Entrepreneurial stewardship is the key to perpetuating family wealth through multiple generations. Stuart Lucas and David Lansky discuss some of the paradoxes of maintaining a healthy, wealthy multigenerational family and how to address effectively these paradoxes.
Why is an American who has spent over a quarter century managing financial assets for his family cautioning you against selling your family business? The author urges you to think twice before selling your business.
Many wealthy families envision keeping a shared property in the family as a means of building family unity, harmony and legacy. A number of notable families have been successful at this, but many others find the reality creates the opposite of their intention.
What are the leadership attributes and behaviors that wealth owners need to embody in order to promote long-term wealth sustainability and family continuity in 21st century? How do they differ, if at all, from the past? Karen Neal, FOX Managing Director of Consulting, will facilitate a dialogue, drawing on a family example presented by 4th gen family member, Preston Root. Preston is the President of his family’s board of directors after assuming leadership responsibilities from his mother.
Sara Hamilton, CEO and Founder of FOX, will share the FOX research on some of the key trends and issues that will change the landscape for business owning families over the next decade. Sara will outline key questions that advisors need to pose to their business owner clients who are facing critical transitions, and the panel participants and the attendees will address these issues.
Families that marry the strength of individualism with a more inclusive, long-term mindset can capture the best of both worlds. They can improve on a traditional foundation with diversified business interests and strategically populate affiliated ventures with members of the extended family.
While family businesses are playing an important role in the economy and studies have regularly shown that in the long-term they outperform other businesses, there is the continual challenge of succession to the next generation. An estate is built up over the generations and the family grows larger. This source of diversity is not without its challenges: how do you forge a common identity to which everyone can relate? How do you learn to take decisions together while maintaining family harmony?
There is the age old stigma that wealth can bring or buy happiness. But, we hear it time and time again: money doesn’t buy happiness. The lack thereof may create unhappiness, but the presence of wealth does not necessarily have the opposite effect. Wealth does not create happiness nor does it provide the meaning of life. It may provide opportunities, but that does not guarantee happiness or meaning. Senior Wealth Dynamics Coach Amy Zehnder looks at the prospects of turning wealth into happiness.
Taking time to tell family stories, and finding interesting ways to record them for subsequent generations, can serve as a foundation for family members to bond and identify with each other. Stories can engender in family members an appreciation for their own unique “differentness” of identity from those outside of the family. This shared sense of unique family history can aid the family in their quest to break the curse of the third generation.
Leadership succession is perhaps the most uniquely challenging issue a family faces. It transcends the business of wealth management to touch on personal issues of family dynamics and engagement. It is for this reason that you need a clear, transparent and understandable plan for making a change in leadership, one that helps you balance preserving your legacy with preserving family harmony. In this 2012 FOX Fall Forum session, Karen Neal and Margaret Vaughan Robinson of the Family Office Exchange detailed a roadmap to help create a successful plan.Some key takeaways: