To view a frequently asked question, please choose a topic on the left.

Coppertree Ltd. is a private family office practice that specializes in preserving and enhancing wealth over multiple generations. We discreetly serve a small number of families of great wealth, who seek us to ensure the perpetuation of their family capital.

Before founding Coppertree Ltd., Mark Casella was an investment management advisor for over 24 years at both nationally and internationally recognized firms. As a Senior Vice President and Investment Advisor at UBS AG, Mark noticed that many of his clients were anxious about issues that went beyond the scope of his profession.

Those issues were the preservation of their family’s wealth, history, and value system for future generations. Mark began to see that as a family office advisor he would be able to address a broader and more meaningful range of his clients’ needs.

An additional incentive to form a family office came from observing his own family’s experiences in transferring the management reigns of their family-owned manufacturing business. Mark witnessed first-hand what statistics have repeatedly shown: a family governance system that allows for organized succession planning and member education is absolutely essential to the sustainability of family capital over generational transitions.

The name Coppertree metaphorically describes the expansive and strategic work we do with families. As James Hughes says, nurturing the Copper Beech Tree is a multi-generational effort, for the tree’s full growth spans one hundred and fifty years. It takes incredible courage for a person to plant the Copper Beech Tree; he or she may never behold the tree in its full majesty. The Coppertree team, like this visionary planter, honors the future, believing that generations to come will reap the rewards of today’s careful sowing.

When Coppertree begins work with a client we perform a strategic review of the family wealth, which includes its human, intellectual,social, and financial capital. We look at how these resources are currently being managed and deployed, to what degree the family is involved in those decisions, and how members interact to form a family dynamic: the interests and talents each brings to the family group.

Inherent in analyzing the landscape of family wealth is identifying all the possible favorable and unfavorable outcomes of the present arrangement, and exploring the ways that this risk/reward ratio might be altered in the direction of wealth sustenance.

Constructive family discussions are essential when dealing squarely with questions of how best to leverage resources and to minimize risk. Coppertree facilitates carefully structured family meetings, so that members can become involved – through governance – in the businesses and complex ownership structures that constitute the family’s financial capital.

Families who focus only on their success in the present, without understanding their roots in the past or their aspirations for the future, fail to achieve the cohesion necessary for preserving their family’s human, intellectual, social, and financial capital. On the other hand, families who do forge a link between the past and the future develop a greater understanding of how they are meaningfully connected: what sets them apart from others and makes them distinctive as a group. Family stakeholders who feel connected to a unified lineage will feel more empowered to contribute to family governance, family philanthropy, and to the continued evolution of a family mission.

The strongest family governance systems are built upon the foundation of shared family values. As Coppertree begins to facilitate legacy planning, the values that have comprised a family consensus will naturally form the backbone for that family’s values and mission statements, which will in turn provide an orienting preamble to the family constitution of policies and procedures.

After helping your family to draft a constitution, Coppertree collaboratively instates the governance practices set forth therein. We organize regular family meetings, at which issues are prioritized, discussed, and decided upon according to family conduct policy.

We also oversee the interaction of family and business councils, and provide member education programs to both arenas as part of our succession planning effort.

The goal of Coppertree’s education initiative is to empower successors to be fully responsible for their inheritances, and to teach them how to steward family wealth so that it grows for generations.

We teach communication, leadership and management skills, and financial literacy. These customized programs vary based on how each generation interfaces with the family’s economic endeavors. Regardless of the paths they choose, all successors learn the governance skills they need to optimally participate in financial and philanthropic family decisions.

In order to ensure the thoroughness of a family’s succession plans, Coppertree will, when appropriate, enlist the expertise of a specialized tactical partner.

When a generational transfer becomes imminent, Coppertree helps elder family members transition from management to mentorship. As mentors, these family elders can share their experience, wisdom, and vision of the future with the next generation of family and business leaders.

We bill on a flat rate basis anticipating the level of sophistication of our client-families lives and our level of engagement.