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Advisory Services

A family’s multi-generational time horizon is a unique advantage in investing. An articulated strategy builds the family unity required to utilize it.

Helping Families

Answer Their Toughest Questions

Where Do We Want to Go?

As the family and its business assets grow and change, most families will end up in the wealth management business whether they planned to or not. Whether to build a single-family office or partner with a multi-family office is a complicated question to answer, as is overseeing the management of the family’s assets.

How Do We Get There?

As the family builds its strategic infrastructure, it is difficult to find advisors with the requisite background and expertise to build the family office cost effectively and aligned with the family’s priorities.

Where Do We Go Next?

Too often families when facing strategic change jump immediately to implementation of a possible solution. Our Articulate and Align process helps the family surface goals and a vision for the next chapter of the family’s story.

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1. Assess

Help the family understand its holdings and their potential at great depth. Common deliverables:

Deep dive analysis of the family’s current business / investment holdings
Competitive bench-marking & valuation analysis
Assist family in quantifying distribution requirements, return potential and risk appetite

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2. Articulate

Articulate core priorities and long-term goals for family:

Listen and understand family’s story and balance sheet
Articulate and validate family’s ‘why’ for staying invested together

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3. Align

Family begins to align around possible future direction:

Understand current reality for business, family and markets
Analyze and develop possible paths forward

How Do We Get There?

Once the family has understood its holdings, articulated a view for the future that the family is aligned around, we can begin to determine how the family achieves its goals. With a clear vision for the future, design and building the next steps is a faster and more cost effective process.

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1. Family Office Design

Multi-generational families will need the support of a family office to achieve their goals whether they build their own or partner with another:

Engagement with family to clarify strategic vision for office, what services should be offered, identify gaps in desired service delivery, and recommend possible solutions
Design client service model and staffing model. In-source vs. out-source analysis
Assist family in selection of service partners – including out-sourced chief investment officer, multi-family office and asset class specific managers
Benchmark and negotiate fee schedules

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2. Build

Taking the design of the family office, we work to build and implement the infrastructure necessary to deliver the services:

Vet and deploy portfolio reporting systems
Develop/enhance governance structures
Support design of investment data architecture and investment reporting

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3. Enhance

Often an existing family office needs additional resources to develop new services or improving existing ones. We can be deployed as a utility player to support a team. Examples:

Support and develop education programming around investments
Assist in development of next generation education and on-boarding programs
Develop communication programs

Our Family Office Insights:

How Fast Must a Family’s Assets Grow?

One of the great challenges families face when allocating capital for the long-term is determining the right level of risk and return. This is exacerbated further by the fact that many believe that the investment strategies of families are roughly analogous to that of the endowment and foundation community.

What a Family Office Does

The primary role of a family office is to help manage the complexity of a family of significant means. Best in class family offices pursue this end by either following a strategy of exceptional coordination or exceptional comprehensiveness.

3 Recommendations When Moving From Operator to Investor

The magnitude and significance of the change when a family moves from being predominately an operator of a business(es) to an investor in businesses cannot be overstated.