Advisory Work
My work complements the family’s existing professional advisors, including legal, accounting, financial, investment, and family office teams.
I work with families and their advisors to ensure that the same professionalism and care devoted to managing financial wealth is also invested in preparing family members to understand, receive, steward, and use that wealth well.
This work is highly tailored. Depending on the family’s stage, structures, and aspirations, engagements may include the following areas.
FAMILY LEARNING & HUMAN CAPITAL
Family meetings and councils — Designing and facilitating the settings where families convene, strengthen relationships, learn together, and make decisions.
Legacy, values, and purpose — Helping families explore common bonds, meaningful differences, and the principles that can guide the family’s future.
Coaching and mentoring — Working one-on-one or in groups to support the growth, confidence, judgment, and contribution of family members.
Rising generation development — Helping younger family members build the skills, self-knowledge, and perspective needed to participate meaningfully in family life, ownership, philanthropy, governance, and enterprise.
Leadership and talent development — Supporting the development of capable leaders by developing individual aptitudes, nurturing strengths, and creating opportunities to grow through experience.
Philanthropy and social responsibility — Using giving as a setting for values expression, learning, collaboration, generosity, and social impact.
TRUSTS, BENEFICIARIES & WEALTH TRANSITION
Beneficiary preparation — Helping beneficiaries understand the opportunities, responsibilities, and emotional complexity that can accompany inherited or gifted wealth.
Trustee and beneficiary education — Helping trust creators, trustees, and beneficiaries understand the profound human impact trusts can have, so trust relationships can be administered with both technical excellence and care.
Sudden or significant wealth — Supporting individuals and families as they integrate new wealth into their lives, identities, relationships, and decision-making.
Wealth transition planning — Working alongside legal, tax, and financial advisors to help ensure that planning structures reflect the deeper intentions of the giver and the developmental needs of the recipients.
FAMILY ENTERPRISE & OWNERSHIP
Boards of directors — Advising on the formation, transformation, composition, and leadership of family enterprise boards.
Ownership education — Helping family members develop the competencies required to be informed, responsible, and effective owners.
Shareholder roles and forums — Organizing structures for information-sharing, engagement, and decision-making among owners.
Business succession and continuity — Helping families become excellent owners, grow capable leaders, and prepare thoughtfully for generational transition.
Strategic business conversations — Facilitating conversations around alternate futures for the business, including continuity, sale, transition, diversification, or changed family involvement.
Sale of a family business — Supporting families through the complex legal, financial, emotional, and identity considerations that arise when a family enterprise is sold.
Family and non-family management — Helping families clarify the role of family members in management and navigate transitions to non-family leadership when appropriate.
GOVERNANCE & DECISION-MAKING
Governance design — Creating structures that support participation, accountability, communication, and decision-making without becoming overly bureaucratic.
Family councils and ownership forums — Helping families develop the places and practices where shared interests can be discussed and decisions can be made well.
Decision rights and role clarity — Clarifying who decides, who advises, who is informed, and how authority is exercised across family, ownership, board, trustee, and management roles.
Communication and collaboration — Strengthening the family’s ability to listen, advocate, deliberate, and make decisions together across generations and branches.
FAMILY OFFICE
Assessment — Working with family office leadership and the family to map current capabilities against needed services, compare practices against appropriate benchmarks, and consider alternative models for meeting family needs.
Structure and services — Helping families refine, streamline, outsource, automate, consolidate, or redesign family office services to better support the family’s evolving needs.
Transformation — Realigning a family office when it no longer fits the family it serves, the complexity it manages, or the future it is meant to support.
Family office purpose — Helping families ensure that the family office serves not only financial capital, but also family learning, governance, stewardship, philanthropy, and human development.