Founders, executives, widows, and inheritors, engaged on terms of their own choosing.
Composed for the principal in the chair, by the standards she sets.
Women arrive at the architectural table by every path that wealth permits — founders of operating companies, senior executives at the height of careers, surviving spouses inheriting an architecture composed for two, daughters carrying forward what their fathers built. The pathway differs; the seat does not. What unites the principals we serve in this audience is the determination that the architecture, from this point forward, will answer to them.
The most consistent observation we offer is also the most uncomfortable. Many of the architectures we are asked to review were composed in rooms the principal was not in. The advisors were chosen by someone else. The decisions were sequenced against priorities that may not have been hers. The documents reference relationships, intentions, and assumptions that the principal was not always invited to author. None of this is necessarily a failure of the prior counsel; it is the consequence of an architecture composed before the principal’s voice was the one that shaped it.
The work of the engagement is to put the principal in the chair the architecture will answer to going forward. The advisors retained — whether the family’s prior counsel, a chosen replacement, or a combination — are retained on her terms. The Family Policy Statement is authored, reviewed, and ratified in her voice. The relationships are introduced, vetted, and held in confidence to the standards she sets. Discretion, throughout, is the first condition.
Four points at which the principal’s voice should govern the architecture.
Each is a moment at which the architecture either answers to the principal’s priorities or quietly continues to answer to someone else’s. Composed in time, each materially shapes what the family’s position becomes from this point forward.
The advisory table, composed by the principal who will sit at it.
The CPA, the lawyer, the corporate counsel, the investment manager, the insurance counsel — some of whom may have served the family for years before the principal was the one engaging them. We review the existing relationships against the principal’s priorities: which are continuing, which are renewing, which are being introduced for the first time. The composition of the table is itself an architectural decision.
The Family Policy Statement, authored in her voice.
The central operating artifact of the relationship records the principal’s objectives, governance preferences, investment parameters, succession protocols, and the standards to which every advisor will be held — in her language, ratified by her, and updated annually with her at the table. The document is the family’s memory of who set the architecture and on whose terms it is run.
The estate, the trusts, the wills — reviewed against the family that exists.
For the surviving spouse, the inheriting daughter, or the principal whose family configuration has changed, the existing instruments are reviewed against the family that exists today. The wills, the trusts, the powers of attorney, the spousal trust if applicable, the cross-border wills set if relevant. The work proceeds in coordination with the family’s existing counsel, on the principal’s pace, with discretion the first condition.
Philanthropy, the next generation, and the legacy authored deliberately.
The discretionary work the principal is in a position to author — the philanthropic strategy, the introduction of the next generation to the architecture, the values that govern how the family will steward what it holds. These are not adjacent matters; they are the matters by which the architecture is ultimately remembered. We compose the conversations, document the intent, and hold the rhythm so that the legacy is authored deliberately rather than discovered retrospectively.
The principal in the chair, the architecture composed around her.
The engagement begins with a private review of the family’s position as it currently stands — the existing advisory relationships, the existing documents, the existing trusts and entities, the prior decisions and the assumptions beneath them. The review is conducted in confidence and at the principal’s pace, with no obligation to retain or release any specific advisor or to act on any specific recommendation in any particular interval.
From that foundation, the relationship proceeds on the cadence the principal sets: the renewal of advisory relationships under her terms, the authoring of the Family Policy Statement in her voice, and the continuing rhythm of an architecture that, going forward, answers to her.
“My father built the architecture with his counsel over thirty years, and for most of those years I sat in the room next door. What the engagement did first was the simplest, and the most overdue — it asked what I would have written differently, and then, patiently, helped me write it. The same advisors who served my father now serve the family I lead; the documents reference the relationships I hold to be central; and the voice the architecture speaks in is, three years on, recognisably my own.”
If the architecture is yours to compose from this point forward, the next step is a private conversation.
Senatus accepts a limited number of new relationships each year, predominantly through private referral. A member of the Private Office will respond, in confidence, within twenty-four hours.
Request a Private ConversationTwelve adjacent audiences.
Most principals belong to more than one. The architecture is composed for the family in front of us; the descriptions below are how families most often arrive.