Where family disputes actually start

Family business disputes are rarely about strategy. Advisers who spend their working lives in these rooms tend to name the same origins, and they are unglamorous: how a family member's pay is decided, how and when a distribution is made, and whether roles in the business are assigned on merit.

What the three have in common is that each is decided case by case, in private, by someone with the discretion to decide it. That is not corruption and usually not even favouritism. It is simply that a decision with no stated basis cannot be distinguished, by the person on the receiving end, from a decision made for the wrong reason.

The pattern that follows is consistent. A member stops asking, then stops attending, then abstains, and the family reads years of that as disengagement rather than as a request nobody had a way to make. By the time it is spoken about, positions have hardened and each side can point to something.

Writing down the basis, rather than the answer, is what interrupts it. The number changes every year; the basis is what is actually being agreed, and it is far easier to agree in a calm year than in a contested one.