Overview of Services
Our clients often lead complex financial lives that benefit from comprehensive, integrated, and objective
advice. We scale our services to meet our clients’ needs, whether it’s investment management and
planning for a young entrepreneur or a full suite of services for a multigenerational family, including
family meetings and education, philanthropic advising, and family office administration.
We see the first step in any client relationship as our helping you to define and articulate your goals, and
we then use these as critical inputs to all of our work that follows.
Who Are Our Clients?
If you looked under the hood of our client segments, you’d find all of the below. We bring the
capabilities of our full suite of services to each client relationship, but find that clients often prioritize
our work based on their circumstances.
Click on each client type below to see the Top 5 priorities areas in which they are seeking our help:
Top 5 Things Entrepreneurs Seek Our Help With
- Keep track of what I own/my cash need
- Plan for sale of my business
- Transfer value to my children
- Maximize my earnings through good investments
- Manage my risks
Top 5 Things Corporate Executives Seek Our Help With
- Maximize the value of my stock options/compensation plan
- Plan financially for when I stop work
- Maximize my earnings through good investments
- Transfer wealth to my children
- Manage my risks
Top 5 Things Professional Investors Seek Our Help With
- I need someone who will help my family manage this if I’m not here
- Monitor value of everything I own
- Manage investments outside of my area of expertise
- Manage risks
- Transfer value to my children/prepare my children for what they’ll inherit
Top 5 Things Single Family Offices Seek Our Help With
- Bring us excellent investment ideas and strategy
- Take the family through a process to align around goals – for inheritance, communication about
money, philanthropy, etc. - Handle our administrative or reporting needs
- Manage our cash flow forecasting and planning
- Advise on HR/household staffing risks
Top 5 Things Inheritors Seek Our Help With
- Help me figure out what to do with this money
- Show me interesting impact investing ideas
- Teach me what I need to know to manage this money well
- Keep track of what I own and what it’s worth
- Manage all of this well for me so I can trust it’s being handled well and can focus on my own
interests in life
Top 5 Things Multigenerational Families Seek Our Help With
- Bring us good ideas about how other families are handling all of this
- Grow our portfolio so it will last for future generations
- Transfer wealth to our children
- Manage all of the complexities of our estate plan, balance sheet, etc.
- Help us manage our shared family property, business, philanthropy, etc.
Top 5 Things Cross-Border Wealth Clients Seek Our Help With
- Make sure I stay compliant with tax and regulatory authorities
- Manage the tax and investment complexities of my situation
- Bring me good planning ideas that uniquely work for me
- Manage my risks
- Coordinate all of my other advisors
Top 5 Things Successful Professionals Seek Our Help With
- Plan financially for when I plan to stop working
- Maximize my earnings through good investments
- Manage my risks
- Keep track of everything I own and stay on top of the financial details in my life
- Transfer wealth to my children
Ballentine Partners, LLC does not serve as an attorney, accountant, or insurance agent. Ballentine Partners, LLC does not prepare estate planning documents or tax returns, nor does it sell insurance products.
Investing
One of the reasons our clients stick with us is that we help them set and achieve investment goals that are appropriate for their situation. The strong investment performance we have achieved for our clients is the result of our independent research, anticipating events rather than reacting, being early, and being patient.
In designing our investment program, we believe in the core fundamentals of a rigorous and disciplined asset allocation and investment selection process.
In addition, we consider more subtle dynamics, which can have an equally important impact on portfolio returns. Some of these include practicing patience (clients like ours are uniquely positioned to harvest time as an asset) and paying attention to the hidden costs that erode wealth, such as taxes and fees.
Our seasoned investment team has a global perspective. Our size and reputation provide investment opportunities that other firms may not see, and our client network (many of whom are investment professionals themselves) provides us with on-the ground market intelligence and access to undiscovered investment opportunities.
Our clients share a long-term, patient, and truly multigenerational approach to building and sustaining wealth. They rely on us to challenge industry convention and to maintain a healthy skepticism toward the claims of an investment industry that all too often overpromises and under-delivers.
Our Investment Capabilities
Impact Investing
For clients who are interested in aligning their investment portfolios with their values, we offer deep expertise in impact investing. We have offered impact investing solutions since 2007 and have the capability to implement a family’s entire investment program in impact offerings.
