FEA designation energizes careers, leads to peer networking, referrals

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Since 2014, the Family Enterprise Advisor designation has been Canada’s gold standard for professionals in various sectors who work with wealthy people and their families. We decided to ask advisors who have earned the designation to tell us what it has brought to their practice and how it has influenced their careers.

Barb Schimnowsky sees family enterprises through an exceptionally long lens; she’s been working with some of her client companies for as long as 20 years. “That’s so fulfilling, because family enterprises are the backbone of our economy,” she says. “It just gives me a ton of satisfaction.”

Schimnowsky is an executive-search specialist. Since 2017, she has been practice leader, executive and director search, for WATSON Advisors Inc., a boutique firm in Vancouver that recruits directors and executives for family businesses and sets them up for success by making sure their new company’s governance is robust before they arrive.

Prior to that, she spent 20 years with KPMG, where she focused on owner-managed businesses. After KPMG closed its executive search practice globally, she joined MNP as a senior manager, later becoming managing director of her own firm, WestView Executive Search Ltd.

Schimnowsky says executive search can be tricky in the family-office arena. “Every family office is so different,” she says. “I worked with one where they needed a VP of real estate, because the family was setting up a separate business for all their real estate. The biggest challenge is that there’s no single place where you can go to find all the family offices in Canada – they’re all so private!”

What first led you to get your FEA designation?

“I was intrigued by the FEA. I went to a presentation at our chamber of commerce; the presenter was Judi Cunningham, who is one of the people who wrote the program. Later, I contacted a colleague who had taken the program, and she loved it. I took the program in 2015.”

What are the takeaways that have stayed with you?

“It really confirmed for me that the approaches I had been taking all along were right, but it gave me some different frameworks, like the Three-Circle Model [the family-business structure first articulated by Renato Tagiuri and John Davis of Harvard Business School].

“It also was interesting for me, because in my cohort everybody else was an accountant, a lawyer or a wealth-management professional. The FEA program is all about people, and that wasn’t new for me, because every family is unique. I could hire a CEO who would be a huge success in one family business and an absolute disaster in another.”

What advantages has your FEA status given you?

“There’s a very strong FEA network. There’s good sharing amongst peers, and also referrals. I get a lot of referrals [from other FEAs]. They feel comfortable, because they know I know the family-business space.

“This is an interdisciplinary profession, so you have an accountant, a lawyer and someone like myself on the team, but it takes awhile to build the trust with those other service providers. I think the fact that there are so many others from those professions in the program also builds the trust.”

Any unexpected discoveries?

“We had a lawyer in our group, and she had come from a family office. She said that the biggest difference between what she does and what I do is that I can go out [to the family members] to collect information and put together a proposal. If she does that, she has to bill them. She said it’s harder for her to really understand the clients’ needs, because the clock ticks for the lawyer. That was a bit of an eye-opener for me.”

Any predictions for the future of the FEA designation?

“Hopefully it will be expanded. I referred a couple of acquaintances that I knew in the U.S. There is no FEA equivalent in the U.S., so the opportunity to expand the offering outside Canada is just great, but they need to expand the awareness here first.”

Administered by Family Enterprise Canada, the FEA (Family Enterprise Advisor) designation is increasingly recognized across the country. It identifies advisors with expertise in family business and significant technical knowledge in a related field. The program, which costs $16,995 plus tax, consists of six modules and a capstone Team project. More than 450 professionals have already achieved the designation.

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• Thirteen more books highly recommended by family advisors

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