Defining the Building Blocks for an Enterprise Family with Sara Hamilton

Happy New Year! Welcome to the brand new 2024 season of FOXCast CEO Series.

Today, I have the pleasure and honor of speaking with Sara Hamilton, Founder and Board Chair of Family Office Exchange (FOX). Sara founded FOX as a peer network for family office executives in 1989, which evolved over the ensuing decades into a trusted knowledge partner to family enterprises, a platform for sharing family wealth best practices, and an industry advocate for the importance of private enterprise in a global economy.

In this episode, Sara delves into the conceptual definitions and practical implications of being an enterprise family. The term “enterprise family” has been widely adopted by sophisticated families and some advisors in the UHNW family wealth space, but it’s not clear that everyone understands its true meaning or that there is one universally embraced definition within our industry.

Sara puts forth a clear and compelling definition of what it means and what it takes to be an enterprise family and offers a list of characteristics and behaviors that set enterprise families apart. She then shares her views of the benefits of being an enterprise family, based on her experience of working with many of the leading multigenerational families in North America and globally over the past nearly 4 decades.

Sara provides an outline of her proprietary framework consisting of the 30 Building Blocks for an Enduring Enterprise Family, an invaluable practical tool for families who are starting or accelerating their journey to being a multigenerational enterprise. Sara has developed this framework over the course of 20 years and is currently putting it in the form of a workbook families can use to organize and track their progress as an enterprise.

Sara shares some practical tips for families on how to get started with the 30 Building Blocks if they want to develop or strengthen their family enterprise, providing useful suggestions for both aspiring enterprise families who are just getting started and for those who are more mature and advanced enterprise families already.

Building and maintaining a sophisticated enterprise requires commitment, focus, and investment of time and resources from the family and its individual members. Sara offers her perspective and a synthesis of the feedback she has received from many families on why the time and effort required to keep an enterprise going from generation to generation is well worth it in the long run.

You would not want to miss this deeply insightful and instructive conversation with one of the most influential founders of the family office industry and foremost thought leader and practitioner in the family wealth space, Sara Hamilton.