Barbara Dartt

Barbara Dartt is a Principal Consultant for The Family Business Consulting Group, assisting businesses with succession strategies, long-term planning, management transitions and family governance implementation, as well as other opportunities and challenges unique to family-owned businesses. Her experience in helping businesses navigate systems, create structure, and formalize strategic roles brings clarity to her clients’ organizational development needs. Barb brings expansive skills to the areas of strategic design and planning, work group and council formations, and people development for complex generational transitions. Barb’s path into family business consulting is based in very traditional roots. Growing up, she watched her grandfather and father provide educational Extension services to family-owned farms. Her interest in serving farm families led her to study veterinary medicine, earning her doctoral degree from Michigan State University in 1996. In 1998, Barb earned a Master’s Degree in Agricultural Economics at MSU where she worked as a graduate research assistant, then as a Farm Business Management Specialist. She continued her family legacy as a third-generation Extension agent working closely with family farms to enhance their business practices, develop management skills and identify growth opportunities. Drawing from her strengths as a financial and project management advisor, Barb focused her career on supporting the distinctive needs of family business entrepreneurs as a senior business consultant for Salisbury Management Services (later named Lookout Ridge Consulting) in 2001. She later became a founding partner of GROW, a family business advisory firm and also helped create familybusiness.ag, a peer network of family business mentors working within the agricultural industry. In 2014, Barb joined FBCG to leverage her extensive advising experience to work with family enterprises across industries. According to a client, “Without Barb’s help, we wouldn’t have made the progress much needed on our decision making and family relationships.” She earned the Advanced Certificate in Family Business Advising from the Family Firm Institute in 2014. Barb previously served as a director and is past-president of the Michigan FFA Foundation board of directors.