I have been in family business conversations where everyone around the table agrees that the business needs to grow, yet it becomes increasingly clear that they are not talking about the same thing.
For one family member, growth means opening another site, entering new markets and becoming a much bigger business. For another, it means creating enough value to take some money out. Someone else is thinking about protecting what the family has built, while a younger generation may be thinking about professionalising the business so it can become less dependent on the founder.
All of them can use the same word and mean something entirely different.
This matters enormously when a leadership appointment is being considered, because the instinct is often to look for someone capable of delivering growth without first asking what growth is actually supposed to achieve.
The difficulty is rarely finding someone who can grow the business. It is agreeing what the growth is for.
That question can remain hidden for quite a long time. The family may have spent years building a successful company through instinct, relationships and an extraordinary amount of personal commitment. Growth may have happened because the founder saw an opportunity and took it, rather than because there was ever a clearly articulated ambition for the next ten years.
Eventually, the business becomes too large or too complicated for that approach to continue indefinitely. A new Managing Director or CEO is discussed. The language becomes familiar: someone commercially strong, strategic, ambitious, capable of taking the business to the next level.
It sounds straightforward until you start asking what “the next level” actually means.
The appointment carries the family’s ambitions
A leader can be perfectly capable of delivering substantial growth and still be the wrong person for a particular family business.
Imagine a candidate whose instinct is to reinvest every available pound into expansion. They want acquisitions, new territories, more people and greater scale. To one shareholder, this is exactly what the business needs. To another, it may feel like an unnecessary gamble with something that has taken thirty years to build.
Neither position is necessarily wrong.
The problem arises when those differences are left unspoken and the incoming leader is expected to somehow reconcile them.
This is particularly common where family members have reached different stages in their own relationship with the business. The founder may still be emotionally and operationally connected to it. A son or daughter may be thinking about succession. Another family member may have little involvement but a strong financial interest. Their expectations of growth will naturally be influenced by where each of them sits.
A leadership appointment therefore carries much more weight than the job description suggests. The person coming in is not simply being asked to run the company. They are being placed inside a set of family expectations, some of which may never have been properly discussed.
When growth becomes the disagreement
The tension often appears after the appointment rather than during it.
The new leader starts to make decisions based on what they understood the ambition to be. Investment increases. New people are hired. The business enters unfamiliar territory. Perhaps margins fall temporarily as capacity is built.
Then questions begin to emerge.
Was this really what we meant by growth?
Did we want the business to become this big?
Why are we taking so much risk?
Why aren’t we taking more risk?
At that point, what looks like a leadership problem can actually be an ownership problem.
A new leader can expose differences in family ambition that have been present for years.
This is why the strongest leadership appointments in family businesses tend to begin with a much more honest conversation about what the owners want their business to become. Not simply how large it should be, but what they want it to provide, what they are prepared to risk, what they want to preserve and what they are willing to change.
Sometimes the conclusion is that substantial growth is exactly right. Sometimes it is a more modest ambition with greater emphasis on profitability, resilience or family wealth. Sometimes different family members genuinely want different things.
That last possibility is uncomfortable, but it is often the most important one to acknowledge.
The temptation is to resolve the disagreement by finding a stronger leader. But no leader, however capable, can compensate indefinitely for owners who have fundamentally different expectations of the future.
The most useful conversations I have seen are not necessarily the ones where everyone leaves with identical ambitions. They are the ones where people finally understand what the others mean when they talk about growth.
That understanding changes the leadership conversation. It allows the family to look for someone who is not merely capable of growing the business, but capable of growing it in a direction the owners can genuinely live with.
For a family business, that distinction can be the difference between a successful appointment and a very expensive misunderstanding.
About the author
Oliver Denton is Associate Partner at TWYD, where he works closely with founders, family businesses and owner-led businesses on leadership appointments and the questions that sit behind them. Much of his work involves understanding what different stakeholders actually want from the next stage of a business.
He has particular experience of the point where a successful founder-led business begins to require a different kind of leadership, and where assumptions about growth, succession and ownership need to be understood before the next leader is appointed.