Standing on the shoulders of giants

It is both a privilege and a challenge to be born into a family with a great legacy. As the great-grandson of Robert Fleming, the man who built the Fleming family business some 150 years ago, I believe it is a challenge that cannot be met without two things: putting the right governance in place and engaging advisors who are able to provide guidance that goes beyond the technical.

The great Barbara Broccoli, daughter of Cubby, who first started making the James Bond films, once asked me how it felt to be ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’. It was a great question and one I had never asked myself before. The answer, of course, was that being born into a family like my own can be at once daunting and incredibly empowering.

It is a paradox that faces many of the next-generation members of the families with whom many advisors work. Time and again, experience tells us that the key to managing the situation well is engaging advisors who have the technical expertise to put the right governance in place while also having the ability to employ their softer skills in understanding the human side of family office work.

The experience of my own family is that a trust company provides the governance. My father was chair of the trust company that held the family business. As a structure, it has taken us through many major events: the when, why and how of selling our family business; what to do next; dealing with liquidity; working with brilliant (and not-so-brilliant) advisors and the challenge of how to coordinate all that as a family group.

Although perhaps not the most exciting prospect for families to consider, governance can be an incredibly positive thing for family businesses. For me, growing up in a culture of governance via the trust company has made a real difference to my sense of purpose and plan. I have watched the trust company deal with an extraordinary range of events, during which I have come to learn that the only thing we all know to expect is the unexpected.

There appears to be a misunderstanding in the marketplace that governance can be understood simply as a series of events, underpinned by structure or tax advice. Actually, governance must have the family (with all its living, breathing dynamics) at its core. For this reason, it is crucial to find advisors equipped with the holistic expertise that families require.

These are the sorts of areas where holistic advice that extends beyond governance starts to come into its own. The risk is that too many advisors fall back on their technical capabilities alone. Of course, those are very important, but technical capabilities are available all around the world. What is harder to find is advisors with empathy, who display moral courage and principles, and who have that rare ability to challenge the important, and often sensitive, issues head on.