Private Client and Family Enterprise Advisory

Families that have built substantial wealth rarely hold it in one place. It sits across operating businesses, property, investments and holding structures, each with its own adviser, and no one holds the consolidated picture. Decisions about liquidity, succession and reinvestment then get made without it.

We act as the financial coordinating point: producing a consolidated view, supporting the governance forums where family decisions are actually taken, and working alongside the family's accountants, advocates, bankers and investment advisers rather than replacing them.

The work is confidential by nature and structured to stay that way.

When families come to us

• Assets sit across several companies, properties and accounts, and no single statement shows the whole.
• A generational transition is approaching and nothing has been documented.
• A family member is joining the business, or leaving it, and the terms are unclear.
• Each adviser sees one part of the position and none sees all of it.
• A liquidity requirement has arisen and it is not obvious where it should come from.
• The family wants to put structure in place before a disagreement makes it necessary.

The consolidated view

The first deliverable is usually a single statement of what the family owns, through which entity, with what encumbrances. That is less routine than it sounds: shareholdings held personally and through holding companies, property in various names, loans between family members and businesses that have never been documented, and assets whose value has not been tested in years.

Once the picture exists, the questions that were previously unanswerable become ordinary — what the family's actual return is, where cash is trapped, what a transaction in one entity does to the whole.

Governance for a family, not a corporate

Family governance borrows from corporate governance but cannot simply copy it. We help establish the forums where decisions are taken and recorded — a family council, an investment committee, a policy on how family members are employed and remunerated, a documented approach to distributions and reinvestment.

The aim is that decisions are made in a forum rather than in passing, and that the reasoning survives the people who were in the room.

Succession, coordinated rather than drafted

Succession planning spans several professions. Wills, trusts and transfers are drawn by advocates; tax consequences belong with tax advisers; regulated investment decisions belong with licensed professionals. Our role is the financial architecture around them and the coordination between them: what passes to whom, what it is worth, whether the structure produces liquidity when it is needed, and whether the plan survives contact with the business's actual cash flows.

We also work on the preparation of the next generation — the financial education that makes an inheritance something a family can hold rather than something that disperses.

What you receive

• A consolidated family financial position, updated at an agreed frequency.
• A holding-structure review with recommendations.
• Liquidity and cash-flow planning across entities.
• Investment and distribution policies for the family's own governance.
• Coordination of the family's professional advisers, with a single point of financial responsibility.
• Support to the family council and investment committee, including papers and minutes.