In more detail

In a world where interdependent crises appear ever more common¹ and where governmental and regulatory responses have become increasingly unpredictable and far-reaching, family enterprises should consider fundamentally realigning their planning priorities away from a singular focus on tax or regulatory optimization toward jurisdictional neutrality and structural stability. This is because the traditional approach of designing structures around specific tax or regulatory environments creates potential dependencies that can threaten enterprise viability when political changes, economic pressures or international disputes eliminate those favorable conditions with little advance notice.

As a result, family enterprises should consider prioritizing structural designs capable of functioning effectively across multiple regulatory environments, accepting potentially higher immediate costs in exchange for reduced exposure to sudden regulatory shifts. This approach involves maintaining operational readiness across multiple jurisdictions, including local management capabilities, banking relationships and professional service networks that can assume primary responsibility with minimal transition time.

One important component in this strategic framework is establishing “backup” structures to protect against disruptive events while ensuring operational continuity, even if these may at first appear to be redundant². For instance, a family enterprise might maintain separate corporate entities in different jurisdictions, each with its own management structure, banking relationships and operational capabilities. While this creates higher administrative costs and coordination complexity during normal times, it provides critical flexibility when one jurisdiction becomes inoperative due to sanctions, political instability or regulatory hostility. Similarly, maintaining relationships with multiple professional service providers across different regions — including lawyers, accountants and corporate service providers — ensures that essential services remain available even when primary advisers become restricted from providing services to certain clients. This redundancy principle also applies to supply chains, where family businesses might diversify sourcing across multiple countries and suppliers, accepting higher procurement costs in exchange for reduced vulnerability to single-point-of-failure disruptions. In short, what may appear as inefficient duplication in stable times can transform into essential resilience infrastructure during crisis periods, when the ability to rapidly shift operations between parallel structures can mean the difference between business continuity and catastrophic disruption.

A second component of strategic family business planning in this new environment is planning with a mindset already focused on the real possibility of a future corporate migration. Migration capability enables rapid pivoting into new markets when conditions become so adverse as to necessitate exit strategies. This requires preestablished relationships in target markets and governance structures flexible enough to redirect operations without triggering adverse regulatory consequences. A family enterprise may benefit greatly from anticipating stress scenarios including economic sanctions, political instability and supply chain disruption, ensuring multiple pathways for continued operation under hostile conditions.

The effectiveness of a migration strategy relies significantly on network cultivation³, which represents a critical but often overlooked aspect of business resilience. When family enterprises need to rapidly establish operations in new jurisdictions or streamline operations to core functions, having preexisting professional and personal relationship networks can significantly facilitate these radical transitions. These networks effectively function as wealth preservation assets requiring active maintenance. In fact, human capital and trusted relationships often prove more resilient than financial structures during periods of systemic disruption, providing the local knowledge, regulatory guidance and operational support necessary to overcome intense crisis periods. On the other hand, cultivating and maintaining these networks requires systematic investment in relationship development, regular engagement with network contacts and strategic sharing of opportunities in order to build mutual support systems that can be activated when migration becomes necessary.

Effective implementation of this resilience framework requires careful calibration between preparedness and operational efficiency. Family enterprises must navigate the inherent tension between geographic and operational diversification — which enhances resilience — and the resulting coordination complexity that increases both management overhead and operational costs. The strategic imperative is to identify optimal configurations that deliver meaningful risk mitigation without creating administrative complexity so burdensome that it compromises the very agility these structures are intended to provide. This balancing act demands ongoing assessment, as the appropriate equilibrium between resilience and efficiency will shift based on evolving external conditions and the enterprise’s specific risk profile.

The era of static, optimization-focused family business planning may have effectively ended as a result of this past decade’s intense economic and geopolitical shocks. Therefore, today’s family enterprises would benefit from embracing fundamentally different strategic frameworks that prioritize resilience over efficiency and flexibility over permanence. While this evolution requires accepting higher costs and greater operational complexity, it provides the adaptability essential for long-term survival in an increasingly unpredictable global environment.

1 This concept has been defined in political science literature as a “polycrisis.” Polycrisis is defined in the Cambridge Online Dictionary “as a time of great disagreement, confusion, or suffering that is caused by many different problems happening at the same time so that they together have a very big effect” https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/polycrisis.

2 Ivan Lansberg and Devin De Ciantis, “The Enduring Enterprise: How Family Businesses Thrive in Turbulent Conditions,” Public Affairs, 2024.

3 For a historical analysis of the importance of network theory, see Niall Ferguson, “The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook,” Penguin Random House, 2016.