Bill Humphreys, an asset manager and trainer with London-based Eureka Financial, has been a trusted attendant to some of the most private conversations of wealthy family businesses around the world, including in the Arabian Gulf. What he enjoys about his job most is the cultural diversity that it involves.
What challenges are unique to family business?
A lot of people see family business as a source of competitive advantage. Others see the scope of conflict and dispute among family members. The challenge is to create clarity around who makes the shareholder decisions, executive board decisions and family decisions. It is really about creating governance structure so that everybody has a voice.
You have been advising families on wealth management since 1987. How has your job changed?
In the last five or 10 years the advisory profession to family business has changed quite a bit. Families are now approaching advice more holistically and [in a] multidisciplinary [way], looking at the business as a whole instead of approaching specialist lawyers or accountants. But we still see issues that we have heard for the last 25 years make news such as conflict, inter generational power struggle and sibling rivalry.
How do you earn trust as a wealth manager?
Trust has to be earned. You have to deliver on promise and be on time.
What is the difference between advising business families from regions such as the Arabian Gulf, and those from North America and Europe?
Culture does have a significant impact on the way that families choose to address those challenges. While it is dangerous to stereotype families based upon their culture or religion, it is essential that advisers have an understanding of how the culture of the family will impact their decision-making process. An adviser to a local GCC family would clearly have to understand the implications of Sharia but the best advisers would consider issues like attitudes towards the patriarch and matriarch, the "power distance", cultural norms, age, gender and so on.
In addition to these factors, advisers will also need to be aware of the extent of the insularity of a particular culture or marketplace - the attitudes towards outsiders and the extent to which the family would even consider advice from advisers from outside of the culture or even outside of the family.
More than geographic region, you see the difference in attitudes between a civil law country such as France and Spain and a common law country such as the United Kingdom. We use flexibility as a great indicator. In a common law country, flexibility has a positive connotation and shows that planning can be adapted. In a civil law country, flexibility has a negative connotation, showing that something lacks certainty.