Creating Lasting Impact

A Vision for Family Wealth

Understanding the Challenges and Opportunities of Family Wealth

Real wealth is much more than what is reflected on a brokerage statement. Wealth is your ability to create. Wealth is the ability of your family to act as a greenhouse for human flourishing. We like to think of capital more comprehensively by thinking of the following categories: financial, intellectual, social, and human (or “FISH capital”).

Our aim is to help you grow your family’s comprehensive capital. This requires a level of thought and reflection that transcends the typical technocratic disciplines of tax and estate planning that wealth professionals typically focus on.

Families posses world-changing potential. We have all been passed a baton, whether financial or otherwise. The goal is to multiply what we have been given, to redefine what ought to be redefined, and to leave the next generation positioned for amazing success and societal impact.

The challenge however, is that family wealth exists in a complex ecosystem which we call the Family Enterprise (the interacting domains of family, business, investments, philanthropy, and legacy planning). Wealth is impacted by relational and governance dynamics, individual issues, and much more. Success requires a respect for the interconnected nature of the Family Enterprise components, it requires interdisciplinary systems thinking, humility, curiosity, and intentionality.

The Family Enterprise

Bringing Domains Together to Unlock Opportunity

The Family Enterprise is a wealth structure (not a single entity) that is not only concerned with financial success but also with preserving and passing on the family's values, traditions, and assets to future generations.

The key to multi-generational family success is applying wisdom across intersecting domains. How will your estate plan effect your family? How do you effectively make decisions about business or investments with multiple parties involved? How will governance dynamics change as a result of deaths, marriages, births, etc.? By asking these kinds of cross-domain questions you set up the system for success. Inter-domain thinking helps to identify synergies, understand strengths, and recognize weakness that need to be addressed. 

Here are the key elements of a family enterprise:

Family Wealth Services

  • How do you manage wealth as a couple? How do your experiences in your family of origin influence your approach to wealth? The goal of the Wealth and Marriage workshop is to foster an atmosphere where decisions are made in accordance with both spouses’ values and where each spouse is engaged in the decision-making process. Using a proprietary questionnaire and data tool, we help you understand how you presently operate as a governance unit. This understanding serves a starting point for meaningful discussion.

  • Effective families have empowering cultures that propel individuals forward. The Family Coaching Workshop aims to foster a culture in which family members are deeply connected to one another, communicate their needs clearly, and understand and appreciate each other’s unique personalities, abilities, and dreams. We focus on:

    Awareness: Improving your understanding your family history, your relationships, one another, and yourself.

    Communication: Developing value-informed boundaries and strategies for healthy conflict resolution.

    Vision: Uncovering Individual Dreams, Family Dreams and building a family Vision/Mission.

  • As a member of the rising generation in a wealthy family, are you facing the challenge of preparing for a lifetime of wealth stewardship while navigating the complexity your own family wealth landscape? Many find this overwhelming, especially when paralleled with myriad of weighty choices that influence the direction of your life: choosing a college, selecting a career trajectory, exploring the meaning of relationships, etc.

    This workshop is dedicated to supporting you as you uncover and commit to your values while exploring how such values may influence how you practically manage wealth, philanthropy, and the other major decisions on your doorstep. Participants will come away with tools for clarifying personal meaning and ambition to live into their values, specifically within the context of wealth management.

  • How you manage wealth as a couple can greatly influence both your marital fulfillment and your ability to reach financial goals. We cover the following:

    Understanding each other’s financial story.

    Strategies for making decisions together.

    Strategies for obtaining good advice and for working with advisors.

  • Preparing your heirs for a fulfilling future is no simple task. We help you think through these complex, but rewarding challenges, coving topics such as:

    Strategies for having age-appropriate conversations about wealth with your children.

    Using philanthropy as a context for teaching stewardship.

    Navingating legacy: moving from inheritance to multergernalion dynastic thinking.

    Applied learning: Giving your children tools for selecting and working with advisors, and opportunities to learn on the job while the stakes are low.

    Strategies for welcoming in-laws.

    Strategies for enhancing wealth-generating abilities.

    How to create a culture of empowerment

  • There is manner in which your family collectively makes decisions. You probably have multiple governance systems for various entities and types of decisions that need to be made. A governance system is an ecosystem with a unique set of stakeholders (of various kinds), values, objectives, policies, norms, and legal agreements, which collectively determine how decisions are made. Your existing set of systems may be appropriate for your current circumstance, but is your family equipped for the various changes that will occur? (Additional stakeholders, retirement, business transitions, untimely death, etc.) We take a strategic approach: first defining objectives, and then performing a SWOT analysis on your governance systems: examining strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats such that you can be better prepared for the future.

  • We believe each person is meant to leave their own unique fingerprint on the world. While this impact is about more than philanthropic endeavors, when it comes to philanthropy, we help clients discover their own fingerprint- that is a unique, value-driven framework serving to make their make their efforts more impactful, fulfilling, and enjoyable. This framework forms part of a broader philanthropic policy statement that encompasses tax-efficient strategies, governance, and operational aspects of philanthropy. The Philanthropic Compass addresses:

    Which causes do you care most about?

    What guiding principals do you want to inform your philanthropic benefactor selection?

    What is the degree of desired involvement (do you want to write a check and walk away, pay an annual visit, or ….)?

Grace Spencer, PsyD | Family Governance Consultant

Grace serves as Signet’s family governance consultant and brings empathy from her own experience growing up in a legacy family. She has a particular interest in empowering members of the rising generation and supporting families as they navigate the complexities of wealth. Grace has extensive experience in providing psychotherapy and assessment services in the university, community mental health, and private practice settings. She holds a doctoral degree in clinical psychology from Wheaton College and a master’s degree in Counseling from Regent University.