We learned this from the inside.
The business is only as strong as the family system beneath it.
We learned this from the inside.
New York City
Matt spent 17 years founding and leading a network of churches and nonprofits, where the stakes were high and the governance was personal. He has since served as a CFO, an organizational consultant, and the chair of multiple nonprofit boards, which means he has sat on both sides of the governance relationship.
Prior to founding Aven, he was CFO and Head of Business Development at a family-owned business. He watched what it costs when the boundaries between ownership and operation go undefined, and when a transition arrives before the family is ready. That is why Aven exists.
Matt lives in New York City with his wife Deb, near their three adult children. He also serves as Rector of Christ the King Church in Brooklyn and CFO of their Diocese.
Orange County, California
Josh Eby has spent his career developing leaders and building organizations across sectors, geographies, and institutions of varied sizes.
He is the founder of Vida House, a nonprofit that trains and supports international organizations and leaders. Vida House helps organizations see the importance of both leadership health and organizational health. They work in over 20 countries. He has been privileged to care for many different types of leaders and help shape the organizations they lead. He creatively and intuitively connects the human dimensions of leadership and organizational health. He sees how to mobilize enterprises to reach their goals.
Josh lives in Southern California with his wife Robin. They have five children.
Matt and Josh have known each other for more than twenty years. In that time they've collaborated on projects, built parallel consulting practices, and developed the kind of relational trust that can't be manufactured. The kind where you already know how the other person thinks before the hard conversation starts.
After three years inside the family business, Matt was ready to return to consulting, now with a focus on family enterprise. Josh, at the same moment, was forming his next venture. The question became obvious: why keep working alone?
They had overlapping interests and complementary networks. They had two decades of trust. And they had both arrived, independently and by different paths, at the same conviction about family enterprise: that the governance and alignment work most firms treat as secondary is actually the work that determines everything else.
So they threw in together. The opportunity was real and the partnership was ready.
Not easily, and not without the right help. But the situations that look irreparably broken usually aren't. They're situations where the honest conversation hasn't happened yet.
Clearly defined roles between owners and operators, between family and business, between the current generation and the next: these aren't formalities. They're the infrastructure that makes transition survivable. Families that skip them don't save time. They borrow it.
Most clients find us after something has broken. We understand that, and we do our best work in those moments. But the families we most want to work with are the ones who can see what's coming and want to get ahead of it.
Family businesses are the backbone of the American economy. The three-generation failure rate isn't evidence that family businesses are fragile. It's evidence that transitions are hard, and that hard things require preparation, not just hope.
Aven is a senior-led advisory firm, and we intend to keep it that way. Every engagement is led by an experienced advisor who owns the work from first conversation to final recommendation. We are not a firm where you meet the senior partners and then get handed to a team you've never met.
Aven also built its own diagnostic instrument, the Family Enterprise Quotient. We're making it available to family enterprises and the advisors who serve them at thefeq.com.
We built Aven because the problem is real, the moment is right, and twenty years of trust is a good foundation for something meant to last.