Eight out of ten Canadian businesses are family-run, and some of those businesses drive the wealth of Canada's very-high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth families. These are people who want their families to be as successful as their businesses. They see both business and family as precious legacies to be stewarded, nurtured, grown, and handed down.
Contrary to widely held opinion, the wealthiest families in Canada do not live, work, and earn solely for themselves. They look toward the future, the rising generation of their families as well as the generations yet unborn. Most look as well toward the future of the businesses they have built and may yet build, businesses they may pass down through the family, and businesses they may sell to other individuals or corporate entities. Families who create significant enterprises are concerned with how these will contribute to the economy of their nation. They are anxious to ensure that their entrepreneurial investments, in real estate, in venture capital, in new business start-ups, will positively impact their fellow Canadians and their fellow human beings. Many are also committed to devoting a large fraction of their wealth directly to philanthropic projects and causes, which are often initiatives they don't merely fund, but that they create, build, and lead.
More and more Canadians of wealth are realizing the importance of treating their family assets, their family identity, and their family brand as dimensions of the family's business. Accordingly, more and more are establishing or joining "family offices."
This book reveals the concept, the theory, and the practice of the family office as an instrument to enable legacy families to ensure that they nurture, encourage, inspire, and enable their members to create a positive impact on the world around them, on their community, their country, and on humanity itself, generation after generation.
This book will show you—
• What a family office is
• What it costs
• Whether your family can benefit from it
• How to establish it
• How to manage it
• How to integrate with your family's business and investment interests
• How it can preserve and grow a social, financial, and philanthropic legacy
• And most of all, how it can keep your family united—today and for through the generations.
