Institute for Family Culture
Managing Wealth's Impact to Achieve Your Goals
Family culture provides a distinctive and multifaceted foundation for considering wealth in its fullest context. A clear understanding of family history, values, strengths, and interests, coupled with intentional and well-informed plans, plays an important role in stewarding unique wealth and building a meaningful legacy.
The Abbot Downing Institute for Family Culture provides strategic advice to individuals, couples, and multigenerational families—as well as family offices, foundations, and endowments. Our holistic approach addresses education and preparation of the rising generation, best practices to enhance communication, and effective decision-making around shared family interests.
A clear understanding of family history, values, strengths and interests, coupled with intentional and well-informed plans, plays an important role in stewarding unique wealth and building a meaningful legacy.
The Abbot Downing Difference
Experienced Team
Our highly experienced consulting team is staffed with PhD-level and other advanced-degree professionals with backgrounds in education, psychology, history, and business. The team uses certified coaching techniques and practical assessment tools to explore your family’s needs.
FOCUSED CONSULTING
Ultra-high-net-worth clients have sophisticated needs and unique priorities related to business interests, multigenerational stakeholders, and family philanthropy. We help guide you through succession planning, family and social impact, managing business transitions or sales, and a full range of family dynamics and governance matters to foster family alignment and promote multigenerational success.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP AND INNOVATION
Abbot Downing collaborates with renowned academic institutions to design client events and educational opportunities which bring innovative ideas and leading-edge solutions directly to our clients.
FAMILY INSIGHTS
As a basis for the long-term and multifaceted work we do with families, we often begin with our Family Insights process. In this process, we conduct confidential one-on-one interviews with adult family members to understand individual values and strengths, perspectives on opportunities and risks, and unique questions and concerns related to wealth and its impact. We take the themes that come from these interviews and capture them in a written 360-degree view of core values, strengths, and opportunities, along with our initial recommendations. Family Insights helps to clarify the key top-of-mind concerns related to family priorities, and creates a starting point from which specific communication, education, and governance plans can be developed.
The Institute for Family Culture takes a multidimensional approach to family wealth, offering four centers of excellence, each with a distinct focus and set of capabilities.
Center for Family and Business History
One of the most effective ways that family members can communicate with each other about their future is to begin with a look at their shared past. We can help you discover and share your unique family identity across multiple generations to build a stronger foundation for the future.
- Understand the journeys your ancestors made, the challenges they experienced, the successes they realized, and the values they stood for.
- Document and share your family history to inspire multigenerational dialogue around values, legacy, and the future.
- Connect your past with your present and define what matters most to your family.
Center for Family Business Transitions
Effectively managing relationships in leadership and ownership transitions in a family business is critical. The overlapping roles of family owner managers, non-manager employees, and family stakeholders adds complexity to family relationships and to long-term business success.
- Establish an agreed-upon vision that defines the owners’ goals for the business and considers input from other family members and stakeholders.
- Develop a governance process to foster effective communication and decision-making, and navigate potential disagreements between the family and the business.
- Create a succession plan that includes engaging and preparing the rising generations for leadership roles and serving as stakeholders in the family enterprise.
Center for Family Dynamics, Education, and Governance
Sustaining wealth from generation to generation requires that a family address issues such as cultural alignment, preparing the rising generation for the future responsibility of wealth, and implementing effective processes for family decision-making. Our consultants help multigenerational families, family offices, and family foundations address these needs in a proactive way.
- Work with you to create wealth communication and education plans for the next generation with an emphasis on what you want to share and when.
- Design and facilitate educational family meetings to ensure alignment of family values and priorities, and to engage rising generation family members in the family wealth enterprise.
- Provide consultation on wide-ranging topics such as family decision-making, preparing heirs, and family leadership transitions.
Center for Family and Social Impact
Many families want to use their unique wealth to create positive change in the world. We can help you work toward your personal, family, and social goals while respecting an array of multigenerational ideas and interests.
- Help clarify your purpose and explore options for investing, philanthropy, and/or entrepreneurship through a social impact lens.
- Formulate action plans, measure results, and adapt your plans based on insights from data and experiences to meet the needs of local, national, and global communities.
- Explore new perspectives and ideas with younger generations to help cultivate their skills and their capacity to eventually serve as family leaders and responsible stewards of family wealth.
