Episode angles
Six conversations your listeners will remember
Each topic works as a standalone conversation or can be shaped to fit your audience. Peter brings original thinking, real stories, and no rehearsed answers.
01
The Hardest Goodbye: Why Selling the Family Business Is Never Just About the Money
Selling a five-year-old car recently left Peter with an unexpected pang of grief, a small moment that opens into a bigger truth about family business sales. The hardest decisions are rarely the ones where the answer is unclear; they're the ones where the answer is obvious, but letting go still hurts. Peter draws on decades of advising families through real sales to unpack the conversations that determine whether a sale leaves a family intact or fractured.
02
What the Label Doesn't Tell You: The Conversations Family Businesses Avoid
Peter once sent his brother a holiday photo of a San Miguel, certain he was drinking a Spanish beer, only to learn the brand was founded in the Philippines, and the can itself was brewed in Northampton. A small discovery that became a way of talking about something much bigger: the gap between the story a family tells about itself and what's actually happening underneath. Peter brings real, anonymised patterns from decades of advisory work on why these conversations get avoided, and what finally makes them possible.
03
The Most Expensive Word in Family Business: Why “Understood” Isn't a Plan
Watching the sun rise over a fallow field one winter morning, Peter found himself reflecting on how easily we mistake quiet for safety. Succession works the same way: present, assumed, never quite formalised, until waiting becomes its own kind of decision. Drawing on nearly fifty years of advisory experience, Peter explains why the word ‘understood’ does more damage in family businesses than almost any other, and what it actually takes to start the conversation years before it's forced.
04
Checking the Foundations: What Centuries-Old Buildings Teach Us About Family Conflict
A recent first visit to Lichfield Cathedral, despite living nearby for years, taught Peter something about family conflict. Besieged three times during the English Civil War, its spire destroyed and its roof ruined, the cathedral still stands because the foundations held throughout two centuries of restoration. Peter uses this as a way into one of the most common patterns he sees in family businesses: conflicts resolved on the surface that reappear in a different shape, because nobody went back down to check what was underneath.
05
The Day They Told Me to Relax: What Successful Leadership Handover Actually Feels Like
A holiday photo of Peter and his wife, relaxed in the sun, was sent because the next generation had told them, firmly, to clear off and take a proper break. A small moment that captures something most transition plans miss: the lightness that comes when trust has genuinely been earned, in both directions. Peter unpacks why so many founders resist stepping back even when they want to, and what actually has to happen, often over years, before a parent can hear ‘we've got this’ and believe it.
06
Rooted, Not Hovering: Rethinking What Governance Really Means for a Family Business
An ancient olive tree outside a holiday apartment, far older than the buildings around it, stands quietly over a children's play area: rooted, steady, watching without interfering, never needing to be in the middle of the game to matter. Peter uses the image to explain the two failure modes he sees constantly in family business governance: no structure at all, or structure that has wandered into every operational decision, and what genuinely good governance looks like in between.
