How I Help
As a family business succession and governance advisor, I work with family business owners, founders, and multigenerational enterprises across Trinidad and Tobago, the wider Caribbean, and the diaspora including the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. My clients are usually facing one of the moments every family business eventually faces — a leadership transition, an estate that needs proper structuring, a governance gap that’s starting to show, or a dispute that threatens both the business and the family. Legacy work has two sides — building the structure, and resolving what breaks it. I lead both practices so families and founders have one point of contact who understands the whole picture.
How a Family Business Succession & Governance Advisor Can Help
My work runs through two practices, so you have one advisor who sees both the legal architecture of a family business and the disputes that can threaten it.
Mankee Advisory
Estate planning, succession, and family business governance — the architecture side of legacy work.
- Succession and leadership transition planning
- Estate planning, wills, and trust structuring
- Family governance structures and family constitutions
- Ownership and shareholder structuring, including buy-sell agreements
- Asset protection planning, including nuptial and cohabitation agreements and ring fencing mechanisms
- Business continuity and disruption planning
CariCounsel
Dispute resolution for when something has already broken and needs repair, and for the cross-border complexity that comes with an international family.
- Mediation and arbitration
- Probate and estate disputes
- Shareholder and partner disputes
- Family business conflict resolution
- Commercial dispute resolution
- International trust and estate administration for STEP members and UK solicitors and their private clients— resealing of grants of probate, advice on foreign wills, and cross-border estate matters
Three proprietary frameworks, developed from my own practice and research, sit behind everything above.
The frameworks behind the work — The LEGACY EcosystemTM
The Seven Domains are the recurring, predictable events every family business will eventually face: Death (estate and succession planning), Duration (the business’s life cycle and governance needs), Departure (leadership and ownership exit), Disruption (risk, crisis, and innovation), Disputes (communication and conflict), Divorce (partnership breakdown and asset protection), and Debilitation (health and wellbeing). Families that prepare for these Domains in advance are far more likely to survive them intact — both as a business and as a family.
The Legacy DNA is the simplified core sequence underneath that preparation — six essential strands every family legacy is built on: Leadership, Equity, Governance, Alignment, Communication, and You. It’s the plain-language starting point for understanding what’s structurally at stake in a family enterprise, before going any deeper.
The Legacy Matrix goes a layer deeper. It’s an assessment framework built around six capability areas — Leadership transition, Equity and ownership planning, Governance and growth, Alignment and advisory readiness, Communication and culture, and Your wellbeing — that maps exactly where a family business stands today and where the gaps are before they become crises. Rather than generic advice, it gives a family a clear, evidenced picture of their own readiness.
Together, the Seven Domains, the Legacy DNA, and the Legacy Matrix make up the Legacy Ecosystem — one integrated methodology for understanding, assessing, and building a multigenerational legacy.
How we work together
Here is what working with Ria as your family business succession & governance advisor typically looks like, step by step.
- Discovery call/Inquiry — a brief, no-obligation conversation or message about your situation, by phone, email, WhatsApp, or the contact form
- Family Business Consultation — the initial client conversation, held in person or virtually, to explore your situation in depth and decide whether this is the right fit
- Assessment — mapping your family business against the Seven Domains and the Legacy Matrix
- Engagement — a tailored plan of legal, governance, or dispute-resolution work
- Implementation — putting the structures, documents, and agreements in place
- Ongoing governance — legacy work isn’t a one-time event; most families return periodically as circumstances change
“The first time we saw the LEGACY ECOSYSTEM, we knew we really underestimated the amount of grey area that we overlooked. It is an on-going process, but we feel more secure having the expertise to help us work through the challenges in our business and in our family.”
First-generation family business transitioning to the second generation
Whether you need a family business succession advisor for a single transition or an ongoing advisory relationship, I’m here to help you plan for it properly.