Family Business Audiocast | Episode 42 | Adrienne Penta and Lane McDonald

Available to Listen Now On: Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, iHeart, YouTube

New Episodes Live: Subscribe to receive exclusive invitations to upcoming episodes of the Family Business Audiocast. Join us as we explore the pivotal strategies and stories behind successful family enterprises. Click to Follow on LinkedIn.

—————————————————

The fortieth audiocast session of the Family Business Audiocast with Bill

R. Adam Smith: Welcome to the Family Business Audiocast on LinkedIn. I am Adam Smith, creator of this audiocast series, and a warm welcome to our live audience on LinkedIn today and for those listening in the future. Today I am pleased to host Adrienne Penta and Lane McDonald. Great to have you today.

Adrienne Penta: Great to be here, thanks.

Lane McDonald: A pleasure to be here, Adam, thank you.

R. Adam Smith: Great, so not only are you guys legends in the industry and a wonderful firm and have amazing pedigrees, but you're podcasting today for the first time together, I think.

Adrienne Penta: I know, it's great. I'm glad to be here, Blake.

Lane McDonald: Yes, always glad to be a partner of Adrienne's.

R. Adam Smith: All right, friendly audience, a few words on you guys.

Adrienne Penta is a highly respected leader in wealth management, specializing in helping alternate with families, family offices, and of course their business owners align their wealth within their long - term goals. And she is the National Head of Wealth Management at SCS Financial Services, and there she leads the firm's advisory services, focus on clients receiving integrated financial, state, and philanthropic planning. And before that she was a principal at Brown Brothers Harriman, where she founded the Center for Women and Wealth as well, and there she pioneered initiatives to engage women in wealth creation and governance.

I'm actually a block away from Brown Brothers Harriman, I'm looking at the building as we speak. Yeah, with a background as a trust and estates attorney, Adrienne brings a sophisticated perspective to multi - generational planning, succession, and legacy strategy. Legacy is a big topic on our podcast, making her a thought leader in the family enterprise space in the country and in the world.

It's wonderful to have her today. And Lane is her colleague, is a distinguished investment leader with over three decades of experience managing multi - billion dollar portfolios across asset classes. He is the CIO of SCS Financial Services.

He's also the Chair Investment Committee, and he sets the firm's strategic direction, overseeing asset allocation, manager due diligence, and research across public and private markets. And prior to SCS, he played a pivotal role in overseeing investments for the owners of Fidelity, where he held key positions there and previously at HMC, Harvard Management Company, managing portfolios over 7 billion. His expertise is deep in alternate investments, of course, private equity, hedge funds, institutional asset classes, and this makes him a trusted advisor to the family enterprise and firm and office ecosystem, navigating the complexities and their investing activities.

So we're very pleased to have both of you today. Let's get started. We'll start with Adrienne.

Yes. You've worked closely with families on philanthropic strategy, and you serve on various advisory boards, of course, in the space. Let's talk a bit about some disconnects between intent and execution in family giving strategies from a wealth planning and tax perspective.

And let's talk a bit about donor advised funds and direct investments and structured philanthropy. How does it all evolve today into the priorities of the other rising generations? So, you know, philanthropy as a whole, and then next gen around, we'll start with philanthropy.

Adrienne Penta: Great topic. I do think that philanthropy, I often say, is a gateway to talking to kids more deeply and the next generation broadly about money and wealth and what it's for. It's an easy starter topic, and so we often use philanthropy as a tool to start those conversations in families about what is wealth, what's its purpose, how do we think about it as a family.

I think that where families, and unfortunately I've seen it many times go poorly, is they think that setting up a private foundation or some other type of philanthropic vehicle, it doesn't really matter if it's a private foundation or a donor advised fund, but that they are then serving it to their children on a silver platter because it is a great opportunity for them to work together as siblings, and perhaps even after their parents are no longer there. And that's a little bit misguided because the opportunity to work together as a family is fantastic around philanthropy, but we also have to prepare kids and the next generation to work together, and where that so often goes wrong for families is when they don't do that work during life, and then kids are surprised by the family foundation landing in their laps as a vehicle that their parents intended for them to run together after they're no longer there to give guidance around it. So that's not a recipe for success.

