Your assets — EY Family Enterprise DNA Model
In family enterprises, private assets and company assets are often linked and intermingled. As the complexity of managing the family wealth grows, families look to professionalize this process and improve its efficiency through family office functions.
Risk management
Structuring and managing wealth is a challenge. To preserve their assets in the long term, entrepreneurial families anticipate changes, manage all kinds of risks and frequently re-examine their investments.
When contemplating how to protect assets from risk, it is important to take a broad view. A comprehensive risk management framework will help to protect the family’s capital as well as its privacy and reputation.
Family office strategy
Family enterprises set up family offices to establish central coordination of wealth. These special vehicles help the owners create quick decision-making routes and streamline reporting at a relatively low cost.
A family office can serve as a safety net if the leading decision-maker is incapacitated when important changes need to be made. It provides absolute confidentiality and reduces the family’s dependence on third parties.
Tax management
Tax management requires a full picture of the family’s assets, from trusts and real estate to airplanes and yachts, to protect personal wealth. Family enterprises should start their tax planning early to find the right approaches — sometimes looking decades ahead. They also should align individual family members to their tax planning strategy to reach consensus on personal and corporate tax planning.
The next generation is an important component of the tax planning process considering the tax ramifications regarding succession. Plus, their increased global mobility has the potential to cause severe tax issues.
Wealth
Wealth planning starts with the family’s goals about what they want their wealth to achieve. Beyond generating wealth for their successors and shareholders, families often have aspirational goals related to charitable giving. Family enterprises need to develop a strategy to achieve these objectives.
Successful families have a common purpose and shared values that help them decide what matters to the family and the business. They create roadmaps that can guide their decision-making, and they rely on strong governance frameworks to help family members manage their differences in a way that preserves cohesion and does not jeopardize the enterprise’s future.
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