Family Enterprise Center at Kennesaw State University

The Family Enterprise Center sits in Kennesaw State University's Coles College of Business and was founded in 1987 by Craig Aronoff, which makes it one of the earliest university-based family business centres anywhere. Its founding idea, that family business owners learn most from each other, produced the Family Business Forum, an early peer group format that the centre still runs twice a year, and the Georgia Family Business of the Year awards, which it operated from 1992 to 2020. Later directors extended the work: Joseph Astrachan built an executive MBA curriculum for family enterprise leaders, and Gaia Marchisio added advisor workshops and a nine-month online programme for next-generation leaders. Membership today is sold in two tiers, both priced per business: Core at $1,000 a year for workshops, webinars, a speaker series, a resource library and educational discounts, and Signature at $2,500 for four Forum seats, monthly peer group membership, a Family Business Roadmap, more staff office hours, next-generation engagement and talent exchange. Peer groups are described as confidential, facilitated and monthly.

Hoe het werkt

A family business joins at one of two annual price points. Core membership provides open programming: workshops, webinars, a speaker series, the resource library, discounts on Kennesaw State education, open house tours of member businesses and three staff office-hours sessions. Signature membership adds the things that need places reserved: four seats at each of the twice-yearly Family Business Forums, monthly confidential facilitated peer groups, a Family Business Roadmap of expert-guided sessions, six office-hours sessions, and access to the NextGen student group and talent exchange. The centre asks prospective members to schedule a conversation before joining.

Typisch lid

Members are family businesses rather than individuals, at a range of sizes and stages; the centre notes that membership is expected to move between tiers as a business changes. The next-generation side reaches Kennesaw State students from family businesses through a student group and a talent exchange with member companies.

For $1,000 to $2,500 a year this is among the cheapest structured family business memberships available, and the tiering is honest about what the money buys: Core is access to open programming, Signature is where the peer group and the reserved Forum seats sit. The centre's research and executive education lineage is genuinely deep (the Family Business Forum format and the Georgia awards were early enough to have shaped how other centres were built) but the current public materials are thin on operational detail. Peer group size, facilitator background, Forum agendas and the Family Business Roadmap are all described in general terms with no figures, and member counts are not published. The Georgia awards ended in 2020 and have not visibly been replaced. Anyone tracking the organisation should also note the name: current pages say Family Enterprise Center, older material and the university calendar still say Cox.

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