The past year challenged families to react to adverse trends to protect their enterprise and build capabilities to achieve their vision. The journey from uncertainty to impact requires an elevated enterprise mindset and determination to persevere throughout the four-stage evolution to position the family enterprise for long-term success and positive community impact.
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When Governance Grows Beyond a Family Business: Defining the Enterprise Governance Process
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Enterprise families are unique because they share ownership and stewardship of more than just family businesses. In addition to co-owning operating companies, they are the guardians of family legacy, family trusts, shared philanthropy, and joint properties. As leadership moves from founders to siblings to cousins and family priorities change, the decision-making structures must evolve to stay relevant.
At some point, your family wealth may be so complex, or a significant transition happens that starts a process to form an independent family office outside of the business. Whatever the reason, separating family wealth management from the business should be considered an evolutionary process and starts with your family gaining consensus to establish an independent office or use outside partners.
Family wealth preservation is not guaranteed simply by effectively managing a family’s wealth. The most successful multigenerational families all share five key attributes. FOX Foresight keeps you up to date on our latest thinking about matters affecting Enterprise Families. It gives you our forward look on what we're learning from our members and subject matter experts. Please share it broadly with your family, your office, and your advisors
Families are becoming more complex, but a shared family vision and strategy are becoming easier to define. Business-centric families are becoming enterprise-centric and risk assessment is more sophisticated. Having impact in the future will require new strategies and new ways of thinking. The Family Office of old will need to make substantial adjustments to stay relevant in the coming decades. To thrive in the future, families must prepare themselves for dramatic change. Here we look at the seven most significant changes taking place as families adapt to the modern times.
2020 FOX Foresight: Take the Long-Term View
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The perennial question facing financially successful families is how to preserve the family and its well-being beyond the first generation. It isn’t the size of wealth that determines the family’s ability to build successful Enterprise Family—it’s realizing you have something worth preserving and setting a goal to maintain the family’s financial, social, and human capital for generations to come. Like all worthwhile journeys, it helps to start with a roadmap to ensure your family’s long-term success.
In this 2019 Foresight article, we explore how family enterprises face an increasingly uncertain and risky world owing to developments in the economy, geopolitics, financial markets, technology, and industry competition. We review a wide range of general and specific strategies to mitigate systemic risks.
Research indicates that multigenerational involvement is the single most important factor in sustaining family wealth into the third generation and beyond. Furthermore, the families that most successfully integrate younger members into their family operations seem to share the same philosophies and core values. It’s a family enterprise mindset that prepares the rising generation to be able to step in immediately and manage the family’s financial assets, run the enterprises, and preserve the culture and legacy.