In an age of change and continued evolution of the family wealth environment, 2025 was a year marked with the need for sound practices and steady guidance. Looking back and looking forward, Family Office Exchange’s (FOX) Year in Review highlights key insights on:
Family Sustainability
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Dr. Verburgh will share cutting edge insights in the field of longevity, including the latest science, investing, and personal strategies backed by scientific evidence for extending health span. We will discuss what the future looks like in a society where adults might live much longer, and what this means for families both personally and professionally. Kris Verburgh, General Partner & Head of Science, Longevity Growth Fund
2025 FOX Foresight: Mastering Complexity
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As multigenerational families evolve, they all face one universal challenge—growing complexity. Smart and intentional management of this challenge is central to sustaining family unity, achieving the family’s purpose, and ensuring the family and its enterprise flourish over the long run. 2025 FOX Foresight is presented in 8 chapters and can be viewed here, or individually in the "Related Resources" column below.
2024 FOX Foresight: Cultivating an Entrepreneurial Spirit to Sustain the Enterprise Family
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One of the most discussed topics is to what degree entrepreneurial and vital drive and “hunger” are determined by nature or by nurture. That is, can drive and hunger be taught and developed with the proper education, incentives, influences, or conditions? With a closer look and analysis based on existing literature on the topic and interviews with successful businesspeople, entrepreneurs, and enterprise family members, there is a clear view of how cultivating an entrepreneurial spirit plays an important role in the future success of an enterprise or business family.
Over the past 30 years, families have worked hard and invested enormous resources to create the plans and structures that promise to carry the family into the future and ensure its long-term success. The vast majority of these investments have focused on the quantitative disciplines that serve the family’s financial capital – the collective disciplines that today we call “wealth management”.
Family Values: Charting Your Future
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We all want our children and grandchildren to be critical thinkers and to find their own way in the world. But we often want them to also adopt the family’s values and, in some cases, the responsibilities of running a family business. When those two goals are mutually exclusive, it can be a challenge to chart a course that embraces the future without letting go of the past. In this interview, Melanie Schmieding of Baird Family Wealth shares three steps and advice to help families with that challenge and uncover their family’s values.
All parents have reasons for why they do or do not share their wealth with their children, and neither option is without challenges. The key for parents is to find the balance between sharing everything and sharing nothing while also passing along the skills required to ensure their children become responsible inheritors and/or beneficiaries. Here are some best practices for striking that balance without losing the opportunities that come with significant wealth.
The creation of family wealth takes years of dedication, sacrifice, and hard work. To ensure that the hard-earned wealth is sustainable for generations, mentoring family members plays a key role in the successful transition of family wealth. Serving as an effective framework is the Family Wealth Mentoring Pyramid™ that incorporates five areas: Life Purpose, Wealth Theory, Wealth Operations, Communication Practices, and Wealth Governance.
The past year challenged families to react to adverse trends to protect their enterprise and build capabilities to achieve their vision. The journey from uncertainty to impact requires an elevated enterprise mindset and determination to persevere throughout the four-stage evolution to position the family enterprise for long-term success and positive community impact.
2023 FOX Foresight - It Can Be Done: Six Case Studies from Champion Global Enterprise Families
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From a global crisis triggering a family’s restructuring, to an entrepreneur-turned-global-investor’s commitment to change the world, six case studies demonstrate how some international champion enterprise families are assessing their threats and opportunities, reinventing themselves, and delivering the full potential of family capital to realize their desired vision and positively impact the world.