Multigenerational Planning: A Case Study

The Situation

About 10 years ago, Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren began working with a family that had operational control of a multigenerational family business in Southeastern Wisconsin. The family business traced its roots back almost 100 years and had recently made a technology leap in its business operations. The family tree had grown and divided into multiple branches with distant cousins owning smaller and smaller portions of the business. The branch that we were working with cumulatively owned roughly 35% of the company but ran the day-to-day operations. However, many small minority interests in the company were held by a wide group of owners, many of which were family members, but some of whom were outside passive investors. The fractured ownership structure was beginning to negatively affect the family's control over the business and impeded its strategic positioning.