You know, it's a better situation, I think, where families start giving the next generation a seat at the table, and that can start a ta young age as just an observer to the philanthropy or maybe as part of a junior board, and then start actually giving up or giving real agency and control to the next generation as part of that governance committee, as part of a decision-making committee while they're there, during life, and putting some guidance around that, some guiding principles around what it means to be part of the foundation or what it means to be part of a family's philanthropy, but not just bestowing it upon the next gen and thinking that it's all going to go smoothly and evolve over time to be a collaborative working group.

Often we don't grow up, and we weren't born into families, knowing how to work with our siblings and knowing how to make business-like decisions with them, right? We grow up with siblings arguing over airspace and actual space and all sorts of things, but that's not often a framework for good decision-making.

R. Adam Smith: That's great. We've discussed this topic of multi-generational philanthropic planning on the show a great deal with experts like Christina Wing, Victoria Gonskaya, Karen Costa, Elizabeth Bagger, interesting people, and last week we were planning for our podcast on Friday, which is with Octavian Graf Palade, whose family goes back to a thousand years in Austria, and he is really focused on the early involvement preparation of the children, and he just launched his company yesterday, actually, called the Anti-Fragile Family. The Anti-Fragile Family launched yesterday, actually, where he's guiding families in Europe, especially, with a dichotomy of vulnerability and sharing and preparation.

But also, your point, I think it's super important in involving the next generation early at the table to empower them and not overwhelm them, but then we won't have time on this podcast, but also raise the issue of the charter and the governance and the board and the role play of the siblings and next-gen within the philanthropy or the charity or the business units in terms of who holds the cards and the power within the next-gen. So that's a good topic.

Lane, you have managed investments for, of course, SES, which is a wonderful organization, and also Fidelity, serving some sophisticated families in the process. And at this level, capital deployment isn't just about making money, of course, for families. As I've learned from my family office clients and billionaires, it's much more than money, as wealth and legacies define both hard and soft power and also influence and legacy.

So let's say, what's a lesson that family capital strategy, let's say, most, the highest majority of families, let's say, what do they miss when they think about managing their money that goes beyond the paper wealth itself?

Lane McDonald: So Adam, listen, you obviously have experienced the space and summarized it very well. I think there are so many elements to it. What I think most families miss is just having that self-awareness of trying as much as possible to take the emotion out of investing.

I think in many families, there can be an emotional attachment. There can be a personal interest or passions that come into investing, which is absolutely their prerogative. But at some point, I think it's important to really understand and frame that as to what's being done for non-investment reasons and what's being done truly for investment reasons or legacy reasons.

To really box those things so that there really is clear direction, I think, from an investment standpoint about what you're trying to accomplish. And I think that's where it can sometimes be missed and sometimes confusion. I kind of compare it a little bit to someone who buys a professional sports team.

It's that piece of great, it's passion, it's an interest. But oftentimes, the best owners are those that let the team or the management kind of lead the organization and be the day-to-day as opposed to leaning in. And so I think it's really important with families where they have domain expertise and knowledge to apply that in certain sectors, but at the same time, to have the humility and objectivity to know where they need to rely on their professional team of investors to execute for them.

R. Adam Smith: That makes a lot of sense. It's a good analogy. Next point, together, many firms talk about preparing the next gen, as we're talking about now, but then what are they really preparing for?

So there's the for-profit and non-profit, there's the wealth, there's the power, there's the legacy, there's sticking with the family or wanting to move on from the family or the owners, let's say, not willing to hand over the keys or not willing to agree on the human capital front. So what's the greatest risk? Let's say the next gen is not really engaged enough, as you were saying, Adrienne, or that they'll be giving too much responsibility too soon, if you both can comment on that.

