Search Results

On Monday, Feb. 10, 2014, the IRS announced it is delaying a portion of the employer mandate associated with the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. The delay applies to employers with 50-99 workers. These employers will have until 2016 before facing a penalty for failing to cover employees. Businesses with fewer than 50 workers are exempt from the e...

The FOX Financial Executive Council was first established in 2004 and it offers family office financial executives (CFOs, controllers, tax managers, etc.) an opportunity to share best practices on operational, compliance, and technical issues.On January 30-31, 15 of our members joined us in Orlando, Florida, for a meeting focused on management issu...

Carl Robinson has spent the last 25 years helping a wide range of businesses develop effective leadership strategies. Currently, as managing director of Vantage Leadership Consulting, he focuses on identifying and developing executive talent.Last October, we were fortunate to have him address our annual Fall Forum on the leadership challenges facin...

For most families, the natural evolution of wealth concerns eventually shifts from creating, preserving and transferring wealth to the realities of next generation education and preparation. With a growing body of research underscoring the importance of applying early and sustained attention to the preparation of heirs, many families have repriorit...

Successful multi-generational families often have difficulty making the transition from a business-centric family to a family-centric enterprise as the scope of their activities expand, and the family grows across generations. The diversity inherent in the growing group of shareholders brings the enterprise model to life. Some shareholders care...

Every family enterprise needs a framework for holding together the disparate parts of the family activities, and a process for managing the elements in the framework. An integrated model of the Family Enterprise encompasses the family’s capital goals (in green), family governance and leadership issues (in gold), and the coordination of financial alt...

Business owning families face the simultaneous challenges of running a business while planning for the future of the family and the management of family capital. While successful businesses benefit from disciplined operations and strategic planning, the management of family wealth is often eclipsed by the needs of the business and delegated to trust...

Employers in the wealth management industry face two distinct talent challenges, one long-term and the other immediate. According to a recent Accenture report titled “The ‘Greater’ Wealth Transfer: Capitalizing on the Intergenerational Shift in Wealth,” Baby Boomers stand to pass on an estimated $30 trillion in wealth to their Generation X and Mill...

The Need for a Formal Governance ProcessAs the family grows, decision-making moves from the dining table to the board room and family members are often reluctant to formalize their decision-making process. Each branch of the family wants to broaden their options rather than to narrow their options. Written ground rules for decision making make...

Assigning a business executive to manage or coordinate personal financial or administrative affairs can be problematic for several reasons: Lack of alignment of interests between the business and the family – The personal goals and appetite for risk-taking of some owners may not align with the interests of the business.Heavy reliance on the sam...

Recently key figures from leading advisors in the private wealth management industry gathered with executives from several sophisticated family offices for our annual FOX Thought Leaders Council Summit. The attendees met to discuss what constituted state of the art wealth management. What they determined was that service offerings varied little fro...

The 2013 FOX Thought Leaders Council brought together representatives from sophisticated family offices and industry leading advisors with the goal of identifying the state of the art in private wealth management. They discovered that while on paper the services offered from one firm to the next are often similar, the greatest differentiators betwe...

Late last year several industry leading advisors gathered with a select group of family office executives for our annual FOX Thought Leaders Council Summit. They tackled an interesting question: What separates the best wealth advisors from the merely average? What they found was that high performance was more a matter of how services were delivered...

In recent posts we’ve looked at what separates extraordinary wealth advice from the industry norm. Several industry leading advisors gathered with a select group of family office executives to tackle this issue at our most recent FOX Thought Leaders Council Summit. They concluded that state of the art wealth advisors all embody four common ha...

If any of the following situations are familiar to you, you probably have a family office embedded within your business.There is a department within the company referred to as “shareholder relations”Certain employees are dedicated solely to working with the family without other business-related responsibilitiesThere is a separate physical space, oft...