Our first step when a client is interested in this approach is to facilitate a deeply reflective set of discussions in order to help the client articulate their impact values, goals, and priorities.
From there, we design a custom values-aligned portfolio that seeks to generate competitive financial returns while expressing the client’s priority impact themes. As a result of our experience spanning more than a decade in the impact space, we have a deep network of contacts and are able to source interesting and unique impact opportunities across public and private markets.
Finally, we provide custom reporting that allows clients to see and assess the impact their investment is making in the areas they care about. We monitor and report on impact themes using the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a framework.
Wealth Planning
Strategic Wealth Management
Most families never experience the benefits of Strategic Wealth Management. Instead, they experience wealth management as a series of disjointed transactions that are mostly designed either to pursue investment returns or to reduce estate taxes. When we take on a new family relationship, we frequently find that the family has no wealth management strategy.
At Ballentine Partners, we practice Strategic Wealth Management, a rigorous process designed to help your family develop a written statement of your family’s wealth management objectives, incorporating a multi-generational perspective and through teamwork with your other professional advisors. We then follow up regularly to measure how your family is progressing toward its goals.
When you become a client, one of our client advisors becomes your family’s wealth strategist and serves as your family’s primary contact with the rest of our team. Our client advisors are highly credentialed and experienced professionals – not “relationship managers” who are sales people in disguise. Your client advisor also facilitates teamwork among your various specialty advisors.
Our proprietary process frequently allows us to identify problems and find untapped opportunities that have been overlooked by others, and we are skilled at the process of converting our recommendations into reality. Often, difficult technical issues arise during implementation. For example, it may be necessary to rearrange the ownership of existing assets as part of an estate planning project. Changing the ownership of assets raises a number of investment, income tax, gift tax, and estate tax issues that must be resolved. We are able to take charge of this process and work with your other advisors to make sure that all of the technical issues that arise are resolved in a way that is consistent with your values and objectives.
Our Wealth Planning Capabilities
Services for Single Family Offices
Our firm is designed to provide wealthy families with a highly efficient and cost-effective alternative to setting up a dedicated family office. For families who already have a family office, we provide services and advice that complement the family office’s capabilities.
Our services include:
- Investment strategy, asset allocation, investment oversight and risk management
- Wealth planning services, including cash flow planning, tax planning, estate planning, insurance and risk management
- Family meeting planning and facilitation
- Administrative support for philanthropic activities, including establishing charitable entities, grant solicitation, due diligence investigations, grant processing, and devising ways to measure results
- Transaction processing, including standing orders, wire transfers, and processing of capital calls
- Design and management of bill payment systems
- Assistance with recruiting and managing household staff, employee benefits, and confidentiality agreements
- Recordkeeping, including creating and maintaining a document library for all of your important documents
- Coordinating the activities of your various specialty advisors and helping them to access the information they need to perform their functions
We customize the range of services we offer to each family, so you pay for only what you want and need.
Family Consulting
People often hire us seeking alpha in their investment portfolio. We work hard to meet our client’s expectations in this way. Interestingly, we often hear from long-term clients that the most meaningful aspect of our work with them involved family, and specifically the guidance we provided that helped them avoid making the types of mistakes that families of wealth often make when raising their children.
No parent wants to raise a child who is spoiled, ungrateful, or mercenary. Unfortunately, when wealth is concerned, it takes work and intentionality on the part of parents to avoid that outcome. We are experts at helping parents understand these dynamics and know how to design their parenting behavior and wealth planning strategies to best set their children up for a self-motivated, grounded, productive, and content life. We’ve written a book on the topic and while that’s a good place to start, doing this well really comes down to each family, every day, in every parenting decision. We act as your partner throughout these critical years, from when children are just a future possibility to when they are struggling to live financially self-sufficiently in their first job. What’s more, we lean in to these conversations and bring these issues up in our relationship with you proactively and non-judgmentally.
For families sharing businesses, investment management, or philanthropic enterprises, we have extensive experience in helping multiple family members work productively to govern shared endeavors. We are adept at facilitating family meetings and helping families to discover and then align around shared goals.
In short, our team is attuned to the many and varied influences that wealth may have on parenting, child development, and family dynamics more broadly. Our goal is to help you to harness and control wealth as a positive force in your life and to act as your partner to structure plans and circumstances to best promote each family member’s well-being.