Adrienne Penta: Yeah, maybe I'll take a shot at that and then let Lane add if he has. I think that raising a responsible next generation, I think that no matter what you're doing, whether it's running an operating business, as many families do, investing together, running a family office, running a private foundation, all of those things require the next generation to be good decision makers, to be collaborative with their partners in the family, and to have the confidence around their decisions.

So it doesn't really matter what we're preparing the next gen to do in any of those contexts where they have to work within a family to do something and to do it well. I think there's a couple parts to it, and I thinkthat we talk about next gen engagement at SCS as really having three legs of the stool. One is family communication, starting from an early age about wealth, but really about the purpose of wealth and the values within the family that drive decision making around wealth.

Certainly talk a lot more about that if you're interested. The second leg of the stool is giving kids age-appropriate responsibility and autonomy for decision making. And then the third is obviously education, skill building, and confidence building around decision making around wealth.

I'm going to go back to the second one because I think it's where so often parents get stuck, is with giving kids the opportunity to be independent and to make decisions on their own with support, obviously, with the right framework and family around them, but giving them the opportunity to make the wrong decision sometimes and giving them the opportunity to own that risk of failure. We all know, all of us who have made bad decisions, which I think is probably all of us, know that we learn a whole lot when we make a bad decision and we have to go forward and correct our action or to take a different plan because it didn't work. That's an incredible learning experience.

So to give kids the opportunity to do that inappropriate ways, you give a 10-year-old $20 bill as allowance and let him not put it away, hold it in his hand, and lose it. That's an acceptable risk. It's better than losing $10 million at age 25.

And then that period, I think, that is the stickiest and the hardest to navigate as parents is the post-college years, the post-school years, where kids are out in the big bad world and they're trying to figure out where they should be, what they should do, where they're going to land professionally. And very easy for a lot of wealthy families to wrap a safety net around those kids so that there's really no risk of failure. And if there's no risk of failure, kids don't have the feeling that their decisions matter, right?

They have to own that independence and risk because really important for the next generation of even very wealthy families to feel that they can make a difference in their own path in life and then in turn in how their larger family system makes decisions. And if there's no risk of failure, if you lose that job and I get you another job, or if there's just sort of a spigot of money or other resources that never turns off, then it's very hard for the next generation to feel as if they can really have an impact. So autonomy and responsibility I think is probably the most important leg of that stool.

R. Adam Smith: Lane, you have the smart cookie here. Do you want to just say ditto? Or you got something else?

Lane McDonald: I think Adrienne cover edit perfectly.

R. Adam Smith: We'll keep going. We'll go back to Lane. Your career has covered every major asset class and you've been inside the most complex investment structures, still standing, congratulations.

What's one investment area you fundamentally have changed your mind on over the last decade or so?

Lane McDonald: So I'd say kind of going back to my time at Harvard Management Company, and this probably won't be surprising to you, Adam, or to Adrienne, but I think hedge funds and particularly equity long short is an area that's evolved so much from a historical standpoint. And so when I took over the public market side at Harvard Management Company, which included equity long short and long only and portable alpha, it was a point oncoming up in history where the meeting hedge funds had done so well in those prior periods, like 90s into the 2000s. But then the model came very highly misaligned, the traditional equity long short model of the Tiger model, 100 long, 150 short specifically.

And what that led to from A, the market becoming very efficient and there not being enough alpha there, but the misalignment of that model where you were really paying for beta performance, right? When you're paying someone 20% carry over zero in many of those structures. So it just became a question of, what is that model?

How do you use that going forward? And when you look at the share of the alpha in terms of who captured it, it was really the GP, right? As opposed to the investor.

And in that time period, we really shifted within HMC to a heavy focus on trying to create greater alignment. So taking equity long short managers who we like their long book and moving that into long focus strategies, but measuring them relative to the appropriate benchmark for whatever their strategy was, whether it's S&P 500 or IFA. So I think that's one area that not unlike many others, folk shave really cooled.

