Managing your family’s financial assets requires uncommon vision. Yet life is strewn with obstacles that blind and hamstring family wealth. In an ever-shifting world, how can family offices do more than just tread water?
A single word holds the answer: alignment. As an “inner office advisor,” and deeply experienced personal development mentor to men of wealth, EVERY family office should implement the most essential changes for the true success they demand.
Whether you’re considering starting a family office or are maintaining one that’s generations strong, my approach provides an unsung perspective that you can put to work immediately.
Ground your office in something even more compelling than its concentrations of returns. Supplement your strength with a refreshing new principal: the power of joy. Here’s how it works.
It begins with the difference between a run-of-the-mill family office and a “quantum” family office.
What is a “quantum” family office?
“Quant-” is an indivisible state of being. A quantum family office is a cohesive, cooperative constant within an ever-shifting landscape. In contrast, most family offices are not anchored in solidity.
Every family office needs to convene a mandatory meeting as soon as possible. The theme of this meeting should directly address one of these two questions:
“How will the mission of the family office be defined?” or “How do we redefine and clarify our mission in light of all that beckons ahead?”
The Meaning of Mission
Alignment of mission is paramount to succeeding on any scale of terms. This is beyond just getting everyone on the same page. For me, a truly aligned mission entails invocation of quantum-level energetic forces to prompt authentic unity, synergy, harmony, and — above all — joy.
Allow me to clarify my standing on this. I am not a “money man.” I’m not a lawyer or a CEO. I am an inner office advisor. And what I provide is in truth more valuable than these important positions.
Why is this? Clarity of mission among office members should always be foremost. This can circumvent future earthquakes within the office and resolve any that are currently existing.
A quantum-level approach orients your office in a place of indivisibility. Where in your family office are there no walls, no geographic consideration? How do you create an un-separable space?
You must directly address the transference of power-sharing within the family crucible. That may be a younger generation coming in and taking over. Or it could take shape as an equal partner who’s such a pain that he must leave.
When you take emotion and put it into an economic equation, and couple that with some potential pathologies and differences in work ethic… you have a recipe for disaster.
Enhancing Your Profits Through Peace & Joy
As an inner office advisor, I serve as a reconciliation specialist for family wealth management.
Have you seen the TV hit “Billions?” If so, you’ll see example after example of financial heavies having on-set psychologists.
Beyond psychology, this amounts to a strategic approach that takes the internal components of the family office and realigns their purpose, mission and vision, as defined by them (no consultant or third-party).
Offices can regard such work, essentially, as an invitation for an internal consigliere and a fiduciary to be shared by all the members of the family office.
Conflict resolution, peaceful transference of leadership, realignment of economic distribution, handling the exit of a member: you need a proper plan in place in order to accomplish these goals. Quantum-oriented service can enable you to go about ensuring such a plan, and such a mission.
People don’t know that place within the office which is the constant. There’s an agreement field. If you have 12 members in your family, that represents 12 different opinions, 12 different interests. How do you uncover the underlying common bond between every member of this group?
You do so through my ability to foster reconciliation and an emphasis on the emotional intelligence of your office wholesale.
What do I mean by reconciliation? I mean a process of conflict resolution through awareness of quantum possibility.
To resolve a conflict, you must first engage in the conflict itself. For example, there’s a family member that wants to depart the office; it’s no longer serving their objective. In this circumstance, we could build a bridge that brings the parties into an understanding that, first of all, this is an agreed-upon move. But it’s important to learn what’s precipitating this move in the first place.
Enhancing Your Family Office with Quantum Science
So far, my message is blindingly clear: I am urging your family office to go “quantum” in terms of its mission. Naturally, mention of the word “quantum” points to the scientific phenomenon of quantum physics or quantum mechanics.
But your office isn’t a science lab: it’s a focused financial enterprise. So what’s the connection between the two?
A quantum-fueled approach makes the link crystal clear. Let me lay out how the science of quantum can dramatically improve the performance of your financial efforts.
Broadly speaking, quantum mechanics incorporates four classes of phenomena for which traditional physics cannot account: quantization, entanglement, uncertainty, and duality.
Quantization: What aspects of your family office are absolute? Solid and unchangeable? These aspects cannot be separated from the office. Lawyers, accounts, and private wealth advisors, however, can indeed all be separate from the office.
For example, you have a physical office. Within the office you have a desk, a chair, artwork, and more. Does this space feel uniform, or is it divided into separate spaces?
My suggestion to you: create one large common space, preferably in the middle, and have offices around the edges. Every space within the office should contain the same theme, colors, feel, textures etc.
This allows the offices and the people that inhabit them know to resonate with your most critical values and principles. It promotes the feeling of being connected as one. True success can emerge when the whole of your office functions beyond the sum of its parts.
Entanglement: Segueing from the principle of quantization, this concept holds that everything and everyone are entangled. In short, there is no hiding or escaping from other members of the office.
Paradoxically, I recommend that you entangle your office and discover the place that connects each person. From this place, everyone can share the commonality of one another and support the growth of the office from the inside out.
Once a month, or quarterly, gather members in person or online to share a story, be it about family or a personal issue. Work is not allowed as a topic. Practice listening to one another, seeing one another. This invokes empathy. It’s gold!
Uncertainty: To successfully navigate the unknown in your office — perhaps the head member is contemplating passing along the reigns — you must first embrace what is certain.
This requires that each member of the office know the vision and mission of the office. It’s not about one member. It’s about the office: that which is greater than the sum of its parts. Uncertainty creates opportunity.
