Family Firm Institute (FFI)

The Family Firm Institute is a Boston-based 501(c)(3) professional association for the family enterprise field. It was incorporated in 1986 by 22 founding members drawn from the then-new multidisciplinary study of family business, and its distinctive contribution has been infrastructure for the discipline rather than networking for owners: it owns Family Business Review, the field's first peer-reviewed journal, now published by SAGE, and publishes the practitioner-facing FFI Practitioner. Since 2000 it has run the FFI Global Education Network, which awards online certificates in Family Business Advising and Family Wealth Advising. Membership is open rather than selective and is priced by category: individual professional and family enterprise members pay the same rate, with reduced rates for educators, researchers and students, and organisational memberships banded by the number of people covered. Members get the journal archive, member directories, virtual study groups and discounted conference registration. The annual Global Conference is the main in-person gathering; the 2026 edition is set for New York in late October.

Cách thức hoạt động

Members join by category and pay a flat annual fee — individual, educator/researcher, student, or an organisational membership banded by how many people it covers. Membership provides the Family Business Review archive, member directories, virtual study groups and discounted access to the annual Global Conference. Certificate education runs separately through the FFI Global Education Network, which awards certificates in family business advising and family wealth advising and is priced apart from dues.

Thành viên điển hình

The core membership is professional: lawyers, accountants, wealth managers, family business consultants, psychologists and academics working with family firms and family wealth. FFI also admits family enterprise members, educators and researchers, and students, and sells organisational memberships to advisory firms, universities and associations priced by headcount.

FFI is best understood as the professional body of the family enterprise advisory field, not as a network for wealthy families. Advisers are the centre of gravity; families can join, and pay the same individual rate, but the programming is oriented toward practice standards, research and credentialing. That makes it complementary to FBN or the Institute for Family Business rather than a competitor. Pricing is fully published and modest by the standards of this sector, and there is no vetting beyond choosing the right category — so it carries none of the exclusivity of an invitation-only network. The main gap in the public record is scale: FFI does not publish a member or country count anywhere on its own site, and the widely repeated "nearly 2,000 members in more than 80 countries" traces to secondary sources rather than FFI itself. Anyone weighing the certificates should note they are priced separately from membership.

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