Business acumen may create wealth, but prudent investment is required to maintain it, let alone make it grow.
Adding Structure
‘Governance’ is the name we have for the structures and processes that families use to organise their affairs. Successful governance provides clarity and allows people to focus on their objectives instead of peripheral, and often managerial duties and problems.
Removing Uncertainty
A well-defined governance structure will enable families to deal with what might otherwise seem like irreconcilable issues: how to allow differing family members to work together harmoniously, how important decisions can be made fairly and equitably, who should control what, how to avoid and manage conflict and how to deal with succession of control and wealth. Formalising these structures and decisions keeps the peace.
Family Office Governance Overview
Often overlooked, a meaningful Governance structure created with your wealth manager has numerous subjective benefits:
- Serves to define the family culture and propagate it over the long-term
- Eliminates many conflicts, and provides a procedure tor resolve them when they do occur
- Clarifies the relationship between family owners and external owners and stakeholders
- Ensures that the control and power structure is known, understood and accepted
- Improves overall performance; both from an operations standpoint, and particularly an investment standpoint
There are going to be things about your current way of operating that have formed over many years; and many parts of that system you want to keep. There will also be areas that you would like to change, existing problems that you’d like to fix, and future issues that you would like to avoid if possible. Spending time to audit and understand your current way of doing things, along with what you like, and what you don’t will enable us to strategise.
We provide you with observations and feedback. With this we propose various changes; some small, some not, that will bring your governance structure into line with your objectives. We forecast how the changes can be implemented, what growing pains to expect and what the net benefit will be over time.
We assist in explaining and rolling out the updated structure to all of your members and key staff, taking care to explain the rationale for each change, and the way that it will benefit them, and the organisation.
Together we decide on an interval at which to formally check in on how the changes have been affected, what has worked, what has not, and determine if any course-correction is required. Hearing ongoing feedback from all members is essential to creating a framework that is both beneficial and accepted. The frequency of these reviews tends to lessen after the first couple of years after having made changes.
Service Areas
Facilitate efficient, conflict-free decision making among family members, ensuring that family guiding principles and goals are preserved.
Maintain the sometimes challenging mix of family and non-family member executives and staff. Engineer relationships built on trust and merit and remove in-group/out-group divisions among talent.
Retaining highly skilled staff is challenging and their loss can be highly disruptive. We help you build attractive environments for your best people to thrive, grow and be appreciated.
“A structure known as the corpus callosum connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain and enables communication between them. Dysfunction or absence of this structure can result in a condition known as split-brain syndrome.” – Encyclopedia Britannica
Highly functioning systems only work when they communicate with each other. Get a handle on your communications strategy to ensure that your family and your business share and compare.