Wealth of Wisdom

Assessing Your Family's True Needs

Keith Whitaker

When you review the table of contents of this book, a particular chapter or exercise might stand out to you, as addressing your family's true needs.

You may wonder, however, “What are my family's true needs?” So often there are possibilities for growth and learning that we are not even aware of.

This section offers you a way to assess your family's needs when it comes to living well with significant wealth. It does so by adapting the Family Balance Sheet, an assessment tool designed by Wise Counsel Research, a consultancy that works with some of the most enterprising families around the world.

Wise Counsel's Family Balance Sheet was developed based on research into what leads families to succeed when they are engaged over multiple generations in managing significant financial wealth or a family business. This research includes Wise Counsel Research's 100-Year Family Study, which studied more than 100 families around the world who have transitioned a family enterprise through at least three generations of family leadership.¹ From this research and practice, Wise Counsel identified five factors of long-term family success, each of which aligns with one of five forms of nonfinancial or, as we call it, “Qualitative Capital”:

	Success Factors	Qualitative Capital
1	Long-term resiliency, growth, and development	Human Capital
2	Shared values and core purpose	Legacy Capital
3	Cross-generational engagement and support	Family ...