Welcome to the Family Enterprise Sustainability Index: Assessing the current and future sustainability of your family's shared ownership.

Introduction to the Index

The Family Enterprise Sustainability Index provides a family with a way to determine how prepared they are for their future. It helps the family to assess their current preparation along five dimensions and to look forward to what they think they will need as their journey continues.  Each family member responds anonymously, and their responses are mapped along with the others' responses providing a composite of the total family view. 

The book, The Essential Roadmap: Navigating Family Enterprise Sustainability in a Changing World describes the framework upon which the index is based. There you can read about what sustainability means, its five dimensions, and how an enterprising family might first, understand the challenges and opportunities before them, and second, identify the steps they might take to accomplish the practices important to pursuing sustainability. We encourage you to explore the concepts in greater depth there. However, if you have not read the book yet, the overview below and in the "View Your Results" section is designed not only to introduce you to the index, but also to provide a foundation so that you can interpret your results.

About the Index

Enterprising families by their very nature are futurists. While they might have been, or even currently are a “business owning” family, as they look out into the future they see themselves as moving beyond owners of a business and more as “builders of assets” over time. They are anticipating the future needs of their members, thinking about possible scenarios, how far into the future they want to co-exist as a larger asset sharing family, and creating a vision of that future.

These families are unique in many ways, especially in that that they share financial assets and choose to face many opportunities and challenges together. As they consider their capacity for sustainability—as individual family members and as multi-generational, multi-branch families—preparation is fundamental. What preparation will they need in order to take on the opportunities and challenges along the way?

In preparing, they might be asking questions such as:

• Should the family continue to remain together as a family sharing assets? If they choose to, what are the reasons for doing so?
  
• Does the shaping of our family legacy allow each generation to contribute to and expand it?
  
• What capacities do the next generation family members need to lead our family enterprise in the future?
  
• Do we have a plan for how to meet the current financial needs of family members while still assuring that there will be sufficient resources for future generations?
  
• How does each branch, generation, and the family as a whole make decisions?
  

We believe that sustainability is much more than preserving or growing wealth. The way we think about it grew out of our work with our clients and the realization that a new lens or framework was required to capture the breadth and nuances. As we were solidifying our thinking, we came across the writings of Gro Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway. She challenged nations of the planet to consider that unlimited use of natural resources by present generations will risk the existence of future generations. This framework (greatly expanded in the new UN sustainability program) focuses on thoughtfully balancing current and future needs resonated as the right approach for addressing the challenges faced by enterprising families.

The leap from risking depletion of natural resources to risking depletion of wealth and opportunity in wealthy families is not as big as one would think. Real wealth sustainability applies to families in terms of how they utilize and preserve family enterprise resources, prepare the next generation for responsible oversight and interaction with family enterprise financial and human capital assets, and transition the opportunities of wealth to future generations. At the core of this concept is the understanding that enterprising families are made up of individuals that are interconnected in distinctive and complex ways. They share risk, opportunities, and challenges as well as the responsibility and accountability of managing and growing the family wealth, both human and financial. Our experience tells us they are looking for positive ways of working together.

Start the Index

Set up Your User Profile, Take the Index, Analyze Your Results, and Create Your Family's Roadmap to Sustainability--It is that simple. All your information is confidential and anonymous. Any information used for research or benchmarking will be in aggregate form only.

Why the Index?

The goal of The Family Enterprise Sustainability Index is to provide families of wealth with a beginning understanding of what they are currently doing to support sustainability and what they agree or disagree is the pathway to actually achieving their vision. Ultimately it provides the objectives for a roadmap to achieving family wealth sustainability. It is comprised of specific practices that if applied regularly,

• Allows any number of family members of a multigenerational family to log in, participate in the index and instantly view the results of their viewpoint combined with other family members, both to show average family viewpoints as well as to compare individual perspectives to one another.
• Encourages review and development of behaviors that will increase the likelihood of your family achieving sustainability.
• Lays the groundwork for the family to create a strategic plan to achieve real wealth sustainability of their financial and human capital resources.

Families are often interested to know if other families are experiencing the same or different challenges. They also want to know how their efforts to become sustainable compare with what other families are doing. As more and more families participate in the Sustainability Index, you will also be able to compare your results with that of other families.

Who Should Complete the Index?

While one individual can take the index on their own, it is best used by several members of a family. After each family member completes the index, the whole family can compare their perceptions by discussing similarities and differences.

How Much Time Does It Take?

While it takes approximately 20 minutes to take the index, viewing, digesting and planning related to the results will be variable. The results are in real-time, so you will be able to view yours and other's results immediately. You can also stop and start, or come back as many times as you wish to complete the survey or view results. It will continue to update as more family members participate.

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