CircleMakers
Engagements

The work that changes a family enterprise.

Six, twelve, eighteen months — in the room, with your people. Our engagements are private, hand-crafted, and built around the conversations that need to happen in the present and future. We build capacity in your family, your team and your leaders — and the habits that compound long after we're gone.

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How an Engagement Works

Strategy is available everywhere.

What isn't?  The trust to say the hard thing out loud, the process to decide when the family disagrees, and the culture that holds when the pressure comes. That work is human, and it is the work we do — high touch, uniquely crafted, reaching both the group and every individual in it.

In person, in the room

The hardest moments in a family enterprise happen face to face. So does this work — on site, at your table, with the people who actually have to live with the decisions.

Private and central to you

Nothing off the shelf. Every engagement is designed around your family, your business, your history and your pressure points — and stays confidential, always.

Ongoing, not one-and-done

Over 6 to 18 months you have an advisor on call for what you couldn't have planned for. New challenges surface; you don't face them alone or improvise them.

The Engagements

Year-long transformations.

Four ways to work together — each one immersive, in person, and crafted for one client at a time. We take on a limited number of engagements each year, on purpose.

Engagement One · 12–18 Months

The Family Enterprise — Family Constitution

Turn the unspoken assumptions that divide families into clear agreements that unite them.

Our most comprehensive end-to-end engagement. Over 12 to 18 months we work in person with the full family system — senior generation, next generation, spouses, ownership group and board — to build the governing agreements that protect both the enterprise and the relationships inside it.

  • Separate the family, ownership and business tables — and give each one a voice, a rhythm and decision rights.
  • Draft, debate and ratify a constitution the whole family owns, because the whole family wrote it.
  • Install the family meeting cadence, conflict protocol and communication habits that keep it alive.
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The problem it solves
When roles, rights and rules live only in people's heads, every hard moment becomes a negotiation about relationships. Families rarely fracture over strategy. They fracture over process no one agreed to — and by the time that's obvious, it's expensive.
Who it's for
The wider stakeholder group: owners, operating family members, non-operating shareholders, next-generation members, spouses, boards and key non-family executives.
How it works
In-person family and ownership sessions on your ground, private one-on-one coaching between meetings, and an advisor who stays on call through the surprises — the death, the offer, the exit, the argument nobody scheduled.
Outcomes
A ratified Family Constitution, a working governance rhythm, agreed decision rights, and a family that has practiced hard conversations enough to keep having them without us.

Engagement Two · 6–12 Months

The Leadership Team — Helm™

A leadership team that can carry the business — together, not in parallel.

Helm™ is a 6 to 12 month immersion designed exclusively to transform a family business leadership team into a high-performing unit. Structured dialogue, shared accountability and real-world application, session after session, until the way the team works together has actually changed.

  • Build the trust and candor that lets a team disagree in the room instead of in the hallway.
  • Clarify roles, ownership of outcomes, and how the team decides when the answer isn't obvious.
  • Practice the accountability rhythms — meetings, metrics, feedback — until they're habit, not initiative.
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The problem it solves
Most leadership teams in family enterprises are a group of capable individuals, not a team. Family dynamics blur authority, tenure substitutes for clarity, and hard feedback goes unsaid. The business plateaus for reasons nobody will name in the meeting.
Who it's for
The full executive or senior leadership team — family and non-family alike — plus the owner or CEO the team reports to.
How it works
In-person working sessions on a set cadence, individual coaching for each leader, live observation of your real meetings, and ongoing advisory as new pressures and new people arrive.
Outcomes
A team with a shared operating agreement, a clear decision model, individual development plans that stick, and the capacity to lead the next chapter of the business without the owner in every room.

Engagement Three · 6–12 Months

The Next Generation — Next Chapter™

Step into your role with confidence, credibility and a plan of your own.

Next Chapter™ is a hand-crafted development experience for the next generation of leaders in family enterprises. Retreats, in-person intensives and one-on-one coaching over 6 to 12 months — reaching the rising group as a peer circle and each leader as an individual.

  • Earn authority with the family, the team and the people who remember you as a kid.
  • Develop your own leadership voice without dishonoring the one that built the business.
  • Prepare for the handoff on both sides — what you're stepping into, and what they're stepping back from.
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The problem it solves
Next-generation leaders are handed responsibility long before they're handed authority. Without a place to practice, they over-defer and stall or overcorrect and fracture trust. Both cost years the business doesn't have.
Who it's for
Rising family members, emerging leaders and successors — with the senior generation engaged deliberately so the transition is shared, not imposed.
How it works
In-person retreats and offsites, private coaching between them, structured senior-generation touchpoints, and an advisor who stays available as the role — and the family — keeps shifting.
Outcomes
A named leadership development roadmap, real credibility earned in the business, language for the conversations that were being avoided, and a peer circle that keeps working long after the engagement closes.

Engagement Four · Custom Term

Fully Customized Advisory

For the obstacle that doesn't fit anyone's framework — including ours.

Some situations arrive without a category. A customized engagement is designed from scratch around your obstacle, your timeline and your people — scoped after we understand the situation, not before.

  • Strategy: where the enterprise goes next, and what the family must agree on to get there.
  • Succession: pre-transition, transition and post-transition — ownership and management alike.
  • Leadership development, conflict, culture, and whatever is actually in the way right now.
Inquire
The problem it solves
The real blocker is rarely the one on the agenda. Families and leadership teams lose years working the visible problem while the conversation underneath it goes unhad.
Who it's for
Owners, families, boards and leadership teams navigating a moment that matters more than most — and who want one trusted advisor rather than four vendors.
How it works
In-person facilitation and coaching, shaped to your cadence, with continuous advisory access. Intimate, confidential, and built entirely around you.
Outcomes
A clear plan, a roadmap with owners and dates, and — more durably — capacity in your people to handle the next one themselves.

In Their Words

What a year of this work changes.

"We'd hired consultants before. This was different — he sat at our table, with our family, for a year. What we walked away with wasn't a document. It was the ability to talk to each other."

— A second-generation owner

Family Manufacturer · Midwest US

"Our leadership team went from polite to honest. That one change moved more in twelve months than the previous five years of strategy work."

— President, family enterprise

Distribution Group · Southeast US

Inquire

Start with a 30-minute conversation.

Tell us where your family, your team or your business is today. We'll follow with a 30-minute intro call — and if it's a fit, a detailed proposal with the coaching and advisory package designed specifically for your situation.

Every engagement is private, confidential and built for one client at a time. There's no script on the other end of this form.

todd@circlemakers.co

Private and confidential.