firm Advisor · Managing Partner FFA Advisors
Why me
We have neither the tradition nor the language for these conversations, and that is exactly why we postpone them. Yet it is far better to hold the hard talks in a time of peace than in the middle of the chaos brought on by a loss. At that point it is no longer we who decide; the circumstances decide.
I bring the structure that makes these conversations possible and I build the governance framework that keeps the family business standing, whatever the market may do. I do not come with recipes, but with the patience to separate what has become entangled, what belongs to the family, what belongs to the wealth, what belongs to the business. Before any percentage or strategy, I ask four questions:
Who decides · Who executes · Who owns · Who follows.
Change can begin at your own pace
The book helps you understand what gets entangled between the family, the wealth and the business. You read it in quiet, before you bring the subject to the family table.
Read the bookA private place where you can think out loud, without pressure. It does not decide for you, it helps you prepare a clearer conversation.
Talk to the AI (coming soon)If the subject involves several family members, ownership, succession or the future of the business, it calls for a guided room.
Let's sit down togetherLegacy Design Immersive
An unnamed tension slows every decision that follows, and each month of delay adds to the cost. In 90 days, the family begins to see more clearly how it works together: what holds the family, how the wealth is understood, how the business is led and what needs to be clarified before the next stage. The method will be presented at the Family Firm Institute Global Conference, New York, October 2026.
House of Legacy · Media
Start with the language
The book gives you the words. And when the question involves the family, we sit down at the table. The most expensive moment in a family business is the one you postpone.
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