This article is part of our Special Report on “Educating the Next Generation of Family Office Leaders.”
Family businesses have all the usual corporate headaches, and several that are uniquely their own: succession planning, family governance and the complications that can arise when everyone in the boardroom is related. But business education is quickly evolving to keep up, and the Alberta Business Family Institute at the University of Alberta is already two steps ahead, offering programs designed specifically for business families—and also for the advisors who support them and students who’d like to.
Executive director Matt Knight says the institute’s three-stream structure—serving families, advisors and business students—is unique among Canadian universities.
“I would say we are one of the larger or more active universities in Canada doing all three,” he says.
Since 2003, the nonprofit institute has supported Canadian business families with education, research and networking opportunities tailored to the family enterprise ecosystem.
For students
Delivered on campus, the ABFI’s student programs are their most traditional offerings. Credit courses for undergrads and MBA students—with lectures, case studies, guest speakers and collaborative projects—explore the challenges facing family businesses.
They’re aimed at business students, but Knight says they also draw curious pupils from other disciplines. The institute’s flagship academic course, Managing Family Enterprise, introduces students to the economic and social dynamics that shape enterprising families.
With a focus on strategic decision-making and emerging technologies, the program includes a capstone artificial-intelligence simulation, developed by Knight, that allows students to interact with AI-driven characters representing members of a fictional business family.
A lot of these family businesses are so busy growing the business that they don’t necessarily think about growing the family.
Matt Knight
“It’s really quite neat,” says Knight. “You log in and you’re able to actually talk to the different folks and say, you know, ‘Hey, Father, how do you feel about Jimmy or Sally taking over the business? Who should it be, and why?’”
Another unique opportunity for students is the European Family Business tour that takes a small cohort of MBA students on a two- or three-week European tour to meet some of the world’s oldest business families. The trip includes visits with famous family businesses like Prada, Swarovski and the German pharmaceutical company Merck.
Merck, says Knight, is “owned by 300 cousins. We meet with the vice-chairman of their family board, and he walks through how challenging it is for him to manage 300 cousins. It’s really eye-opening for us to go and see this company that’s been around for nearly 400 years and see the level of maturity they have in the 15th or 16th generation.”
For families
ABFI’s programs for business families are designed as immersive experiences, including its Roadmap program, which brings entrepreneurial families together for a series of intensive learning weekends in the Alberta Rockies.
During three-day sessions held in Banff, families step away from their day-to-day operations to work through strategic questions about legacy, growth and governance alongside professors, advisors and peer families. Knight says the off-site format is intentional: when families gather in a neutral setting, it creates space for sensitive conversations about values or succession that can be difficult to have while running the business day-to-day.
For advisors
For advisors, ABFI offers both an Executive Certificate in Family Business Advising and customized Family Business Advisor training. Usually offered as a series of employer-sponsored “lunch and learn” events, Knight says the workplace-based training is the ABFI’s most popular choice for advisors.
“We’re able to customize it to their sector and talk about their tools and really help them stay competitive and work with business families to provide more value,” he adds.
The Executive Certificate program is offered once or twice a year, and advisors can apply these credit courses towards U of A’s MBA program.
All advisor training focuses on the advisor’s unique role inside the family business, exploring governance structures, legacy planning and sensitive topics like family conflict. Knight says advisors often apply the coursework directly to real client situations, turning the classroom into a working lab delivering actionable takeaways.
Knight says the content is similar across the ABFI’s three streams, but each program is tightly focused on the needs of its cohort. “We’ll teach a similar concept to a family business member and to an advisor, but you’re looking through a different lens,” says Knight.
Research
Knight says the ABFI always has its eye trained on strategy and actionable insights, especially when it comes to research.
“Instead of looking at family business from a social science or a psychological aspect, we typically look through a marketing or a finance lens,” says Knight. “We try to look at things like how these families make decisions and how they balance family values with this changing technological world that we’re in.”
A third focus, Knight says, is on ownership and building ownership capabilities. He’s proud of the custom courses and workshops the ABFI has created on the topic, including an in-class succession planning workshop based on a real-life situation where a patriarch died suddenly. The case study includes a detailed timeline of how the family responded, which is shared with students to critique.
“So we have these students doing presentations on what the family should have done,” says Knight. “And we bring in family members or the CEO to actually engage with the students. So the person who made those decisions 15 years ago is sitting right there discussing it with them.”
After more than two decades of teaching, the ABFI has a reliably deep network of family business connections, but Knight says marketing education specifically for enterprising families can still be a challenge.
“A lot of my students say it’s one of their favourite classes,” says Knight, but attracting family members as students can be difficult. Knight says younger members often want to distance themselves from the family business, or think they should focus on specific, hard skills like accounting or finance.
Knight also describes a very Canadian-sounding problem: enterprising families often look in awe at family office structures, while not imagining they might need such a structure themselves. Or thinking they’ll get to it later.
For Knight, the work ultimately comes down to helping families think beyond the next quarter or even the next generation.
“A lot of these family businesses are so busy growing the business that they don’t necessarily think about growing the family,” he says.
“Strengthening governance, values and shared decision-making,” he adds, “can be just as important as expanding the business itself when the goal is long-term stewardship.”
Cindy McGlynn is a Toronto-based writer and editor who frequently writes about business, culture and the arts. In addition to holding communications roles at tech startups and writing for consumer and B2B publications, Cindy has edited two national magazines and served as a long-time columnist for the Toronto Star’s Eye Weekly magazine. She has been contributing to Canadian Family Offices for four years.
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