Clarify first, then decide.

I come from management consulting. My work was to bring order to projects that had run aground. A board on one side, several suppliers on the other, a great deal of money in between — and nobody left at the table whom all parties believed. My task was then to set out the state of affairs honestly, to recalculate other people’s figures, to bring the parties back to one table and to build a path that everyone could carry in the end.

Today I am a director of an advisory firm for private equity houses based in London; before that I was with the Boston Consulting Group, most recently as a Principal. I studied in Münster, with certificate programmes in Washington and at the Wharton School. These are many years in the profession, and they taught me one thing above all.

I learned how disputes between parties arise — and that they are often about something other than money. About a promise made years ago and never kept. About the feeling of having been passed over. Mostly nobody says it out loud. Whoever negotiates only about the figure negotiates past the matter itself.

Several parties, one house, a figure nobody agrees on — and a history older than the occasion. That is the set-up I have worked in for many years. In families such mistakes weigh for longer than in companies, because afterwards nobody moves to another firm.

I negotiate calmly. I negotiated and concluded a contract with total costs of thirty million euros; on the other side sat one of the four large audit firms. I led the procurement for a project of one hundred and fifty million euros. In another project of the same order I fought off claims of more than ten million euros. A prospective buyer explaining at your kitchen table why your house is suddenly worth considerably less does not unsettle me. I know such conversations. And I do not sit beside you under pressure: for the clarification you pay a fixed fee, regardless of whether anything is sold in the end. How that is built is set out openly in our fees.

I check the figures. I drew up a business case of seventy-five million euros and examined other people’s numbers before decisions were taken on them. If somebody shows you that selling is cheaper than letting, I set the paths side by side: with maintenance, with the years still to come, and with the case that things turn out differently than planned. Precisely that comparison is the work behind the housing decision.

I keep order when nobody can see through it any more. I brought order to a project with more than two thousand participants in which nobody could still say what the state of things was. Deadlines, documents, responsibilities, open points — that is craft, and I have practice in it. In an inheritance case this craft is often half the relief already: everyone reads the same state of affairs, in the same wording, at the same time.

What is said in my conversations stays with me. It does not go to prospective buyers, not to neighbours, and not to family members who were not present.

Two limits I name to you unprompted, because you should know them before you tell me anything. First: an estate agent has no right to refuse testimony in court. Second: where money laundering is suspected, I am required by law to report it. Both I would rather say beforehand than afterwards — confidentiality whose limits you know is worth more than a promise that does not hold when it matters. What else you can hold us to is set out in writing in our code.

In consulting I saw how wealth is ground down between parties who are not really enemies. For companies that costs money. In families it stays.

Two experiences from that time brought me here. The first: a dispute almost always costs more than the matter being disputed. The second: whoever sets out the state of affairs honestly removes much of the ground a dispute stands on. Both hold at the conference table, and both hold at the kitchen table — except that at the kitchen table more is at stake than a balance sheet.

That is why I work for individual families rather than for companies, in the region where I am at home. And it is why I say openly when Wahrgut is not the right fit. An honest no is worth more to me than an engagement that helps nobody.