GenSpring Family Offices has established a dedicated family-business consulting practice. GenSpring's Orlando, Fla.-based Family Business Center provides expertise in tax, estate planning, family governance, succession and education to wealthy families with operating businesses.

“We have learned over the years that there is a vital role for family offices to play in advising wealthy families who do, or will, share ownership of a closely held business,” GenSpring's chief executive Maria Elena Lagomasino says in a press release. “Family members need someone who can represent their shared interests in this most important family asset, and integrate that with all the other aspects of their financial lives.” 

The Family Business Center is an outgrowth of 20-year-old GenSpring's experience as an advisor to families whose wealth comes from running successful first-generation businesses. Families like these can run into trouble when business founders make way for next-generation leaders; either because the younger family members lack the skills, grit or patience to keep the business from ruin or, if the decision is made to sell, because they lose the glue that had served to keep them united behind a common enterprise.

“Family businesses are a unique form of family wealth," says Stephen Salley, head of GenSpring's Family Business Center. "We are committed to working with family members and the professionals who advise their businesses to build an infrastructure that integrates both the practicalities of business operation in an ever evolving economy with the full range of challenges of shared family ownership.”

Joining Salley in running the Family Business Center are JoEllen Ross, co-head with Salley of GenSpring's operations in central and southwestern Florida out of offices in Orlando, Tampa Bay and Sarasota, Mike Henderson, a senior partner of the multifamily office and family-governance director Daisy Medici. 

Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.-based GenSpring, formerly known as Asset Management Advisors, is an affiliate of Atlanta-based SunTrust Banks. It says it advises more than 700 families on about $18 billion in assets out of 14 US offices.