Private Advisory Protecting
the Relationships That Matter Most
When the Stakes Are High
For those navigating succession, leadership transition, and relational complexity in business, on the land, and in organisations where the stakes are high.
of multi-generational business and farm transfers fail not because of poor tax planning or flawed legal structures, but because of a breakdown in family trust and communication.
Your legal team has protected the estate. Your accountant has structured the transition. Your governance documents are in order. But the relationship at the centre of your family and enterprise the trust between founders, the alignment between generations, the communication that makes a technically perfect succession plan actually executable that remains the most valuable and least protected asset you own.
In high-stakes transitions, relational misalignment is not a soft issue. It is a material risk.
That is the gap we work in.
Grant and Christine Wattie
Between us we bring more than forty years of working life across financial services, software, and leadership development. We have built and sold businesses. We have navigated everything that comes with them: tax disputes, legal battles, financial pressure, grief, health crises, family conflict. We have not read about these things. We have lived them.
We have also spent twenty years in professional practice, working with more than five thousand couples and families from farming operations and family businesses to some of the most complex leadership and succession situations in the Asia-Pacific region.
Most people who do what we do have come from one direction either the therapeutic world or the business world. We have come from both. We understand what it means to carry a business and a family simultaneously, because we have done it.
Over time, this work has given us a pattern-recognition advantage. We are often able to see within hours what families have been living with for years the unspoken dynamics that determine whether a technically sound plan will hold.
You work directly with Grant and Christine. Not a junior associate. Not a delegated team member. Every engagement, every conversation.
The Story Behind the Work
In 1999 we were standing in a Malaysian palace at the peak of careers that had taken us to some of the most powerful rooms in the world. I asked the king whether he was happy. He looked at the palace walls and said: No. This palace is like a prison.
A week later I was with a man who would become Prime Minister. Same question. Same answer he would be happier if he was as wealthy as the Sultan.
I looked at the watch on my wrist proof we had made it and it felt like a shackle.
We had spent years trading family for achievement. Not dramatically. Just the ordinary accumulation of choices that business owners make the trip that could not wait, the deal that mattered more, the presence that got deferred. We were successful by every measure the world uses to keep score. And we were quietly losing what actually mattered.
I came home. My daughter Rachel was seven. Back seat of the car. Five words:
I heard it. I knew she was right. And I got on another plane.
Eighteen months later, Christine packed her bags. Not as a threat. As a fact. She was done. I sold the business not as a gesture, but as an admission.
What followed was the hardest and most important work of our lives. Rebuilding trust that had eroded through years of absence not by talking about it, but by earning it back slowly.
We learned that trust does not collapse suddenly. It erodes in the small moments the conversation that does not happen, the need that goes unacknowledged, the distance that becomes normal. And it rebuilds the same way. Slowly. When someone shows up differently than they have before.
We teach it because we lived it. And the single most consistent thing we hear from the couples and families we work with is: we wished we had done this sooner.
We are not experts who studied this from a distance. We are two people who nearly lost everything to it and found the way back.
And we know the way home.
Who We Work With
Our clients come to us when traditional approaches feel inadequate for the complexity they are carrying and when the stakes are too high for anything less than genuine transformation.
Couples in Business Together
Two people who built something together and somewhere along the way stopped being a couple. They make decisions all day and come home to silence. The business looks fine. The partnership underneath it is quietly failing.
Families in Succession and Transition
Where the succession plan is technically in place and the relationships it depends on are not. Where the plan is correct on paper and relationally impossible to execute.
Farming and Primary Industry Families
Where the land, the business, and the family are inseparable. Where decades of unspoken expectation sit beneath conversations that have never happened.
Founders and Business Leaders
Whose professional performance is masking the cost at home. Who are winning by every external measure and quietly losing what matters most.
Second Marriages
Blending significant assets, families, and competing expectations. Where the complexity of wealth and the complexity of family dynamics intersect.
Next Generation Leaders
Preparing the rising generation not merely to receive assets but to lead with the relational maturity and communication capacity that multi-generational stewardship requires.
