Resource Search

In "How To Talk With Your Family About Wealth," we discussed the importance of the family conversation when it comes to planning a legacy—and how quickly wealth can be lost when these conversations don’t take place. Yet despite their importance, these discussions can still be difficult, especially if your family doesn’t regularly talk about money.

People are critical to a family office’s long-term success. However, recruiting top talent can be a hurdle when there’s a shortage of top talent in a tight labor market. Compounding the problem, many family offices lack robust training and development plans to prepare next-generation family members and existing employees to step into key roles. As capability needs evolve, updating role descriptions for employee recruitment is key. Intentional skill development, career pathing, and creative compensation can help retain top talent.

Driven by events no one could have foreseen, leaders in recent years have pushed their companies and themselves beyond their comfort zone: out of the office to remote workplaces; into the cloud; along chains of supply that are almost completely digital. And with each new venture, there are new cyber risks.

Consistently revisiting potential liquidity risk is important work for family investors, as many of these risks can lay silent for prolonged periods and become easy to overlook. In fact, unexpected liquidity demands can undo a lot of hard work and, in a worst-case scenario, force a fire sale of assets.

With depression affecting as many as one in three adults, greater attention has been given to mental health in the workplace—including the impact poor mental health has on workplace morale, culture, and healthcare costs. Workplace culture initiatives that address and support employee mental health needs boost employee engagement, productivity, and retention. By following this checklist of six best practices, organizations can help build a strong framework for mental wellness both at home and in the workplace.

Selecting or reviewing the location of your family office is a highly complex and challenging exercise. As your family grows and gains assets and business interests that are often outside your home country, a host of factors can be crucial to your choice of location. These include considerations around reputation, regulatory frameworks, tax regimes, access to skilled professionals and professional services, political and economic stability, quality of infrastructure, and more.

It is not uncommon for enterprising families to end up making sub-optimal capital allocation decisions due to limited visibility into, and planning around, the entirety of their shared family assets. To optimize the value of shared family capital, both the business and other entities or advisors in the enterprise ecosystem must work in harmony. With a well-defined shared family capital strategy and holistic framework, enterprising families will be in a better position to grow and sustain their wealth, promote family unity, and prepare for the road ahead with purpose.

As enterprising families expand across generations, they often stray from their entrepreneurial wealth creation roots to a more risk-averse wealth-protection mode. However, if maintaining shared family capital across multiple generations is the goal, wealth protection mode is not an ideal strategy and may have some unintended consequences.

Many business owners worry about how their success and wealth will impact their loved ones and the next generation. The fear behind it can hinder the ability of future generations to build on past success and even lead to family tension. To successfully move past the fear-based planning and toward a collaborative approach, five secrets and action items of successful families demonstrate how to effectively transfer the family wealth and values.

For the wealth owners—and the family offices managing their assets—the opportunities that impact investing presents are arguably greater than for any other type of investor. While impact investing is a natural fit for family offices, most are still working out where to start—mulling over issues like how to source deals and measure impacts. In order to help them in this quest, we have captured the questions that family offices ask most frequently about impact investing and provided responses to create a thorough and accessible how-to guide on impact investing for family offices.