Advisor
Education
The family has a team of financial, legal and management advisors who help them. I have helped staffs of financial services, law firms, and family offices, to develop the skills to guide families. To work effectively, advisors need skills in interviewing, convening family meetings, and developing governance to enhance their professional skills. I offer advisor workshops to develop these skills and better serve their family clients.
My past presentations have been applauded by leaders from scores of professional and wealth management organizations, including the Family Business Network, Family Office Forum, Young Presidents Organization, Inc. Magazine, Institute for Private Investors, Family Office Exchange, Family Firm Institute, and many family business associations, wealth management, family investment groups and private banks.
Talks for Families and Advisors
I speak to professional advisors regarding topics of family business, succession, wealth and philanthropy. Programs range from keynote talks, to half-day, full-day and longer workshops that help professionals to develop or enhance the skills needed to make a difference to themselves or their clients.
My experiential and high involvement programs provide cutting edge concepts, vivid case studies pulled from personal experience and video examples that apply ideas directly to challenges of the participants.
- Values Based Family Business: The Special Nature of a Family Enterprise
- The Generative Family: Best practices of 100 Year Business Families
- From “Immigrants” to “Natives”: The Journey Across Generations of a Family Enterprise
- Empowering the Next Generation: How to Create an Entrepreneurial Community in Your Family Enterprise
- Three Cultures of Global Family Enterprise and the Challenge of Cross-Generational Culture Change
- The Skilled Family Advisor: How advisors help families communicate and plan without getting caught in the middle
Professional
Development Workshops
Advisors to family business may be skilled in legal, financial and business areas, but they increasingly find that they also need skills in interviewing family members, diagnosing family needs promoting family communication, setting up family meetings, dealing with family conflict and coaching and guiding individuals to change. I offer workshops to teach these skills to financial institutions, multi-family offices, and other business advisors.
Education
Curriculum Design
I have also been involved in the creation and development of in-persona and on-line educational programs. For many years I taught graduate courses in Fundamentals of Family Business, Family Business Consulting, and the Psychology of Family Wealth. I have worked with the Family Firm Institute to design some of their popular GEN courses, and the Business Families Foundation, and offered many webinars for professionals. I have helped several financial institutions and family offices to develop their internal protocols for working with families and their platforms for service and family education.
Multi-Family
Gatherings
Family members learn best from each other. When they enter a learning environment with members of many families, and share their experience and hear from others, and learn about tools and practices that can help them, and where skeptical family members can learn what is possible, their learning is accelerated. Having a retreat or workshop with a group of families, representing different generations and roles, can provide a unique and special learning environment to inspire each family to develop their own plan, and find support from other families for their journey.
Resources
Best Practices for Multigenerational Family Enterprise
This inventory offers your family a “snapshot” to discover how much you engage in practices identified as important to sustaining your family across generations, and using your family wealth to make a difference in people’s lives.
Client Relationships and Family Dynamics: Competencies and Services Necessary for Truly Integrated Wealth Management
One of the most critical decisions a family can make is whom to entrust with the financial resources needed for current and future generations. This choice is not entirely a rational financial decision. It is also about who can best take care of the family in a personal sense.
Core Techniques for Effective Client Interviewing and Communication
Effective communication between client and advisor is fundamental to the financial advising process. Good communication skills are assumed to be employed by advisors, but in practice these skills have seldom been defined explicitly and are often absent in advisors’ repertoire of client relationship techniques.
Are Your Clients the Huxtables or the Sopranos?: Assessing Family Complexity in Wealth Management
Accurate upfront assessment of client families can influence many important factors: allocation of resources, choice of relationship manager to assign, likely profitability, stresses on your advisors and administrative staff, and the impact on other accounts due to time spent on high-maintenance clients.
