One-to-one interview
The starting point: each person is heard alone. What is said stays between us.
Build governance that brings people together around a shared project.
Companies, shareholders, entrepreneurial families, executives and boards of directors come to us to strike the balances that let them decide together and secure the company’s future.
Our clients remain confidential, as does our work.
Since 2014 we have supported a great many companies and families. The trust between us is something we keep up over time.
Board evaluations for family-controlled companies listed on the SBF 120.
Our mission
Building alignment, organising decision-making, supporting the company’s development.
A succession, new shareholders, a change of leadership or a board that evolves can redraw roles and balances. Views diverge, responsibilities blur and decisions become harder to reach. Behind difficulties that look legal, organisational or personal there is often a governance question.
We bring the different points of view together, draw out what must remain shared, then translate that alignment into roles, powers, bodies and rules that move the project forward and make decisions easier to take.
Listen to every point of view and compare them, to find what supports the project and what holds it back. We hold individual, confidential interviews with shareholders, executives, directors and family members. From them we draw a shared reading, without ever attributing a remark to the person who made it.
Listening
We begin by listening: individual, confidential interviews with the shareholders, the executives, the directors and, in a family business, members of each generation. The result is a map of the collective issues that separates the real sticking points from their symptoms. We share it with you without ever attributing a remark to the person who made it.
Vision
Until the shareholders are aligned, the direction stays unclear and no decision holds for long. We run the working sessions that bring out what you must hold in common — the ambition, the time horizon — and also what each of you accepts not to share. What is agreed is recorded in your own words; what remains open is named as such.
Strategy
The vision becomes a roadmap: priorities, roles, timelines, and who decides what, at which level. We work with you to clarify how responsibilities are divided between the shareholders, management and the board, and we identify the questions to be settled before going further. Everyone finds their place and tensions ease, because they stop being personal.
Governance
Board, committees, charter, board charter, mandates, the calendar of meetings. We draft the reference documents with you: your legal advisers make sure they are sound, and we make sure they are owned by the people who apply them. Then we review them regularly so that they can evolve. An architecture that allows decisions to be made without drama, and that outlives the people who built it.
How do we work?
A partnership made to measure, and made to last.
Every tool for building governance together, from an informal conversation to a board charter or a family charter. We work in pairs, combining diverse profiles, complementary expertise and seniority.
Group workshop
Around the table, the views we have gathered become shared rules.
Messages
Between meetings, a direct line — WhatsApp, email, a question, an answer, no formality.
System & strategy
Family, shareholders, business: one system to read before setting a course.
Documents
Charters, agreements, rules: short texts, written to last.
Why Associés en Gouvernance?
People above all. Nothing replaces lived experience.
Two complementary perspectives, one shared responsibility, and a partner present at every key moment.
Confidentiality protects the situations entrusted to us, and is what makes the real conversations possible.
Questions you may have.
How long does an engagement last?
Governance cannot be decreed in a single workshop: it takes shape one decision at a time.
Do you work with the family, the business, or both?
Both, always. Keeping the two conversations apart is precisely what creates the tensions we are called to resolve.
What happens in the individual interviews?
A confidential conversation with no hidden agenda. Nothing said is ever attributed to the person who said it: only the shared findings leave the room.
Do you publish references?
No. Discretion is the condition of our work. Our clients may talk about us; we do not talk about them.
When should we call you?
Earlier than you think. A succession is prepared years before it becomes urgent.