Take the Long-Term View How can you ensure your family’s long-term success? Our framework will help you transition from a business-centric to a family-centric enterprise.
Successful owners who choose to sell their business have many things to think about before beginning the process. Owners who are new to the process should consider not only the financial ramifications of selling their business but also how it can affect their life after the sale has finished. To make the selling of a profitable business much smoother, there are five things to consider. First, it begins with the question: What financial means do I need to support my current lifestyle?
Explore the good, the bad, and the ugly around succession and generational transitions of power and control within families of wealth. Hear from one Gen 7 family on their recent generational succession, what prompted the transition, and how they navigated the practical and emotional challenges.Nate Imfeld, Attorney, Foley & Lardner, LLPTorri Hawley, Windway Capital, NextGen
Traditionally, wealth advisors use a succession planning framework that involves working with the founders to look downstream to the next generation for an effective “passing of the baton” strategy. In contrast, a multi-generational approach encourages each person within the family system to contemplate and share with others where they’ve come from, what they’ve come with, what they wish to pass on, and what they wish to leave behind.
Succession is not just about money or property. It means confronting family relationships and taking the time to make sure that the drivers for succession planning connect personal motivations, the purpose of wealth, and specific family issues. It requires an emotional commitment to a process that once started must run its course, including having conversations about fairness, equity, choices about who is in “the family,” and their capabilities for current and future roles.
A high-quality board of directors with a range of talents and experience can be a powerful resource for your company. Taking steps to ensure your board is well-designed, well-informed, and properly engaged will reap significant benefits for your company’s shareholders and management team.
A new FOX study, “Capturing Opportunity and Managing Risk in the Next Decade,” is now available for members who are interested in taking a proactive approach to risk management across the enterprise. Complexity and risk are inevitable consequences of building and perpetuating wealth. Therefore, the issue at stake for families of wealth is not risk avoidance, but rather, risk management. Well-managed risk presents opportunities, but it takes a team operating as trusted partners to sort through the range of risks, helping families make the best decisions.
Major disruptions to the normal course of business are heading our way, and enterprise families will be uniquely challenged by unforeseen risks and opportunities. As trusted advisors to ultra-wealthy families and enterprises, our industry needs to understand how to have effective conversations to prepare clients for these looming disruptions. To address these challenges, FOX embarked on its 2019 Opportunities and Risk Study.
FOX Foresight keeps members up to date on the latest thinking on matters that affect enterprise families. It summarizes what we have been learning from our members and our subject matter experts over the last year. Please share it broadly within your family, your office, and your advisors.FOX Foresight is presented in 7 chapters:
Family Enterprises face an increasingly uncertain and risky world owing to developments in the economy, geopolitics, financial markets, technology, and industry competition.