I didn't just learn about family business from a textbook:
I live it
About Mairi: A lifetime
of business family experience
Sometimes, the boardroom and the dinner table are one and the same - something I often witnessed firsthand in the board room of my family’s 4th generation business.
Growing up in a business family helped me understand from an early age - intuitively at first, intellectually as I grew up - that the people you love the most can also be the very people you disagree with on deeply personal or fundamental levels.
Those formative years showed me that pride, pressure, joy & grief can all exist in the same conversation, and it helped me develop a profound empathy for the people who are part of a business family.
And that empathy - the lived experience - is the foundation of everything I do. It's why enterprising families trust me with their most complex, most personal, most consequential decisions about their futures together
Not just because I've studied their situation from the outside or because I’m a faculty member of the Family Firm Institute - but because I've stood where they're standing:
Placed right in the middle of a complex family business system.
When I say The Mickel Practice, I mean it
The work I do is a practice much in the same way a doctor or a lawyer has a practice: serious, professional, and rigorous.
The Mickel Practice is a place where expertise meets trust, and where the work is never taken lightly.
And, it's a practice in the way a craft is practised: continuously honed over one and a half decades of advisory work and a lifetime of personal experience.
Not a product and not a package, but something that has been shaped, tested, practiced and refined through real work with real families.
And it's a practice in the sense of stewardship: Business families entrust me with that what matters: their relationships, their legacy, their business and their future.
I sit at the edge of your family system, challenging, supporting and conserving it, and I allocate a very large amount of mental real estate to your family.
Finally:
My job isn’t to walk ahead of you, knowing it all, telling you where to step:
It’s to walk beside you as your trusted guide, throughout the work & the process, so that you find your own footing and direction.
What makes me different
When you work with The Mickel Practice, you work with me, Mairi.
Sometimes I’ll bring in a trusted colleague for parts of the work that’s outside of my technical expertise, orchestrating a team specific to your needs.
You won’t be passed on to a sidekick or to a junior who has been briefed on your situation, carrying a standard project binder under their arm with your company logo stuck to it.
You get me, with my attention, my full experience, and my genuine care for your family's outcome.
There are perhaps two or three people in the UK doing this work at this level - and I don't say that to impress you: it’s because you deserve to know what you're accessing, and how rare it is.
The combination of my lived experience inside a family business; over 15 years of professional advisory work; a lead educator in this emerging field, and a genuine understanding of the human complexity involved - and none of this work can be replicated at scale or handed over to others.
That’s why working with me, you don’t get a methodology: you get a person, eg the owner of the Practice.
I use my generational view to work on prevention, addressing inconsistencies and better managing unintended consequences, not crisis management.
Which means I only work with forward-thinking people, because by the time most families reach out for help, things are often already difficult, or contentious, or worse.
Instead, I’m the one to call early on:
When the future might feel uncertain, and there is a need for change, but there’s still love in the room, and relationships are still strong enough to build on.
If that's where you are, we should talk.
