Owner Strategy

An Owner Strategy articulates a family business owner group’s shared financial and non-financial goals, the guardrails they want management to operate within, and their collective purpose for being in business as a family. Without a clear and communicated Owner Strategy, management and the board are left to guess at owner priorities, leading to misaligned decisions and avoidable conflict. Unlike business strategy (which focuses on how to compete in the market), Owner Strategy focuses on what owners want the business to do for them and how they want to make that decision together.

The Owner Strategy Triangle is BanyanGlobal’s tool for helping owner groups articulate their priorities across three dimensions: Growth (investing in the business to expand it), Liquidity (taking money out of the business), and Control (retaining family ownership and decision-making authority). Families cannot maximize for all three priorities at once; they must be willing to make trade-offs. The Triangle helps clarify those tradeoffs so the owner group is aligned on priorities. It is a starting point for the broader Owner Strategy process, not an end in itself.

An Owner Strategy Statement is a written document that captures the owner group’s shared purpose, goals, and guardrails for the business. It translates the outcomes of the Owner Strategy process into a clear reference point that owners, the board, and management can use to guide decisions. Creating one involves the full owner group working through questions such as: Why do we own this business together? What financial returns do we expect? What are our non-financial priorities? What decisions are off-limits without owner consent? BanyanGlobal facilitates this process and provides tools, including a step-by-step guide and companion toolkit, to help families create and communicate a statement that reflects genuine alignment, not just surface agreement.