Common Presenting Situations
- Our relationship is affecting the business and we cannot separate the two.
- We are considering separation, but the implications for the business are enormous.
- There has been an affair. We need this handled quickly and privately.
- The farm has been in the family for generations. We cannot agree on who leads.
- The succession plan is in place. But the family cannot execute it together.
- My position means traditional counselling is not an option.
- My children are about to inherit everything I have built. I am not sure they are ready.
Three Areas of Practice
We work at the level of trust, presence, and the quality of relationship between the people who matter most. When that shifts, everything else follows.
The Founder Partnership
The relationship between the founding couple is the operating system of the family enterprise. When it is under strain through sustained pressure, an affair, years of managed distance, or a divorce that would reshape everything every decision made beneath it is affected.
For acute situations we work intensively. Genuine transformation in days and weeks where time is the defining constraint.
Intensive engagement availableFamily Enterprise Advisory
We protect family unity during succession and transition. Working alongside your legal and financial advisors, we address what they cannot reach: the trust between founders and heirs, communication that has broken down around succession, and the sibling dynamics that make shared ownership either a foundation or a fracture point.
We prepare the rising generation not merely to receive assets, but to lead.
Leadership Advisory
Retained one-on-one advisory for founders and senior leaders navigating the gap between professional performance and what it is costing them personally.
For the leader who has built something significant and is beginning to understand what it has cost.
Strong self-leadership creates strong partnerships . Strong partnerships create strong families . Strong families create lasting legacies
Why Clients Choose Us
Direct Access
You work with Grant and Christine. Every session. Every conversation. Every engagement. We do not scale with junior consultants. We do not dilute quality for volume.
Speed
When a relationship breakdown is threatening a succession event or business continuity, months of weekly sessions is not viable. We work intensively when the situation requires it.
Privacy
Discretion is not a feature of our service it is foundational to it. Our clients situations never become our stories.
Pattern Recognition
Twenty years of practice across thousands of families has given us a diagnostic advantage. We are often able to see within hours what families have been living with for years.
The Space Between
No other practice operates precisely where we do at the intersection of relationship transformation and enterprise continuity.
Lived Experience
We have built businesses, navigated succession, and rebuilt our own marriage from near-collapse. We understand what your clients are carrying because we have carried it ourselves.
What we are not.
We are not estate planners, financial advisors, investment managers, or family governance consultants running large facilitated meetings. We work alongside your existing advisors in the one area they cannot reach the relationship at the centre of your family and enterprise.
We came in crisis. Within days, something shifted that years of other approaches had never reached. They work at a level I did not know existed.Business Owner, Australia
Grant and Christine gave us our marriage back. We were close to a decision that would have cost our family everything. We are more aligned now than we have been in twenty years.Founder and Spouse, New Zealand
Working with Grant changed how I lead at home and in the business. I did not realise how much I was performing instead of actually being present.Managing Director, New Zealand
Every Engagement Begins With a Conversation
Every engagement begins with a private advisory conversation. Our work typically unfolds in three stages though no two families are the same.
Situational Clarity
Conversations with key individuals to understand what is operating beneath the surface. The purpose of this phase is not diagnosis. It is discernment.
Structural Stabilisation
Where relational strain is threatening business continuity or succession, we act directly. This may involve intensive work with a founding couple or facilitated conversations between generations.
Strategic Alignment
Once stability is restored, we help families and leaders align around the future. We do not replace your advisors. We ensure the human system beneath their work can sustain it.
A note on structure. We do not offer programmes or predefined packages. Each engagement is shaped around the specific situation. We work with a limited number of families at any time. Depth matters more than volume.
Start With a Conversation
We work with a small number of clients at any one time. That is by design not by constraint. If you are considering reaching out, the first conversation is private, direct, and without obligation.
The situations that bring people to us rarely improve with time.
Havelock North, New Zealand . Serving clients across New Zealand, Australia and the Asia-Pacific region
With Aroha,
Grant and Christine Wattie