And certainly for me, it was an eye-opener in that period of time and certainly has informed my thinking about how high the bar is on hedge funds broadly, which means so much more than equity long short, but it's certainly informed my views as we apply them here at SCS.

R. Adam Smith: Yeah. The public markets and the institutionalization and block trading and speed trading has really changed the public markets. One of my favorite books in all time for finance is The Random Block Down Wall Street by Burton Macchio.

What do you think of the efficient frontier and the ability for retail investors to still be able to perform versus the stock market?

Lane McDonald: Oh boy, I hope I'm not going to rain on too many folks parade here. I just think in many markets today, there are very few inefficiencies that exist. I'm a believer that duration is the greatest advantage that exists in investing today ,because when you have a longer duration, you have the ability to fight through cycles, to have a different perspective.

I think the market in broadly has become much too short-term focused. And I think many retail investors, therefore, can be too short-term focused. That's not all, but certainly some who like to trade.

And I think that's a very dangerous game in terms of given the knowledge, the information, the access is quite limited in, oh, by the way, the inefficiencies are just not really there, given the citadels of the world or the millenniums of the world and the access what they have in many ways is so vastly superior that I think it's very, very difficult from a retail standpoint to find value unless you can take a longer term view and find those great businesses back to the Peter Lynch model, the famous Fidelio Magellan manager, where you find those companies that you do believe will compound over a long period of time. And oh, by the way, Amazon, Apple go down the list. That would have been a great strategy.

So I think those types of thoughts for retail investors where I really like this business, I like the future are thoughtful and can be very productive. I think trading-wise, I think that is a dangerous game for retail.

R. Adam Smith: Speaking of risk and short-term decision-making, family offices are increasingly drawn to alternative investments. We see this massive trend the last five years or 10 years. We see that data with the reports by Camden, UBS, Northern Trust, JP Morgan, et cetera.

And Lane, you've overseen some of these institutional portfolios and Adrienne, you've advised families on the institutional of their alts portfolio. So maybe just a bit on the family office front, how does SCS guide them on risk in terms of the efficient frontier and the baskets of alts coming into a portfolio these days? What's the standard?

Let's talk about that a bit. And then when you're done, we'll talk about the endowment model.

Lane McDonald: Great. And so from an overall standard standpoint, we continue here at SCS and certainly everywhere I've been in my career, including our management company, have leaned very much into alts. You're right, Adam.

And then there's been more of a consensus view in that area is that either good or dangerous, certainly time will tell. But back to my comment about duration being the greatest advantage that exists, that certainly leads to alts specifically and privates in particular within the broad alts category, where I do believe there continue to be more inefficiencies in that market, more ways to create and extract value. And so we continue to lean into that area.

I do think in terms of where those inefficiencies exist are focusing our capital on domain expertise and those that have domain expertise in particular areas and particularly at the lower end of the market, mid-cap, small-cap, micro-cap, in those expressions, whether it's buyout, growth equity, or venture. I've been in this market. I was a GP for 13 years before I went to Harvard Management Company.

I am a believer and continue to see through our managers that in efficiencies exist, but it takes true domain expertise. And whether that's you have some sort of edge, it maybe an operational edge. It could be a sourcing edge.

It could be a strategic edge. But you have an ability to look around corners. You have ability to capture or source unique situations.

And at the smaller end of the market where there's less capital, I do believe that is where those inefficiencies lie. So I think folks who deploy their capital in sort of large kind of dollars in bigger vehicles, I think that ends up lending itself to more beta-type returns or beta-minus returns in those asset classes, applying a public market construct to something like private equity. But I think those that are nimble and really talented have an ability to continue to outperform meaningfully.

R. Adam Smith: And then, Adrienne, on the family office side, looking at alt products for, let's say, a single family office of $1 to $10 billion or $1 to $5, let's say s mall to mid-sized. It's tricky for them, I think, to get enough choice and access and internal diligence that there is a value to outsourcing that to consultants or private banks or an SCS or maybe even getting access to a case or a capital. What's your thought on the construction of the alts portfolio?