Are your businesses greatly challenged at this moment, from forces like COVID-19 or a subsequent economic downturn? This could actually serve as your signal to productively pivot: i.e., build a plan to fund, support, education, train employees during these times.
If the uncertainty is happening with the inner circle of the office, create situations for bonding, talking, and exploring. Getting in touch with the emotional intelligence of your office is paramount.
Finally, duality: How does your office practice polarity? Think about a battery. It has both a positive and a negative charge. In order for anything to be productive in duality, there must be balancing forces.
If there is a strong male presence in your office, support the empowerment of a female dynamic. If one member is dominating the conversation or overall strategy of the offices, invite another member to lead a counterintuitive initiative to explore other options.
COVID: Opportunity or Disaster?
COVID-19 is yet another topic that bears on the health and prospects of all manners of family offices. This moment is prompting all of us to revise and rethink investment and portfolio risk balancing strategies.
You have probably already modified your investment strategies in-house in light of the crisis. But what are you all likely not doing?
Spreading a benevolent strain of goodwill, compassion, and futuristic promise.
In this manner, COVID and its concomitant chaos in truth offer you the greatest opportunity of a lifetime. It’s your chance to create goodwill in a philanthropic way that perhaps you haven’t done in the past. This could be as simple as issuing $1000 grants toward causes oriented toward the next generation.
In addition, your efforts could be laser-focused on your hometown or adopted city, as a way to spur dynamic locally focused change that produces results from which your community will derive immediate benefit.
AI: Intelligently Integrating Tech Into Your Office
Artificial intelligence is an organic transition from the attention placed on our pandemic. All in all, artificial intelligence is yet another shift transforming the family office environment.
In my opinion, AI will vastly improve productivity and create economies of scale across all business aspects of your office.
But a stern warning: AI also harbors potential to wreak havoc in the well-being of the innermost sanctum of your office — the play where joy, peace, and generational expansion are rooted.
AI is, in sum, a critical choice-point. AI should always be subordinate to the human intelligence of your family office.
If the foundation of your office is flawed, or surrendered to non-human technologies, all that your office values will disintegrate in due time.
Your personal human connection is far more important toward long-term success. Balance your digital opportunities in proper proportion with person-to-person advantages. It’s an inner-to-outer perspective that bears a positive impact on all you’re wanting from the office at large.
What’s Truly Holding Your Family Office Back?
Beyond AI, there are other potential obstacles which your office must reconcile. These expand beyond just data security, scaling staff resources, or an increase in the complexity of accounting and reporting.
In truth, the greatest challenges to family offices lie within, not without. Here are the five most important concerns to address right away in order to shore-up your office’s mission for success:
Interior Sabotage. In many offices, family members are fighting among not only themselves, but also against their overall mission. However, this tension can serve as a chance to deepen relationships among your office members, inspiring ways to rework the office that removes burdens and re-balances everyone’s energies.
A Distaste for Joy, A Default to Conflict. Unfortunately, people know conflict more than they know peace and joy. It’s easier to default into palace intrigue than into peace. Yet this is an opportunity to find harmony and de-charge hostility.
A Belief That You Are Separate. Members of family offices often forget what binds them together. They too often defer to their individuality, not to their collective strength. However, this concern can be revised as a chance to operate as a coherent and cohesive unit, which improves your grasp on mission, from philanthropic to financial aims.
Forgetting The Family Legacy. “Pass the legacy forward” ought to be your office’s watchword, full stop. Don’t think from a short-sighted perspective. This is your chance to support the family legacy beyond yourself, for the generations to come. Sponsoring local youth to further their skills, for example, is a prime way to pay your legacy forward, much more meaningful than your name on a building.
Lastly — Fear of Quantum Success. High achievement by each office member is indispensable to the legacy and longevity of your endeavors. When one person succeeds, you all do. See any fear of success as a chance to fuse as a unit and propel yourselves collectively to greater heights.
Managing Generational Change
Generational change and succession planning are also sensitive yet essential matters to properly address within your office. Now more than ever, younger generations find themselves further and further removed from the original generation that created the wealth to begin with. Yet I have devised a game-plan for your office to grapple with these key concerns.
Here’s how to re-familiarize all generations with one another, and re-empower new office stewardship in the same action.
#1: Celebrating Family History: Storytelling that honors lineage is essential. I suggest framing a day in which remarkable anecdotes on what defines your family’s values can be shared. Of course the family matriarch or patriarch should begin the process.
Yet in addition, this day must include the cooperation from the family’s younger members, encouraging them to share experiences, values and desires that are in harmony with the lineage. This showcases how all branches of the family tree can come to terms on what’s important to them all individually.
#2: Honoring the Core Principles and Ethos of Founders: In this step, you would be examining what the inaugural generations represent. How did they serve their community, their faith, their environment? How was it relevant then?
#3: Honoring the Core Principles and Ethos of New Stewards: This replicates Step 2 but re-frames the latest generation as not just heirs but as stewards of an ever-flowing legacy.
#4: Passing it Forward: In this final step, you construct a plan that communicates the family office’s vision moving forward, in light of all that has been voiced previously.
For example, say that a previous generation was heavily weighted in oil and gas, yet the new generation wants to transition into more current technologies. But an emphasis on dynamic charitable giving can serve as a through-line that connects these interests. Generosity can serve as the glue that ensures lineage and legacy remain intact and thriving.
Generating a Quantum Approach
If you are curious as to my personal take on where your family office currently stands, I invite you to contact me.
Thank you,
Adam C. Hall