Our Process
Our governance process includes three phases.
We initiate governance projects by spending time with and listening to our clients. We establish their overarching planning objectives and define what is important to them. Our discussions revolve around the notion of a family and its core values, the nature of their legacy and what it will mean for future generations. We also consider the rights and responsibilities relating to the family’s wealth and its business and the way their wealth is currently structured and governed.
We then start the design and implementation phase: we first assess the challenges and risks faced by the family, stress-test their existing arrangements for internal and external threats, assess key person risks as well as the potential for conflicts within the family and possibly the business. We then design the appropriate framework and fine tune it as part as of our ongoing dialogue with the family. This leads to the implementation of the various arrangements.
The governance framework is then put to work and the third phase consists of our long term support, making sure it sustainably achieves the family’s objectives over time and ensures that future generations continue to embrace and support their family legacy
Succession Planning
Succession planning and asset protection are difficult things for families to address, particularly in an increasingly transparent and complex world. Wealth can become a destructive force in family relationships, and challenges come from within the family as well as from without. Tax, political risk, divorces and legal claims can make it difficult for wealth owners to navigate the succession and asset protection process safely.
- We conduct ‘health checks’ on the succession and asset protection structures of families, reviewing what’s in place and helping to ask the important ‘what-ifs’ that all wealth owners should be asking.
- We liaise closely with tax and legal consultants to ensure that approaches taken in view of tax and legal objectives are consistent with good governance and standards of excellence in family succession and asset protection.
- We challenge existing asset protection and succession structures, helping wealth owning families to identify areas of risk and where conflicts of interests within or outside the family may be the cause of future problems.