I'd like to say the non-hedge fund side is for the private equity venture, let's say real estate. Hedge funds are more kind of shrunk and it's more high beta, could be one-off. But let's say for the mature asset classes, private equity, real estate, and venture capital, what do you think of my comment there?

And then secondly, is what do you think of the alpha between the, let's say, the quality of the manager of the fund versus the quality of the organization?

Adrienne Penta: Yeah, I would broaden that out a little bit, do, Adam, do. I think it's a conversation around family offices and what they insource and what they outsource. And I think family offices have to be really careful in making that decision across all types of things, including alternative assets.

It's funny, Lane and I were just chatting about this the other day. And Lane, I think that your analysis here is really good around diversity, especially with sub $5billion family offices about whether they are able to get exposure in alternative asset classes individually without going to a place like SCS to do it for them. Very hard to doat that asset level.

And Lane, you had a great analysis on this that I'll maybe let you walk through quickly because I think it was spot on. And I think very good reason to outsource and to use a partner in thinking about alternatives exposure.

Lane McDonald: Really, having come from where I did in terms of having a large capital base, I certainly speak with a lot of families and I consistently advise those who don't have at least $5 billion that I think you're much better off outsourcing, whoever that may be, right? And you have to be very, very thoughtful about that because there are a lot of people who want money from family offices, but who does it really, really well? I obviously voted with my feet by joining here, so I believe in this.

But from a dollar standpoint, let's just kind of say simplistic, you take a $2 billion family office. If you think about your exposure to private equity, it's going to be 20% of that, so it's $400 million. Now you kind of back track that to saying, if you're really going to be doing this right, you're kind of going to want maybe 50% of that to be in funds, 200 million, 50% to be in co-investments, which is 200 million to arbitrage down that fee and carry drag to something that's more reasonable.

Now, if you have $200 million to invest in funds, by default, if you kind of pick a minimum of 20 funds, that's $10 million per fund. For sure, you're not going to get $200 million of co-invest from that because you just don't have a big enough checkbook to matter to really access that, separate and apart from actually hiring the people who can actually execute that for you. And so that's where I really think folks get really hung up about wanting to have a family office or building a family office, but from a capability standpoint, it's really hard to do it well.

I say this many times, anyone can be an investor. All you need is money. If you want to be a great investor, that is a very different question and a very much, very, very difficult thing to execute on.

But I feel like in my career, I've seen through my lenses as a private equity person, then as an allocator right at HMC, where we had 80 GPs, 200 funds and access to many of the best managers, public, private, being great at this is very hard. And that's where I just think you have to have the humility to know what you're good at and the humility to know when you're better off partnering.

R. Adam Smith: Good. We're going to wrap up the next five minutes. And we've covered kind of our go-to thoughts for the day, but I want to pivot a bit to legacy and purpose.

It's my favorite topic. I've written on it several times with practitioners and academics and experts alongside me atfamilybusiness.org, which I make a plug for. Pleased to have won an award for an article I did with Professor Matthew Hughes of Lancaster this month on the blend of investing with your head and your heart, not just philanthropy, but the purpose of wealth management and creation that is impactful for both the wealth and the society or the community.

So I'd love kind of to hear how SCS looks at the mission and the purpose of wealth for its families that goes even beyond philanthropy and talks about legacy. And I'd like for you to both comment on that. And then lastly, maybe comment on what does legacy typically mean for your clients?

Adrienne Penta: Those are great questions, Adam. It's also one of the areas that I'm passionate about, and I've written a whole bunch on and helped create a discipline that we use at SCS called values-based planning. Frankly, every family we work with has slightly different values.

No family is the same. Nobody parents the same way as the next family. So it's a very personal conversation with our clients about what motivates them, what are the values and the purposes that motivate them to how they use their time, how they use their wealth, how they think about philanthropy or anything else for that matter.

