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Selling the family-owned business is one of the most important financial decisions and transactions that any family will face. Business owners, their children and grandchildren will live with the results for a long time to come. Getting it right is important to maximize family wealth, and some basic advance planning — even several years in advance — could help achieve that critical goal.

Leadership succession and governance are important issues for every financial family. However, these issues are especially complex for business-owning families. To explore succession from an expert perspective, FOX spoke with Kelin Gersick, co-founder and senior partner of Lansberg, Gersick & Associates, a consulting and research firm specializing in family enterprise and philanthropy.

For most people, being part of a family means learning the family culture and passing the family’s values through the generations. If philanthropy is part of a family’s ethos and identity, most parents agree that there are many ways to incorporate the concept as well as the practice of giving in day-to-day life.

Why, when and how legal and financial advisors counsel their clients around their charitable giving options has important implications for the donor, for the gift planner, for charitable organizations and for society. The author makes a series of recommendations on how the advisor-client relationship can best be structured in the interests of both.

This issue paper focuses on the principles, practices, and policies of family governance. It aims to help philanthropic families understand the theory and practice of effective family governance.

The decision to make a planned gift allows the donor to satisfy his/her charitable intentions without the loss of income from the securities. Unlike an outright gift, this transfer is of the remainder interest only; the donor retains the current income stream.

On April 25, Mario Morino, Chairman of the Morino Group and Venture Philanthropy Partners, spoke to the FOX Concepts in Strategic Philanthropy Special Interest Group.

The SO is a little known vehicle that can be used by families to give back to their communities during their lifetimes, especially if they want to use stock in their family businesses to fund the gifts. The SO is described in IRC Section 509(a)(3).

Family giving can be wonderfully gratifying as well as a bit messy. That goes double when several generations with different agendas run the family foundation. At the FOX Fall Forum, family members and foundation executives engaged in a lively discussion on how to effectively address questions related to family philanthropy.

The day-to-day operations of a family foundation are naturally consumed by details such as grant reviews, donation formulas and site analyses. Though important work, family foundations focus less attention on the basic questions: Why give? What difference does it make?