Category: Family CFO
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What a True Family Office Does Beyond Investment Management
The term “family office” used to mean something quite specific: the organized people, processes, records, reporting, and decision-making structure that helped a wealthy family manage the complexity of its financial life. A family office was not simply an investment strategy, it was more like a CFO. It was the operating system around the family’s wealth.
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Charitable Donations and Holdcos: Beat the Last-Minute Rush
Are you leveraging the full tax benefits of your family foundation or DAF to make the greatest philanthropic impact? Many wealthy Canadian investors have holding companies and family foundations. Over the course of a generation, some investments have accumulated large embedded unrealized gains. It’s common to see investors who have shares purchased decades ago for
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Measuring Portfolio Carbon Emissions: Turning ESG Intentions Into Reportable Results
Many ESG investors want to know whether their investment decisions are actually making a difference. It’s one thing to say that a portfolio is values-aligned, fossil-fuel-reduced, or lower-carbon. It’s another thing to measure the impact in a disciplined way. For investors who move from a broad-market ETF, such as a plain vanilla Canadian equity index
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How Family Office Investors Can Leverage Values-Aligned Indexing
The data is clear, and the debate is largely settled: indexing and passive investing are on the rise for very good reason. Most active managers fail to beat their passive benchmarks. When investors also consider fees being paid, the underperformance of active management becomes even more striking. As a result, retail investors saving for retirement
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Updating Our Privacy Policy: Considering AI Tools
Much of our work involves organizing, validating, and reporting on complex financial information for the families we serve. We gather data from investment statements, custodians, accounting records, spreadsheets, manager reports, and other client documents, then turn that information into clear reporting and better decision-making support. Because privacy and confidentiality are central to that work, we’ve
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Planned Giving at Family Offices
Planned giving conversations are different when you’re engaging with a family office. For fundraisers, especially those focused on legacy giving, the opportunity is significant. But so is the need to understand how these families think, operate, and make decisions. At this level, philanthropy is often professionalized. Family offices often bring a deliberate, structured, and strategic
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Navigating A Family Office: Service Provider’s Perspective
Working with a family office can feel very different from dealing directly with an individual investor or donor. For investment managers, advisors, fund sponsors, and even fundraisers at charities, the experience is often more structured, less personal in the traditional sense, and far more process-driven. Understanding what’s happening behind the scenes, particularly regarding governance, stakeholder
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How We Help Founders with Newfound Liquidity
Many entrepreneurs spend decades building a business or a real estate portfolio. Their expertise is deep, practical, and hard-earned. But when the day finally comes to sell, whether it’s a company, a commercial property, or an entire real estate portfolio, something changes overnight. Instead of operational decisions, you now become the steward of a large
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When Successful Investors Stop Doing Their Own Bookkeeping
Many successful investors spend decades building businesses, managing investments, and handling the administrative details of their financial life themselves. In the early years, that approach makes perfect sense. The systems are simple, the number of accounts is manageable, and doing things personally is usually the most efficient. But at a certain stage of life, often