And we often say money in itself is just a means to an end. So where we spend a lot of time with clients is trying to figure out what the purpose is behind the wealth. And this came from my experience as a trust and estates attorney and working with families around estate planning.

I'd often say, let's look back at your estate plan. And so many families, even wealthy families who have spent hours and hours and hours on estate planning would so often say, I don't even remember what my estate plan says. And that is because so often the planning that is done for clients, even ultra high net worth clients is not connected to their values or what they care most about.

So that's where I personally start with a family in terms of what do you want to accomplish and why is that? And the benefit of starting with values is not only that you get a better plan, that your philanthropy is more meaningful, that everybody around the table is more engaged, but it creates a more durable plan for the future. And one that is easier to talk about with the next generation.

Of high net worth clients, everybody has an estate plan, but almost everyone has hesitated to share with the next generation. And why haven't they shared the plan? Why haven't they talked about what it is they're doing with their wealth?

Because it's really hard to do. But if you start with values, if you start with talking about what you're passionate about, what is most important to you and where that came from in your life, because all of us can connect our purpose with stories usually that occurred to us either in childhood or young adulthood, things that we saw our parents go through or challenges that our families of origin navigated, that's usually where your values around wealth come from.

Whether you saw a parent lose a job or a bad investment being made or money being used to create some excellent outcome in the world, those are usually the stories that provide us the values that then govern how we ourselves use wealth as we move into adulthood and beyond. So by telling those stories, sharing a historical perspective is an easy starting point to talk about why you're planning the way that you are. The issue I think with not communicating in families and why so many families hesitate to communicate around wealth is that they're worried about getting questions that they don't have answers to.

So if we start with why with families before we put pen to paper, we've answered the questions that are going to derive from the plan because we start with the hard questions versus the tax-driven planning. Tax is obviously a part of it.

R. Adam Smith: Lane, anything further?

Lane McDonald: Adam, that sure feels like another ditto because Adrienne covered that so well. I'm happy to address it from a financial standpoint though, but I think it feeds into everything that Adrienne said about just purpose and everything elsewhere I ended up obviously focusing on the investment side about what the purpose of that wealth is from a family standpoint and also from a legacy stand point often, which means where you want to apply that from philanthropically. And so I've been lucky enough to work with some wonderful families who do great things.

R. Adam Smith: So I'll adjust it for you for your final topic, which is thinking about legacy. Let's say in the entire country, give us one or two or three major family businesses, family offices, billionaire ecosystems that you admire that are building a legacy and building a company, a brand, a legacy, a family ecosystem that is functioning well, properly, and respected.

Adrienne Penta: Adam, I would actually, as you know, women and wealth is something that's really close to my own heart. I think what we're seeing right now happening with some of the largest philanthropists in the country who happen to be women, you know, thinking about Melinda Gates as one, there's really excellent work being done there that I think can be a lesson and be learned from from all kinds of families about being intentional and action-oriented and forward thinking around what philanthropy means today and what it could mean in the future and really interesting around trust-based philanthropy. And I think trust-based philanthropy obviously has a lot to say about philanthropy, but I think it has a lot that we can learn around it also around families and wealth and how far that element of trust, once you've created trust with either an organization or with the next generation, how it can pay dividends for along time for that family or that entity and in what you're trying to accomplish. So, you know, I would look there because I think there's some groundbreaking work being done in a way we haven't seen it be done before at scale, and there's a lot more to come too, I think.

Lane McDonald: I would add, I think there are so many families that do it well. I've been lucky enough to have engaged with many of them and partnered with many of them in different ways. There are a couple that do come to mind.

R. Adam Smith: I mean, congratulations on that as well.

Lane McDonald: Yeah, well, I feel very, very lucky to have had some great relationships with many of these folks.

From a philanthropic standpoint and kind of reach standpoint, I think the Walton family has done a nice job. A good friend of mine, Rupal Poltak, leads that family office.

