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Chicago & New England Chapter Virtual Event | Family Values and the Independent Director: Ensuring Continuity While Capitalizing on Differences
Tuesday, September 14, 2021, 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM CDT
Category: Multi-Chapter

02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (Pacific)
03:00 PM - 04:30 PM (Mountain)
04:00 PM - 05:30 PM (Central)
05:00 PM - 06:30 PM (Eastern)

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This event is available to Chicago & New England Chapter members and their guests only.
The Zoom invitation will be shared the day before the event.

Overview

Successful family businesses have strong guiding values and operating principles. How do they select, onboard, and benefit from independent directors while preserving the family’s values from generation to generation? How do independent directors manage the tension between supporting the family’s values and enabling the business to thrive amidst evolutionary or disruptive changes?

During this joint PDA Chicago-New England webinar, we will learn from three distinguished panelists including:

  • Pierre duPont, Partner, Cerity Partners
  • Craig Duchossois, Executive Chair, Duchossois Group
  • Sara Hamilton, CEO, Family Office Exchange (Moderator)

Please bring your questions and be prepared for a lively, informative, and entertaining exchange.

Thank you to our National and Gold Chapter Sponsors!

Panelists

 

 Pierre duPont
Partner
Cerity Partners

Pierre is a private investor, a semi-retired entrepreneur, a mentor to family-business owners, and an advisor for businesses large and small. With his partners at Cerity Partners, he is also a wealth-strategy counsellor for individuals, tech entrepreneurs and business-owners with a particular focus on the impact of wealth upon future descendants.

For ten years before that, Pierre invested personal capital in private companies in the US and Mainland China. Through the 90s and early 00s, he was an entrepreneur, co-founding five software companies resulting in 1.5 IPOs, one acquisition and some spectacular failures.

After receiving his BScE from Princeton in 1982, Pierre started his career at Bolt, Beranek & Newman (BBN) as a research scientist and software engineer in computational linguistics, parallel processing, and statistical data analysis.

Today he is focused on his business-owner and multigen-family advisory practices at Cerity Partners; working with other families on projecting their businesses, heritage and wealth to future descendants; and on supporting the various tech and non-tech companies he advises or on whose boards he sits.

Throughout his life, Pierre has lived with the challenges and the benefits of a 200 year heritage of family ownership of one of the original twelve (and the longest-lived) public companies in the Dow Jones, and the more-immediate challenges and opportunities derived from current family ownership today of one of the twenty largest private companies in America. 

 Craig Duchossois
Executive Chair
Duchossois Group

Craig J. Duchossois – Executive Chair of The Duchossois Group, Inc., a privately held, family business headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.

The principal operating companies are Chamberlain Group (garage door openers, gate operators and related access control products); Controlled Products Systems Group (perimeter access control systems); Systems, Inc. (loading dock levelers and equipment); and Duchossois Capital Management (the family’s private investment firm). 

Craig serves as an advisory board member for The Edgewater Funds, Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation and the Said Business School/University of Oxford.  His not-for-profit board memberships include Culver Educational Foundation, Illinois Institute of Technology, Kellogg Graduate School of Management, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Trustee Emeritus for UChicago and UChicago Hospital. Additionally, he is a member of the Chief Executives’ Organization, World Presidents’ Organization, YPO Gold, Executives’ Club of Chicago, Economic Club and the Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago. Craig is a past-Chairman of the Board of Visitors for the United States Naval Academy.

Craig holds a BBA and MBA from Southern Methodist University. He served as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1968-1971.

He and his wife Janet have two children and five grandchildren.

Moderator

 Sara Hamilton
CEO
Family Office Exchange

Sara Hamilton is a recognized visionary in the private wealth community. While a trust officer at Harris Bank in Chicago in the late 1980s, Sara witnessed the emergence of family wealth management as an industry. Hundreds of U.S. families became centi-millionaires overnight through leveraged buyouts that spawned private financial offices commonly called family offices, to manage family assets and educate wealth owners. Sara was the first professional to recognize family offices as a complex market segment in wealth management.

Sara founded the Family Office Exchange (FOX) in 1989 as a peer network for family office executives. Within 10 years, FOX could see that families needed help with their enterprise vision and managing financial transitions. As a result, FOX evolved into a strategist for family enterprises, a platform for sharing family wealth best practices, and an industry advocate for the importance of private capital in a global economy.

Today, Sara provides strategic direction for FOX and leads the development of new programs and services supporting family enterprises, family office executives and wealth advisory firms in more than 20 countries. She was named one of the Top 50 Women in Wealth Management by Wealth Manager from 2010-2012 and 2019 Outstanding Thought Leader for Wealth Management by Family Wealth Report.

Sara is the co-author of Family Legacy and Leadership: Preserving True Family Wealth in Challenging Times and serves on the executive education faculty of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business where she is an adjunct faculty member for their Private Wealth Management course, offered twice per year in Chicago. She is on the founding boards for the Private Directors Association in Chicago and the Foundation for Gender Equality in New York.

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