Tell Congress Where You Stand - Act Now
As a multi-generational firm that will celebrate our 40th anniversary in 2027, we have been reflecting on the challenging work of transition between generations.
This has felt particularly poignant over the last year, as our last remaining 1st generation owner exited this role and our first 3rd generation team members were invited into ownership. As a group that consults family enterprises on how to successfully navigate these events, it was not lost on us how hard the work can be.
Just like owner-led businesses, family-owned enterprises are constantly growing, adapting, and changing. Little is straightforward in a family enterprise, where the natural interaction of family dynamics and economics together creates exceedingly high stakes. Challenges to success and longevity can arise from every direction, shifting as the business matures and new generations enter. Across the transitions that family enterprises face–whether succession in ownership or management, changes to governance structures and agreements (both corporate and family), strategic pivots, altered family dynamics, or next generation development—each must be faced with head, heart, and all available resources, including talent.
For our 40 years as a firm, CFAR has been at the forefront of the effort to systematically understand and help family enterprises. From our origin in the 1980s inside the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where we were the first academic center to offer educational programs to family businesses, to our instrumental role in founding the Family Firm Institute, to our own experience of succession as a private company that now includes a third generation of leadership and ownership… CFAR knows, admires, and brings committed expertise to this world.
We take a practical, hands-on approach to working with families across the spectrum of the family enterprise from operating companies to family offices to family foundations. Getting to know our clients is our first priority so that you can feel confident that we will move your firm forward.
CFAR will celebrate 40 years in 2027. Click to read how we guide families through ownership and governance change.
About CFAR
CFAR is proud to deliver our management consulting services to clients, with a commitment to unleashing potential and maximizing impact. We have, for more than three decades, provided guidance and expertise to tackle the thorniest issues—ones often rooted in a misalignment between important organizational goals and individual beliefs about what it will take to achieve them. We come to our work as curious problem-solvers. Our heritage as the Wharton School’s only multi-disciplinary, applied research center lives on in our continued dedication to advising leaders on complex organizational issues where both people and performance matter.
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The need for fact-based reporting of issues important to family offices and hardworking families and protecting a lifetime of savings has never been greater. Now more than ever, family offices and hardworking families are under fire. That’s why Family Enterprise USA Action is passionately working to increase the awareness of issues important to family offices and hardworking families, while continuing to strengthen our presence on Capitol Hill.
Family Enterprise USA Action engages with legislators on Capitol Hill on behalf of family offices, hardworking families, and family-owned businesses. It is focused exclusively on the critical tax and economic policies that impact them. Since 1995, FEUSA Action has been the leading advocacy group working daily in Washington, D.C., to reduce and eliminate estate tax, gift tax, and generation skipping transfer tax while blocking increased income and capital gains taxes, the creation of a wealth tax, and other hostile policies that punish hardworking taxpayers and success in the U.S. It is a bipartisan 501.c4 organization.