And I think what they've done across various branches and generationally is really interesting in terms of the impact that they've had. And also certainly from an investment standpoint, if I were to pick someone on the newer side, the family that I've spent time with that I really have great respect for, because they're just really good people and really thinking about doing this the right way is the Haslam family down in Tennessee. And what they've done from an investment standpoint and what they've done in the community is really quite wonderful.

And Bill Haslam was the governor of Tennessee. And so that mindset, and from a philanthropic standpoint, from a family standpoint, really good people, really wanting to do the right thing. I've been very impressed with them as well.

R. Adam Smith: Those are great examples on all fronts. That last family is not as well known, but I'm familiar with them. And I agree with you that the wealth seeping over into the community and into the local society, not just sort of bleeding and diluting into the world, I think it's very important, particularly in today's economy, that is quite bifurcated in terms of wealth, and particularly the second tier cities and towns.

I think we see now the importance of large family offices and family enterprises to playa key role in society. We're also seeing this theme in conversations we see at conferences and conversations, let's say at FBN. We see this topic of the impact of family offices by Ron Diamond, talking about their impact on society and taking upthe space of the fragmentation of the capital markets, moving away from Wall Street, away from IPOs, moving into building bigger private companies.

These are big numbers. Just as an aside, back to Adrienne's point about philanthropy, one of the biggest philanthropists in modern history is Mackenzie Scott, who has done a great job and quite aggressively building her philanthropic footprint. And so for people that don't know the numbers, I was just looking up that her donations are apparently around 19 billion.

That is the annual GDP of Jamaica. So we're talking big numbers, and that has are ally big impact on society. But sometimes it's also a big impact in the local community.

So yeah, it's been a great conversation today. Hope you guys have enjoyed it. Maybe any closing comment from you, Adrienne, and then over to Lane, and we'll wrap up.

Adrienne Penta: Adam, I think we hit on a lot of really great topics. I think that wealth, purpose, and then the bringing up of the next generation, I think those are the essential questions for the families that we work with. The last thing I would probably say is that I think that we are seeing some differences in how the younger generations are thinking about wealth, and they're not always thinking about it the same way that we do or prior generations did, which is to change their minds, but to bring them into the conversation in a meaningful way so that they can appreciate history of where their family and where that wealth has come from and the purpose that has been behind that wealth creation, but allowing them to bring their own perspective and their own preferences on how they deploy it out into the world. So I think that there's change in creativity coming to our industry just because of changing frame works around how folks think about wealth.

Lane McDonald: And Adam, I would just add, first of all, thank you for having us on today. Really enjoyed the conversation and great questions. I would just add, I think what Adrienne just framed is so the right thing.

I would just add that it's important for families to really be thoughtful about how to maximize their time and their impact and to really be aware of where they should be doing things themselves and where they should be partnering, because they can get so much leverage in different ways about having the right thought partner along for this journey, as opposed to spending the time and effort to build everything. I think what's important in own that and do that, but really is important to partner and have those people by your side where you get more leverage and can really magnify what you're trying to accomplish.

And whether that's philanthropically, whether that's family-wise or whether that's investment-wise, I think that's a very important thing for families to consider.

R. Adam Smith: Wonderful. Great. That's a strong ending.

Thank you so much. And thank you for joining today. I would like to thank both of you, our esteemed guests, Adrienne Penta and Lane McDonald, and also our guests today attending the Family Business Audiocast on LinkedIn Live.

This is R. Adam Smith signing off. Stay tuned for our next episode of the Family Business Audiocast on LinkedIn.

—————————————————

Explore the strategic intricacies of family business success with the RAS Family Business Audiocast. Join R. Adam Smith as he delves into exclusive discussions with global leaders shaping the future of private wealth and enterprise. Each episode offers a rare glimpse into the core decisions driving prosperity in high-stakes markets. Tune in to gain expert insights and innovative strategies that empower family businesses to thrive across generations.

Available On : Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, iHeart, YouTube

Disclaimer:
Opinions presented are personal and do not represent the positions of speakers’, sponsors’, or guests’ organizations.

Family Business Audiocast™