The Family Enterprise is a way of thinking about the true scope of your family. It goes beyond the family business. It is more than the invested wealth. It includes all the family members, the philanthropy, the history, the values, and the future of the family. If you are the leader of a Famil...

Not to be a total Scrooge, but I would be remiss if I didn't raise a cautionary holiday season human capital reminder that your family office holiday party can expose you to increased employer liability. You should begin planning now regarding the policy and communication efforts that will ensure a ...

When the family friend of Dustin Hoffman’s character in the 1960s film The Graduate took the young man aside to offer him career advice, he had just one word of advice for the young man: “Plastics.” If there were to be one word I’d offer leaders of family businesses today, it would be “Neuropl...

This is the missing piece and, I hope, the next big thing in technology for financial services and the family office: using automation to create value in the back office.When you look at current trends in financial services, client experience is (quite rightly) seen as the place on which to focus re...

How important is cybersecurity to you?If you’re like many family offices, it’s up there as a top priority: in the latest FOX benchmarking survey on family office technology, data security was cited as the top technology concern of FOX members. But what is your office doing about it?FOX benchmarking ...

While I was working as a consultant for FOX, the topic of leadership succession was often on my mind—particularly whenever I was working with a multi-generational family to facilitate the process for the family’s leadership transition.So for those of you thinking about leadership succession, here ar...

There are few speakers more compelling than Mellody Hobson.Hobson (president of Ariel Investments, chairman of the board for DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc., director of The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. and Starbucks Corporation) is one of the most innovative thinkers and prominent leaders in th...

In my previous blog post, “Is the Multi-Family Office Pricing Model Broken?”, I noted that there has been a 15% drop in the pricing of wealth management-related services for ultra-high net worth client prospects since 2012. Since then, I heard back from several of you asking about how advisors plan ...

When considering an allocation to emerging markets, investors are almost universally seeking growth.Emerging economies have, indeed, significantly outperformed developed economies, with a GDP growth differential of over 4% per year during the decade from 2006 to 2015, based upon IMF data. For the pa...

At the inaugural FOX Global Owners Forum, I described the evolution that business-owning families experience—and the increased complexity they encounter—as they become family enterprises. Here is a short video that explains what I mean when I refer to Enterprise Families: [[{"fid":"21356","view...