Family Governance

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Five Tips for Holding a Successful Family Meeting
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Poorly structured family meetings that lack a clear purpose and agenda can do more harm than good. Failing to get buy-in from all family members can cause irreparable damage to relationships, despite the best of intentions. There are five key tips for holding a successful family meeting, which is an essential ingredient for managing wealth across generations and ensuring families achieve their ultimate goal of sustaining family unity, maintaining wealth, and preserving the family legacy.

Aligning Culture: Making Culture Personal
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As research continues to validate the need for cultural alignment within families as well as between families and the advisors who serve them, there is continued need for effective assessments that measure culture and clear approaches to manage sustainable change.

How to Discuss Wealth With Your Family
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Talking about wealth is every bit as important as creating a technical wealth plan—if not more so. Preparing a wealth transfer plan for your assets “on paper,” but failing to help your loved ones understand how to manage those assets in their lives, leaves the true process of sharing wealth incomplete and subject to real, but avoidable, risks. When it comes to family money and wealth, it is important to understand the variety of styles families may employ to encourage proactive, healthy, and informative family discussions.

Three Steps for Smooth Family Business Succession
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Statistically, every day 10,000 Baby Boomers will reach the age of 65, a phenomena that will occur daily until 2029. And, according to the Small Business Administration, half of small business owners are currently over age 50. As a result, waves of small businesses will be sold or transitioned. When you couple these statistics with the emergent megatrend defining the wave of wealth transfer that will occur within the next two decades…it is time to formalize your comprehensive business succession plan.

Should We Have a Family Meeting?
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At some point, most families ask if they should have a family meeting, recognizing the importance of providing a forum for sharing news, concerns, opportunities, and challenges in an open and direct way. Family meetings are often seen as a great place to learn, whether the topic is investments, business, legal matters, or the family itself. Furthermore, the interplay of generations is a great way to model and develop family leadership and help nurture the family legacy.

Taking Time to Teach: Raising Responsible Children Amid Affluence
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One of the greatest concerns among wealthy parents is that the family’s great fortune might inadvertently lead to misfortune for their children. Raising responsible children in affluence is a life-long task requiring patience and persistence. Like learning to read, financial literacy is a process that is best started in early childhood. Teachable moments, alongside practical ways to teach children about wealth, are the beginning of financially responsible parenting.

Track 1 - EDUCATING OWNERS - Family Culture and Embracing Change
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Family success over generations is often contingent on the health and vibrancy of family culture. Family culture can destroy legacy, decimate planning, and wreak havoc on even the best laid plans of founders, professionals and family leaders. This session helps to bring clarity to the confusing dynamics of family culture and, more importantly, provide strategies and techniques used to make adaptive cultural shifts.

Track 1 - EDUCATING OWNERS - Family Education In Action
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Family education is critical to wealth sustainability. In this session, participants will hear directly from families who have successfully implemented family education programs and the challenges and obstacles they have had to overcome to design, develop and deliver quality programming. In addition, family members will share information about the types of programs they are delivering as well as the outcomes of their implemented learning strategies.

Track 4 - ADVANCING THE FAMILY TRUST - The Art and Complexity of Trust Distributions
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Distributions have many implications for the Private Family Trust Company (PFTC). The responsibilities of the PFTC in preserving the corpus and being true to the role of the trustee must also align with the changing needs of the family. This peer dialogue centers on a case study examining the art and complexity of family distributions and provide tools, strategies, lessons learned and insight into preparing for the intricacies inherent in distributions.

Developing a Family Vision for the Future
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A multigenerational family can benefit from a visioning process when moving from one stage of the enterprise to another— perhaps facing a change in leadership or a change in ownership of key family assets. The time for a Family Visioning process has come when family members can see a major change coming, but are uncertain as to how the transition will occur.