For ultra-high-net-worth families, wealth is rarely the hardest thing to manage well over time. Governance across generations often is. Michael Gold, founder and chief executive of Gold Family Wealth in Westport, Connecticut, has built his firm’s specialty practice around exactly that persistent challenge.
Gold’s team develops multigenerational governance frameworks alongside enterprise risk mapping and advanced modeling, tools he says are wasted if they stay siloed inside one department of a firm. Instead, Gold Family Wealth pushes those frameworks to inform decisions across the entire Westport firm’s broader advisory work with every client.
Aligning the Family and the Plan
The problem Gold most often encounters is not a lack of planning documents but a disconnect between the documents already in place. Family governance structures get built without reference to the estate plan, and philanthropic vehicles get created without any real tie to the family’s succession strategy down the road.
Michael Gold Westport, who has spent 25 years working with complex families, says the fix requires treating governance as an ongoing coordination exercise rather than a one-time document drafting project. Advisors need to keep checking that the pieces still fit together as circumstances inevitably change over years and decades.
Preparing for What Comes Next
With close to three quarters of privately held business owners expecting to transition their businesses within a decade, Gold argues that governance planning has to happen well ahead of any transaction. Families who wait until a sale is already underway, he notes, typically discover the gaps in their governance structure at the worst possible time, when little can still be fixed.
Gold’s Westport team walks new clients through a governance audit before touching any investment allocation, checking that estate documents, family agreements, and philanthropic vehicles all point in the same direction. Only once that groundwork is settled, he says, does it make sense to move on to the portfolio decisions most families assume come first. Visit this page to learn more.
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