This week, I’m speaking with Josh Kanter, Principal at Josh Kanter Wealth Advisory Services and Founder of leafplanner. Over the past 20 years, Josh has been an “owner-operator”, leading his family’s family office and consulting with other families. He is a long-time FOX member and an active and valued contributor to the FOX community – especially by generously and frequently sharing his knowledge, connections, and insights with his fellow FOX members on our popular member-only peer-chat application, FOXChat.

Josh starts by sharing the very personal story of how he came into his current leadership role within his family enterprise at a difficult time for the family when his father’s health was deteriorating – and the lessons he drew from this transformative experience about what it means to be fully prepared or to be able to pass down all the knowledge the family needs. From these lessons, Josh synthesizes some of the common challenges faced by owners during such times of family transition or untimely disruption.

Josh describes the importance of having a 360-degree view of the family’s information and introduces the concept of a “family owner’s manual” that can allow a family to identify blind spots, educate family members and advisors, and prepare a family for an effective, comprehensive, and efficient succession. He talks about the different approaches and tools in the marketplace to create and maintain this kind of single-source family knowledge and information hub and shares the reasons he decided to create leafplanner, first as a solution for his own family’s needs and now as a comprehensive digital platform for other families to benefit from.

Enjoy this informative and practical conversation with one of the most active and generous members of the FOX community and a leading expert on family governance, estate planning, and family information management.