You're about to say yes to a job with no contract, at a company that's known your middle name since birth.

An invitation to join the family business may even arrive wrapped in flowery language instead of a job title: trust, loyalty, blood being thicker than water, etc. That framing can make a signed agreement feel like an insult to the relationship. Ask for the terms anyway and someone may call you ‘transactional’. Let them.

In this case, transactional is just another word for knowing what you’re worth, so hold your position. Price the role, get your scope of work in writing, and settle how it ends — all the same terms things you'd prioritize at any other company, negotiated in advance.

Read the Offer Like a Buy-In

The strategic risk you take before saying yes in poker has a name: the buy-in, what a player decides to put at risk before taking a seat — a personal number, rather than the one the table sets for everyone. Every player agrees to the same number together from the beginning. A family business rarely does — you're expected to take the seat first and find out what you signed up for later. Before you come aboard, ask for what you want upfront, be it your title, the hours you're about to put in, or the scope of your role.

PwC's latest Global Family Business Survey found that only 19% of family businesses have a formal way to resolve conflict when it shows up. Decide the terms before you sign on, and you're ahead of the game.

Negotiate Your Salary Before the Equity

A promise of future ownership in the business and a paycheck are two separate conversations, and most people let the first one stand in for the second without ever setting a number. Research the market rate for the role you’re stepping into, and calculate it the way you would anywhere else, before equity, an inheritance promise, or some future stake in the company ever comes up.

Say it this way: "I want my salary here to reflect the market rate for this role, independent of any future ownership — can we agree on that number first, separate from equity?" Get that figure in writing, then let the ownership conversation run on its own schedule.

Get Your Authority in Writing

A title tells other people where you sit in the org chart. It says nothing about which calls you get to make without someone else signing off first, and that's the piece an offer to join the family business leaves out more than any other. You can carry a director-level title at the company and still need a parent's signature on every vendor deal over a few hundred dollars, a limit nobody mentions until that first contract comes across your desk.

Before you take the title, get specific about what you can and can’t decide on your own. Try this: "If I were to accept this title, exactly which decisions can I make without needing a sign-off — can we write that down?" A decision list beats a job description every time: the job description describes the role everyone assumes you’ll grow into, and the decision list describes the one you’re walking into today.

Agree on the Exit Before You Need It

Every job that doesn't work out has an ending, usually negotiated in advance by an HR department before you're hired. A family business skips that part, because bringing up an exit before anything's gone wrong feels like jinxing it.

Talk through it while it costs nothing and emotions haven’t taken center stage. Say: "If this doesn't work out for either of us, I'd like us to agree now on how that looks, so we're not figuring it out in the middle of a conflict." An exit plan written down before you need it is the cheapest insurance either of you will buy.

Keep the Business Out of Dinner

A business decision made over dinner or any other family gathering is still a business decision. It just loses the paper trail, and shows up later as a fight about who's passing the potatoes.

Set the boundary before the first awkward moment happens. Say: "I'd like us to keep business decisions in a scheduled meeting, not at dinner — can we agree to that structure going in?" Most importantly, a standing meeting on the calendar keeps business and family time separate, meals included.

Put a Date on the Review

The job you agreed to on day one rarely looks the same six months in. Put a review on the calendar now, while everything’s still fresh.

Say: "Can we set up a meeting in six months to check in on whether this arrangement is still working for both of us?" Whatever's true by then, you'll both be looking at it on the same day, by design.

All you have to do now is make sure your poker face is ready for whenever they pull out “but we’re family.”