High-Achieving Women can Manage, Sustain, and Organically Grow Wealth with a Family Office
For high-achieving women, the pressure of managing the increasing demands at work rarely end when they return home. As stewards for their family, they look after, keep order and manage various aspects of familiar affairs, including the family finances. They are the family CFO, and among the relentless responsibilities that exist at work, high-achieving women often run their family life much like an enterprise. They take calculated risks both at work and with their personal wealth. Likewise, they are motivated to take steps to enhance their personal fortunes through sophisticated tax and investment strategies.
Sustaining and managing the family balance sheet and growing and protecting family wealth has its challenges. For that reason, even with a high value of self-efficacy, high-achieving women delegate the complexity of coordinating and orchestrating the family’s finances on multiple fronts to experts who are understanding of their needs and preferences. They seek to manage potential risk and missed opportunities while pursuing growth within a customizable platform. A single or multi-family office can deliver acuity and formalized guidance on a diverse range of financial, estate, accounting and personal family needs.
Much like a concierge for family finances, a family office is a team of financial professionals dedicated to managing the complexities and serving as integrator and coordinator of family wealth. They discern and wield the multiple risks that come with obtaining family affluence. Created to reflect the unique needs and dynamics of each individual family, a family office can also serve to bridge generations and to create cohesion and continuity for family wealth. Thus, fulfilling the most important role: protecting the family it serves.
Family office services include investment strategy to enhance efficiency and improve performance with attention to detail that is particularly important to high-achieving women who look for laser focus on results from their advisors. Additional personalized services may include tax, estate and philanthropic planning, as well as lifestyle services, such as bill pay and managing various household tasks.
Beyond general management, the family office also works with the family to define its mission and create a strategic vision for the family, rooted in their respective values. Facilitating family communication, the family office endorses their higher purpose and context around their wealth and family legacy.
Through intentional family meetings, governing principles and philanthropic philosophy, cohesive messages are delineated with a written family mission statement. The family mission statement articulates the family’s philanthropic aspirations and socially responsible investing principals and serves as a bedrock for the family’s strategic plan. The strategy is then executed by the family office team of advisors in coordination with family guidance that results in impact to local communities and society at large.
In addition to being highly invested in their family’s mission, high-performing women are also highly invested in the success of their companies. In comparison to their male counterparts, women are more likely to receive executive compensation in the form of equity. So much so, they often own a disproportionate amount of company stock which can prove financially disadvantageous to them in the long run. Investment planning for women who are corporate leaders charged with driving growth in the companies where they work or own, demands exclusive planning around their compensation and tax planning. Serving as guardian for these issues, a family office can oversee the execution and timing of stock incentive plans. They can create models for multiple financial scenarios and aggregated reporting of all family assets to ensure appropriate diversification and asset allocation.
Moreover, family offices also help clients make prudent decisions around investments, by creating an investment policy statement. An investment policy statement defines risk tolerance governing investments and creates the family’s standards for investment decision-making. It solidifies a set of ideals that guides the family’s advisors with parameters around volatility, liquidity needs, management style and allocation to ensure that the family’s objectives are achieved.
Overall, women are achieving greater success than ever before. While wealth can provide tremendous freedom for families, it can also ignite challenges and complexities. A family office can oversee strategies to manage, sustain and organically grow a family’s wealth among generations while promoting financial wellbeing throughout.
Looking for more information? Do you have a question for Nicole on how a Family Office can help you? Go to olsonwealthgroup.com