Family Enterprises and Owner-Led Businesses

Operating Companies

The creation of a family operating company, whether still in business today or not, also creates the possibility for family involvement beyond a founder’s original execution on an idea. Where most businesses fail in their early years, a multi-generational operating company has already beaten the odds. Successfully spanning generations means navigating change when change is rarely easy. What worked for a founder—strategy, leadership, capital—can fail if later generations do not work to examine their talent, their risk tolerance, their competitive landscape, in their time. Meanwhile, an aptitude for business is not genetic; it is cultivated and can be nurtured, with effort from all generations. Competitors don’t care how long a family business has been successful; customers sometimes do care, as long as their needs are met. Operating companies are for creators and can bring great reward, not the least of which is seeing one’s children and grandchildren live their own dreams through it. And when that is not possible, staying together in some way, with assets to deploy productively, can lead to great, collective things. CFAR helps operating companies find their routes to success with eyes wide open, bringing an understanding of capital, growth, and talent development, along with decades of experience decoding family dynamics to families willing to invest themselves in the work of continuity.

Family Foundations

Like business, family philanthropy also requires a clear-headed exploration of goals, methods, resources, and results that drive their funders. They also need an understanding of how philanthropy fits into the larger family enterprise, as well as the values, history, culture, and network of relationships that make that enterprise unique. Challenges for family foundations range from their initial formation, to how they create and measure impact, to how they evolve giving strategies in response to changing needs in the world and/or changing interests in their family’s successive generations. CFAR helps these organizations institutionalize philanthropic passion into systematic approaches to making a difference, integrating the inspiration of some family members with new perspectives on mission, and building a structure that allows family members to have differential and meaningful roles and work, should that be the goal.

Family Offices

Family businesses have usually, from their inception, operated as the core financial asset of a family. More recently, enterprising families have consolidated their liquid assets, created through the sale of some or all of their companies, to diversify together, when worth the cost, into single family offices. The central question facing families at this stage is often about what the group wants to support collectively, on a scale that can range from “concierge”-type services to comprehensive money management, including investment advice, financial, and tax planning, as well as venture or later funding of other operating companies, and even family foundation management.

CFAR helps family offices address the central questions of the office’s mission and purpose, and then develops solutions for the questions that follow, including: what activities the office should collectively support; how to advance both financial and non-financial family goals through thoughtful organizational design of the office; and how to create cohesion among a family that is often varied in interests and dispersed geographically, where the benefits of a single family office may not be well understood and may have differential appeal.

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