The Williams Group Celebrates 50 Years And Enters A New Era Of Helping Families Retain Values And Wealth When Estates Pass To The Next Generation
San Clemente, California (PRWEB) February 27, 2015 -- The Williams Group, a family consulting and estate transition firm celebrating its 50th anniversary of helping successful families mitigate the risks of transitioning wealth to the next generation, announced that it is now offering its family coaching services beyond the US and Canada. The Williams Group new initiative is aimed at “building global trust and communication, one family at a time,” according to Roy Williams, the firm’s founder and president.
The Williams Group is recognized for achieving a nearly 100 percent success rate in helping its client families retain control of family assets and harmony post-estate transition to heirs, and avoid falling victim to the familiar adage of “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations”. The Williams Group attributes its success rate to its family coaching program that focuses on teaching the critical skills of building trust and fostering sincere communication, key factors revealed in the firm’s ground-breaking field research to determine why successful families break apart post-estate transfer.
Over a 20-year period, starting in 1985, The Williams Group interviewed 2,500 successful individuals who had, or were in the process of, estate transition. Mr. Williams credits The Executive Committee (TEC), an organization of family business leaders now named Vistage, with giving him unprecedented access to interview members and their peers. “The results of these candid, confidential interviews shed an entirely new light on what I’ve come to realize was a 2,000-year-old problem, dating back to the Prodigal Son, an unprepared heir.”
Mr. Williams’ field study findings, published in his highly acclaimed book, Preparing Heirs, revealed that post-estate transfer failure in families occurred because of issues within the family itself commonly due to infighting, long-held resentments, different perceptions, and even gossip, that led to a lack of trust and poor communication.
According to Mr. Williams, “Our findings showed that 60 percent of the breakdown in families was a lack of trust and communication, 25 percent was heirs unprepared to be accountable and responsible, 10 percent was the lack of an agreed-upon purpose or mission for the wealth, and only 5 percent was due to other causes such as errors in the documents. Surprisingly, even the definitions of wealth and family were unclear in most families.”
The results of this study led to the firm’s development of a process to quantitatively measure where a family is today across key risk components. Once the family has undergone coaching, members are re-surveyed to evaluate progress.
Mr. Williams added, “Overwhelmingly, family leaders told us their values were the most important gift they could pass on to loved ones. We learned that values determined actions taken, or not taken; actions determined impacts and results; and impacts and results determined a family’s future. While money and "things" are transitory, the values your family holds are paramount.”
To learn more about The Williams Group, visit http://www.thewilliamsgroup.org or call (949) 940-9140.
Carol A Sherman, The Williams Group, http://www.thewilliamsgroup.org, +1 6266447083, [email protected]
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