SUPPORT FOR THE FAMILY'S LONG-TERM STRATEGY

As families accumulate liquid assets, they face the challenge of how to manage this wealth. This is often the first reason why families create a dedicated family office. But too often, family offices have too narrow a role as predominantly a manager of financial assets and provider of concierge services. Many perform sub-optimally, never surviving the founder or becoming multigenerational entities. Too often they lack the professionalism and high standards expected of a for-profit business such as clarity of purpose, effective governance, high professional standards, performance metrics, operational effectiveness, and adaptation as the family evolves.

A high-performing family office reaches beyond the wealth management role. It is a key entity within the family enterprise that supports the family’s long-term strategy and manages the important activities that the family is dedicated to perpetuating. It supports family and ownership governance; assists with ownership strategy and tax planning; provides education for family members and monitors their personal and professional development; manages shared personal assets (such as homes and art collections); organizes family social impact activities; and is a strategic vehicle for the family to achieve its important goals.

CFEG helps families and family offices with the overall architecture and design of the family office, including whether the family should build a dedicated single family office (SFO), join a multi-family office (MFO), or engage a private bank’s family office service.

We help families with new and existing family offices to define: the needs and expectations of the family; the role of the family office; its governance and decision-making process; its reporting process; its structure and organization design; its clients, services, and staffing; how services are priced, allocated and charged to family members; its operations and procedures; how to measure performance; and its succession planning process. We provide objective advice to families on selecting third-party service providers, ranging from wealth managers to accounting and reporting software. We work collaboratively with business families to get the most out of their family office, and to help the family office become a multigenerational vehicle that supports the family’s goals.

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