AI for a family business, tested on one job your longest-serving people know best.

Owners, successors and sellers. This page is for three people in the same kind of company: the owner who still runs it, the next generation stepping in, and the owner preparing a sale. The Census Bureau's Annual Business Survey asks whether two or more members of one family own the majority of a business, and counts spouses, unmarried partners, parents, children, siblings and close relatives as family. Its list of reasons for owning a business includes wanting to carry on the family business. A founder who owns the company alone has the same kind of back office, so the page is written for them too.

The know-how sits with a few long-serving people. The bookkeeper who knows which job every vendor bills against. The estimator who prices from memory. The order desk lead who can read any customer's PO. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in September 2026 that median tenure for workers aged 55 to 64 is more than three times that of workers aged 25 to 34, so the person who knows a job best has often been there longest and may be the next to retire. The accounting firm Mauldin & Jenkins writes that family businesses often rely heavily on one individual, and that a casual style favoring gut instinct and trust over written policies can leave internal controls weak.

A succession runs for years. Ritch Sorenson, who holds the Opus endowed chair in family business at the University of St. Thomas, told FamilyBusiness.org that the rule of thumb is at least ten years to plan for succession. Ownership, leadership and the family's own decisions belong with your advisers. A desk job is a smaller question with an answer you can check: a test on one of them shows how much of it can be drafted from past work, while the person who knows it is still there to judge.

A buyer rewrites the family's numbers. In a sale, the buyer's quality of earnings review recasts the company's earnings. The Bonadio Group lists family members on the payroll who don't work for the company among the costs it takes out of adjusted EBITDA, restates the owner's pay to the market rate for the role, and adjusts rent paid to an owner's property company as if it had been paid at arm's length. We do none of that work. Those adjustments are one reason a buyer asks which family members actually work in the business, and what each of them does.

Key people get a close look. In an article on the National Law Review, S. Graham Simmons III of Norris McLaughlin says buyers look closely at all key employees, especially those related to the owner, and ask whether they are critical to running the business, whether they are legacy hires and whether they will stay after the sale. A job only one person can do will come up in that conversation. A test can't settle it, but it gives the owner a scored answer, early and in private, on whether one such job can be drafted from the documents it leaves behind.

What they know is the answer key. Your reviewer lays our drafts beside what they and the team actually did on the same documents. When a draft misses something only they would catch, such as a customer's habit or a vendor that always bills to the wrong job, it shows up as a miss on the scorecard. They don't have to write anything down first; their past work is the test.

Built around them, not instead of them. The test only drafts. If it passes and the job goes live, a person approves every item before it posts anywhere, and the natural choice for that is the person who judged the test. Nothing in it asks you to change who does the work or how long they stay.

The circle stays small. Some owners would rather keep a test between a few people until there is something to decide. Because it runs on copies and needs no logins, it can stay between the owner, the reviewer and us, under an NDA signed before any document moves. If the documents can't leave the building, we build look-alikes with the reviewer instead.