The shape of the engagement is the shape of the diagnostic carried through.
Every Aven engagement begins the same way: with a diagnostic before a recommendation.
The shape of the engagement is the shape of the diagnostic carried through.
Every Aven engagement begins with a diagnostic assessment before any recommendation is made. We don't arrive with the answer already chosen. We begin by understanding your business's actual history, your ownership's actual dynamics, and the gap between what the org chart says and how decisions really get made. When we do make a recommendation, it is grounded in your reality.
In M&A, succession, and ownership transition work, owner and family alignment is upstream of everything else. Misalignment does not stay hidden. It surfaces in a live transaction at the worst possible moment, usually after significant banker and legal fees have already been spent. So we do the alignment work first. If a family is not ready to have the harder conversations, we will say so before a process gets started.
Every Aven engagement is led by a senior advisor who carries the work from the first conversation through the final handoff. The advisor who holds the diagnostic is in every meeting that matters. We don't split strategy, relational complexity, and operational detail across a junior team that reconciles imperfectly.
Family enterprises are systems. Ownership, family, and operations are interconnected, and a change in one ripples through the others. We work across all three. Narrow interventions that treat only one dimension tend to produce the other two as unintended consequences.
We spend the first phase understanding the business, the ownership, the family, the history, and the pressure that brought you to this conversation. This is typically where the FEQ is deployed. We surface what the system already knows but has not named.
We report back what we've found, including what's fragile, unclear, or risky. If the diagnostic reveals that the engagement you originally asked for is not the engagement you need, we will tell you.
We work with you to design the path forward: governance reform, succession architecture, transaction sequencing, NextGen development, or some combination. Tradeoffs are named explicitly: what you gain, what you give up, what it costs to do nothing.
We stay through the execution, not just the recommendation. Most advisory failures happen in implementation, not design, and we build in the handoffs, check-ins, and course corrections that implementation requires.
Engagements range from focused diagnostic work — a matter of weeks — to multi-year advisory relationships through a full transition. The right shape for you emerges from the diagnostic, not from a fixed menu.
Today, that means Matt Brown or Josh Eby. The advisor who holds the diagnostic is the advisor in every meeting that matters, through findings, design, and implementation.
When the work requires specialized expertise (a tax attorney, a quality-of-earnings team, a valuation specialist), we bring in the right person from a network we've built and vetted over time.
We also draw on a circle of advisors to Aven itself. They are not on our staff. They are owners of multi-generational family businesses, current and former C-suite executives, scholars of family enterprise, and members of prominent family councils.
They sharpen our thinking from their own vantage points, and their influence shapes the quality of counsel we bring to every client.
We respect the difference.
An initial call with a senior Aven advisor is the fastest way to understand whether Aven is the right fit and what a first step would look like. There is no cost and no pressure.
Start a conversationThe Family Enterprise Quotient is a structured assessment that maps the governance, relational, and strategic dynamics in your enterprise. Many owners take it before deciding whether to engage an advisor at all. It will tell you something true about the system you're inside.
Take the FEQ