ConForm / About
Who We Are

Two experts. One shared passion.

We help enterprising families navigate the interface of family and business. Since 2001, across Europe and beyond.

The Partners

Equal partners, complementary practice.

Two distinct backgrounds, one shared discipline of listening to families before advising them. The work moves between coaching, mediation, governance and ownership architecture, depending on what the family needs.

Dr. Sabine B. Rau, founding partner of ConForm Enterprising Families
Portrait / 01
Founding Partner

Dr. Sabine B. Rau

Dr. rer. pol. / Dipl. Kfm. / FCM Finance Coach

Sabine Rau is founding partner of ConForm Enterprising Families in Berlin, Germany. Coming from a business family, her passion is to help enterprising families to better navigate the interface of family and business and to successfully stay together over generations. Since 2001 she has helped enterprising families develop their charters, manage succession, and develop their next generation in Europe and around the world. Sabine is trained as finance coach at FCM Wiesbaden and the 2025 Laureate of the Barbara-Hollender-Award of FFI for her dedication to education and learning, to social causes, civic responsibility, and her belief in the human capacity to change for the better.

Until the beginning of 2017, Sabine was Professor of Entrepreneurship at King's College London. She holds visiting professorships at ESMT Berlin and the University of Ottawa, Canada, and serves on several boards as independent director, including the Sacher Group from Austria and Stiftung Louisenlund in Germany.

Sabine has published in journals such as Strategic Management Journal, Family Business Review, Journal of Business Research, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Small Business Economics, and Entrepreneurship and Regional Development. She wrote one of the first textbooks on family business, now in its third edition. Recently, together with Peter Jaskiewicz, she published "Enabling next generation legacies: 35 questions that next generation members in enterprising families ask".

Karin May, partner of ConForm Enterprising Families
Portrait / 02
Partner

Karin May

Lawyer / Mediator / Systemic Coach

Karin May is partner of ConForm Enterprising Families. She has accompanied well-known large and medium-sized family businesses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland over the last fifteen years. Since 2022 Karin May is part of Business Family House in Saudi Arabia, where she is also accompanying family business processes.

Karin May works as a coach helping coachees find their role in business and family, especially in succession processes. Her passion is developing concepts with coachees who want to fulfil their own aspirations in business, also in international contexts. Combining family and career is a topic very familiar to her, especially the different expectations of family and business systems. She is aware of cultural differences and finds it particularly exciting and important to incorporate these into her work.

Karin May's focus is also on co-creating family charters together with the family members, as well as on mediation, coaching and mentoring. Due to her dual qualification in legal and systemic questions, Karin May concentrates on facilitating orientation and decision-making processes, both in finding solutions to conflicts and in assisting business-owning families develop concepts. Throughout the process the family members also learn about their interaction and how to improve communication.

From 2011 to 2013, Karin was Managing Director of the INTES Family Business Academy. For years, she helped shape important events such as the FBN Global Summit in Berlin in 2007 and the Unternehmer-Erfolgsforum.

Credentials and track record

Stability
Since 2001
A quarter-century of practice at the interface of family, ownership and enterprise.
Reach
3 Continents
Mandates across Europe, the Middle East and North America.
Excellence
Award-winning
2025 Barbara-Hollender-Award of the Family Firm Institute.

Your family members, especially those of the next generation, must bring the jointly agreed-upon processes and structures to life. That is why it is crucial that they are actively involved in developing them.

Dr. Sabine B. Rau
Dr. Sabine B. Rau Founding Partner / ConForm Enterprising Families
Get in touch

Let's talk about your family's future.

Whether you are preparing for succession, shaping ownership for the next generation, or drafting a charter that will outlast you, we are here to listen first.

Write to us
Email s.rau@cfefamilies.com
Office Berlin, Germany