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The successful start to a family office mandate

As soon as you have decided on the fundamental question of whether you want to be advised objectively and independently by a family office, the next question that immediately arises is whether you want to set up your own structure for this (single family office) or whether you want to commission a so-called multi-family office to do this. There can be good reasons in favour of both solutions; It is one of our most important tasks to make the right decision together with our clients. It sets the course for all further steps.

The owner strategy - the DNA of every company and family office

Every company has one – consciously or not: an owner strategy. It moulds the ideas of the founders and owners into a foundation that then forms the basis for the company’s development; It is often a mixture of economic principles and market demands – but also of the individual iron principles of the founders and owners, which are the guiding principles for how to deal with each other and how to present oneself to the outside world.

However, what is part of entrepreneurial foresight for one’s own company is all too often neglected in the area of personal wealth management and family offices – often with problematic consequences later on.

The owner strategy is the nucleus of “family governance” – it answers questions for the family members such as “What holds us together?”, “What do we stand for as a family?” or, looking to the future, “What or who do we want to stay together in this group for the next 30, 50 or even 100 years?”; The owner strategy contains the family’s “value compass” and is therefore a coordinating system for the family members, but also for the family officer; And at best, it combines the values of the family with those of the family business by linking the family’s DNA with the USP of its own company; But there are good reasons not to transfer the principles from the company 1:1 to the family office; It is therefore essential that a separate owner strategy is also developed for the family office – but this is precisely what is often overlooked. This negligence often leads to avoidable arguments between family members. It is therefore worth defining clear and unambiguous rules here too;

Once these rules have been laid down, it is essential to test them systematically with the knowledge and willingness of all family members in order to find out whether they are known to everyone and are interpreted in the same way. This is a prerequisite for avoiding, for example, disputes between several shareholder groups about who can or may succeed to operational responsibility for the company and who may not. Some families project their values onto future generations, overlooking the fact that subsequent generations may have different ideas about these values or the understanding of rules derived from them.
Here it is necessary to make a fine adjustment, i.e. to define the intersection between the understanding of the transferring and the receiving generation.
In many cases, this is not possible without outside help;

Opus Au Lac offers this assistance and advises entrepreneurial families on issues relating to their ownership strategy and family governance;

The next steps

The path from the previously recorded actual structure to the calculated and defined target structure of the total assets in the spirit of the defined ownership strategy is the “journeyman’s piece” of the family office team. Once this path has been successfully mastered, the phase of updating the individual investment strategy and securing what has been achieved begins; This is also the basis for further counselling and structuring issues, such as succession planning or the establishment of a family pool with the children; External specialists are mandated for this purpose; External expertise is also required when setting up a foundation or planning a change of residence if a good solution is to be found and successfully implemented;

The Opus team provides the relevant specialists, introduces them to the facts and the desired structure and ensures error-free communication of the results and proposals for action by the specialists.