Sara is one of the first professionals to recognize family offices as the most sophisticated segment of wealth management, and she has been described as “the Warren Buffet of the family office industry”. When hundreds of U.S. families became centi-millionaires through leveraged buyouts in the 1980s and 1990s, private family offices were created to manage family capital and to educate wealth owners.

Sara founded the Family Office Exchange (FOX) as a peer network for family office executives in 1989. Within 10 years, she could see that families needed help with family governance and managing financial transitions, in addition to their family offices. As a result, FOX evolved into an advisor to family enterprises, a platform for sharing family wealth best practices, and an industry advocate for the importance of private enterprise in a global economy.​

Today, Sara provides input to the strategic direction for FOX and supports the development of new programs and services for family enterprises and wealth advisory firms in 25 countries. Sara is the co-author of Family Legacy and Leadership: Preserving True Family Wealth in Challenging Times. She serves on the executive education faculty of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business where she is an adjunct faculty member for their Private Wealth Management and Essentials of Wealth courses in the Executive Education program. She is on the founding board for the Foundation Advancing Impact and Sustainability in Bologna and the founding board for the Private Directors Association in Chicago.​

Margaret Vaughan Cox is president of MCV Consulting, a consultancy dedicated to helping families and their enterprises thrive across generations. She is sought out by sophisticated and high-profile wealth owners to help them thoughtfully plan for and navigate complex generational transitions. Margaret works with families to establish shared vision and goals for their enterprise, create and evolve effective governance and decision-making structures, develop and implement succession plans, and nurture the valuable capital that enriches the family beyond their financial assets. She builds enduring relationships with her clients, often serving as a trusted advisor to multiple generations within the same family over the course of many years. She is routinely referred to families and family office executives by wealth advisors, estate planning attorneys, and other key advisors who recognize there are important conversations and alignments the family must achieve before efforts on other fronts will be successful. With over 25 years of experience in her field, Margaret’s work has taken her throughout North America, Latin America, Europe, Australia, South Africa, and the Middle East. 

Prior to forming MCV Consulting in 2002, Margaret served as a principal at Generon Consulting (now Reos Partners and Generon International) in Boston where she honed her skills as a strategy consultant and became an experienced scenario planner with a diverse international client base of corporations, nonprofits, governments, and NGOs. After founding MCV Consulting, Margaret applied the methodology of scenario planning to helping families contemplate alternate futures for their enterprise and identify a sense of shared purpose and compelling vision for the future. Margaret is a popular speaker on generational transitions and has served as a senior member of the Chicago-based Family Office Exchange (FOX) consulting team for the past 15 years.    

Margaret earned her BA in English Literature and MBA from Vanderbilt University. She received certification in the facilitation of scenario planning through the Global Business Network (GBN) in Amsterdam, is a graduate of the Society for Organizational Learning’s Foundations for Leadership program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is a Birkman® certified coach. Additionally, Margaret is a graduate of the American Works of Art Masters Program at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York City. 

Margaret currently serves on the board of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the board of the Houston Advanced Research Center for Sustainability Science, the advisory council of The James Lawson Institute for the Research and Study of Nonviolent Movements at Vanderbilt University, and the governing council of The Shepherd School of Music at Rice University.  She is a member of the International Women’s Forum and a director emeritus of The Texas Lyceum, a select group of 96 leaders from across the state of Texas.  

Margaret and her husband, Jonathan, have three children and live in Houston, Texas.