Mr Jon D Kenfield

Jon Kenfield (1954 - ) grew up in London, England. He gained an honours degree in law from the University of Manchester and post graduate teaching qualifications in English and drama from Exeter University. After getting his formal education out of the way Jon started on the real stuff with a spell working in the Middle East as a scuba diving instructor and safari guide on the Red Sea coast, south of Eilat. He returned to London and spent a year setting up worldwide adventure travel programs to mountains; wildlife and game parks and scuba diving sites. This was followed with a year working as an inspection diver and underwater photographer on the oil rigs of the North and Java Seas.

Having mucked around for too long he found he couldn't sensibly get back into law in the UK so, after much soul-searching, he started a serious career as a chartered accountant. Surprising everyone, he qualified in the fastest possible time and then left for Africa to do something exotic with his new qualifications. After a couple of years, with wife Sara and 1.6666 children in tow, he migrated to Perth in Western Australia, where he established Deloitte's forensic accounting division. It was in Perth that Jon began studying and practising dispute resolution: both arbitration and mediation.

In the early 1990s Deloitte moved Jon to Melbourne, Australia, to grow the forensic practice into a national operation. Realising that his professional passion lay more in problem solving and mediation than technical accounting, Jon set up his own consultancy: Dispute Solutions, which is still operating, almost 20 years later. After awhile Jon found himself being drawn into more and more family business disputes and other situations, particularly in areas where other advisers seemed to fear to tread. He rapidly became one of Australia's leading family business advisers (easy to do when there's hardly anyone else in the field at the time!).

In 2004 Jon reinvented himself as a "Solutionist" to reflect the essence of his work, which had become heavily focussed on families in business, their challenges and conflicts, and best practice needs. It's the lessons learnt through this work that is captured in the 360 pages of: "The Solutionist Guide to Family Business" - widely recognised as the definitive Australian text on managing and advising family businesses.

Jon has a website dedicated to his work with family businesses at: www.fambizstrategies.com