In this presentation to Capital Guidance, Dan Negroni outlines what he calls the biggest challenge facing the world today: the imminent transfer of over $40 trillion in wealth across generations. He highlights that only about 33 % of family‑owned businesses survive this transition, despite 85 % of startups being funded by family capital. Over the past four years his team has trained more than 20,000 millennials, Gen Z individuals, their managers, wealth advisors, and families on navigating this intergenerational transfer. Negroni introduces a three‑part “why‑what‑how” framework that aligns individual family members’ purpose with the business’s mission, extracts meaningful value from the family business, and equips stakeholders with emotional‑intelligence tools to communicate, build trust, and empower self‑coaching. He proposes delivering this expertise through speaking engagements, workshops, and direct coaching, tailored after an initial assessment, to help families not only survive the wealth transfer but thrive and create lasting legacies.
Chapters
I am Dan Negroni, and we are honored to be able to present to Capital Guidance what we believe is the biggest challenge in the world today. And that is the fact that over $40 trillion will transfer from one generation to another in the next few years. The largest transfer of wealth ever in the world. And we know that 85% of startups and new businesses are also funded by family family money. And yet, with that transfer from one generation to the next, we must ensure that businesses will thrive and survive. And yet only 33% will make that survival rate during the transfer, and it is the most important asset that families have. So what are we going to do about it? Over the past 4 years, we've been honored to train over 20,000 millennials Gen Zs, their managers, wealth advisors, and families in this intergenerational transfer of wealth. There are 5 generations in the workplace, and it's never been more important that we can connect. And we wrote a book on the tools to connect because we know this: protecting value of businesses and protecting families to be on the same page so they can create legacies work with community, use wealth for philanthropy are critical to the future of what this world needs and what the next generation and the current generation want for their wealth. The coolest thing about getting to work with multi-generational families is this: we not only get those businesses and those family members to survive the multi-generational transfer, but we get them to thrive. And we do that through a variety of ways, usually dressed a little bit more formally, but we do it in a way where we serve the audience through either speaking engagements, workshops, direct coaching, or something that mixes all those three aspects. And for you, we're willing to do all those things as soon as we have that assessment. But the way we do it and the process we use is based on our promise, our promise of connecting through a 3-part hack system. And the 3 parts are simple. They are the why, they are the what, and they are the how. The why is pretty clear. It's not only about the multigenerational individual, each side of the equation. The transferor and the transferee about what their why is individually, but what their why is individually and how it is connected to the particular business and the way they want to use that business to create impact in the world through purpose, through contribution, through community, through impact investing, all those things connecting their individual whys as a family, collectively to the why of the corporation and the business and what it's there for. The what is how do we deduce meaning out of what the family business is providing. Is it meaningful work to the participants? Is it meaningful to the client? And how do we best communicate that to the world and to the client and to our employees Understanding the family's why. The third part is the how, and that's where all of our tools come into play. We coach from speaking. We coach from workshops or consulting on directly how to figure out what are the skills, the emotional intelligence skills to communicate with others, to understand, to create trust, to create empathy, and to empower those individuals to coach themselves and all the assets of the business— employees, the parents, the investors, whatever it is. And that is what we bring uniquely different and have had the honor to be able to do with over 20,000 millennials and their managers. And so we hope to be able to get to the opportunity to do that for you.
