When Politics and Business Clash

Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.

Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.

Dear Bev,

Have you dealt much with families in advisory firms? I work for a small firm, six of us in total. The founder is in his 70s and very vibrant, but not so involved in the day-to-day operations. His daughter is our COO, his son our CFO and legal and his former son-in-law our CIO (the CIO and the COO were divorced about 3.5 years ago). We now have his grandson who just graduated from college with his degree in English doing marketing and client communications. I’m the client service person but also the office manager. I have been here seven years and when the daughter, “Sue,” and her former husband, “John,” were divorced it was very acrimonious. Our founder, “Paul,” let us all know that John was the brains behind our very successful investment strategies and so if it came to it, Sue would leave before John would. Since then they have worked relatively peacefully together and stayed away from each other as much as possible.