Where technique alone no longer suffices
A shareholders meeting that derails. A family dinner where the company is now an avoided subject. A succession technically prepared for three years but that no one manages to sign. An heir who refuses to sit at the same table as another. These are situations that cannot be solved with one more tax scheme.
Family mediation is neither a lawyer’s, nor a banker’s, nor a psychologist’s profession. It is a specific discipline that articulates the human, wealth and strategic stakes in a structured dialogue, to bring out what was blocked. Arcadia Partners has made family mediation one of its distinctive signatures, because no succession is truly signed until dialogue has been restored.
When Arcadia steps in
The situations we handle look like these. A family of shareholders in disagreement for years on the company’s trajectory, and each meeting turns into a power struggle. A succession blocked by a generational conflict between the founder-leader and their children, or between sibling heirs. A spin-off or shareholding recomposition where several family members want incompatible things. A long-standing dispute between minority and majority partners in a family company, now threatening to go to court.
We intervene as much in prevention, when the conflict is latent but not yet formalised, as in repair, when court proceedings have already been initiated or are about to be.
Our method
The human first. That is our founding principle. We know that a successful mediation is not the one that produces a compromise, it is the one each party leaves having grown, heard and respected. We are not here to manufacture bad arrangements; we are here to bring out the solution that reconciles everyone’s interests, beyond apparent divergences.
This conviction is embodied in three operational principles. Listen before structuring: identify the unspoken, old wounds, perceived imbalances between heirs. The scheme comes after. Formalise what each person carries: map of personal stakes, life project, financial expectations, desired role in future governance. Build a solution carried by all: governance, shareholders agreement, monitoring tools. Each stakeholder signs because they have their place, not because they have been convinced.
Mediation takes place in dialogue with the client’s usual advisors (notaries, lawyers, tax specialists) while keeping methodological autonomy. We refuse positions of arbitrage or partial advice. Our role is to bring out a solution that all parties can carry, not to impose the one we would have chosen.
Engagement framework
Specific mission, absolute confidentiality. We take the time it takes. Three months when dialogue unlocks quickly. Twelve months when several years of unspoken matters need to be defused. Time-based billing, with an indicative envelope set at mission start, and we only progress in respect of the family’s rhythm.
Our only promise is to never sign a solution that not all parties carry. If your family is going through a difficult period around the company, the earlier we talk, the more solutions remain available.