Family Business Audiocast | Episode 47 | David Burleigh
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R. Adam Smith: Welcome to the Family Business Audiocast on LinkedIn. I'm R. Adam Smith, creator of this Audiocast series as an entrepreneur, investor, founder, investment banker, and board leader the last 25 years. I'm fortunate for my many experiences within the family firm industry. A warm thank you to our live audience on LinkedIn today, and for those listening in the future, a brief comment on why I created this broadcast.
Private companies are a passion of mine. Having grown up in a family of entrepreneurs and having engaged for two decades in deals, strategic transformations, investments, and boards, with an array of fascinating family enterprises, family firms, and family offices, I founded this series to offer a useful platform for listeners to hear from veterans, academics, and leaders in the vast family firm ecosystem.
Whether you're a family business owner, building, running, or advising a family office, or just expanding your family office activities, I hope these conversations are useful and enlightening. Now it's time to turn our attention to our accomplished guest on today's episode. Today, I'm pleased to host David Burleigh, an esteemed family enterprise expert, trustee, and acclaimed author. Great to have you on today, David.
David Burleigh: Well, Adam, thank you. I'm happy to be here.
R. Adam Smith: Great. So you're based in the Midwest, and you're an author and esteemed family enterprise advisor with decades of experience at the intersection of law, fiduciary responsibility, and family enterprise. You're a trusted advisor to families navigating governance and ownership — and, our favorite topic here, legacy.
As a family trust attorney and fiduciary, David specializes in helping clients manage the legal and relational dynamics of owning and stewarding significant assets — trusts, partnerships, LLCs, and other structures — particularly in preparation for major transactions. Over the course of his career, he's helped clients protect and develop over a billion dollars in assets. He's also the author of Take Ownership of What You Own, a groundbreaking guide demystifying trust management for beneficiaries and trustees alike, and the only professional in the Midwest holding STEP's Advanced Certificate in Family Enterprise Advising.
Great to have you here today, David. Why don't you tell us about your firm, and then we'll jump into conversation.
David Burleigh: Thank you. My firm is a boutique private client law firm — actually two businesses. The first, based in Cincinnati, is BHMK Law, doing the typical private client legal work: trust work, estate planning, corporate, some real estate, some charitable giving, and occasionally dispute resolution.
The other business is the Family Enterprise Office, which I think of as a multi-family office without the investment management component — we don't manage or place money, but we're heavily involved in everything else. Asset ranges run from tens of millions into the hundreds of millions, depending on the family. It's unusual in that it's an advisory firm with a significant governance component that's also heavily focused on trusts.
In the book, I try to bring together two worlds — the family business world of operating companies, and the world of trust and estate planning — into one place, because in my experience clients don't bifurcate those things. They think, "what do I own?" and start there. That's what we try to help them do.
R. Adam Smith: Let's focus on family ownership. You talk about helping families take ownership of what they own — beyond assets, they also own wealth, legacy, and different types of holdings. What's commonly misunderstood as families operate across these different types of assets?
David Burleigh: The first thing I see — and it surprised me — is that families are often unsure of everything they actually own. Especially when there's complexity in the assets and in the family itself — say, a lot of family members — not everyone is aware of what's owned.
The second is that many people don't understand that a trust involves split ownership: there's the legal owner (the trustee) and the beneficial owners (the beneficiaries), who are the whole reason the trust exists. That split-ownership concept tends to be misunderstood, and unpacking it for clients really helps strengthen the trustee-beneficiary relationship, which is where a lot of problems arise.
R. Adam Smith: Talk about the fiduciary role of the trustee, and how asset tracking works on top of that.
David Burleigh: It helps to think in layers. Say you have an operating company owned partly by individuals and partly by a couple of trusts. One layer is the trust owning the company; another is who owns the trust — which brings us back to split ownership, trustees versus beneficiaries.
That puts the trustee at the center of multiple sets of duties — duties to the beneficiaries, duties around disclosure and running the trust properly — but because the trust owns the company, the trustee also has to pay close attention to the actual business operations. That means interacting with the beneficiaries, with an active board of directors if there is one, and with whichever family member serves as CEO. It's a complicated web, and it asks a lot of the trustee.
R. Adam Smith: On the audiocast we often discuss growing complexity for multi-generational families and larger family offices. I recall a survey — I believe from one of the accounting firms — where only around 3% of respondents felt confident in their family office's use of technology. What's your view on where that's headed?
David Burleigh: I just came back from a conference on this with a group called Attorneys for Family-Held Enterprises. The bottom line is you need technology that fits your specific ownership arrangement — the first question is what the family actually wants the family office to do, since no two family offices are alike. There are firms that help figure out the right technology for your structure. As for where it's going, I think AI will be part of it — certainly in process automation — though I'm not a technologist, so I won't speculate on exactly how. But the first step is always figuring out what structure you have and what you actually need, then shopping for technology to fit that.
R. Adam Smith: You started your career at a law firm in Texas after majoring in philosophy, then moved into dispute resolution. What are the best ways large multi-generational families can avoid disputes rather than end up resolving them?
David Burleigh: The first thing is making sure all the key owners are aligned on why they're owning something together. We start with that basic question — do you want to be together? — and almost always the answer is yes. Then: why do you want to own this together? What are the advantages — not just access to capital, but scale for investing, and access to the family's human and intellectual capital?
I can think of only one family that didn't proceed with us — they ended up suing each other instead, over whether their operating company was required to hold board meetings. It went all the way to the state supreme court, which ruled yes, they did — after they'd run up seven figures in legal fees.
Starting with the "why" question, and being thorough about it, is the best way to head off disputes. Clients are usually nervous going in, but in almost every case they discover they have more common ground than they realized — they just hadn't communicated it. They end up relieved, and often more ambitious about their shared future than they expected.
R. Adam Smith: You also bring a contemplative approach to advising clients — particularly around selling a core, emotionally significant asset. Can you talk about that?
David Burleigh: I try to place any transaction in a broader context. I use something I call the "right-fit buyer profile" — helping the family figure out who's really best suited to buy the business. I've rarely, if ever, had a family say cash is their sole consideration. More often it's: we want to maximize the price, but we don't want the buyer to destroy the culture we built, we want employees taken care of, we don't want the business moved out of the community it's been rooted in for decades.
Thinking through those questions up front actually makes the process of finding a buyer, negotiating, and papering the deal go much more smoothly — because you know what you want and why, so you can move quickly, including pivoting during negotiations if needed.
R. Adam Smith: That takes courage — being forthright even when it's difficult, alongside coaches, boards, and consultants.
David Burleigh: Courage matters for everyone in the family, not just the advisor. There are always multiple options when significant money is involved, and even once you think you've settled on the right path, you need the nerve to actually go through with it. I've told clients: I'm not afraid of anyone in your family — that doesn't mean disrespect, it means whatever's going on, we deal with it. You play the ball where it lies.
R. Adam Smith: [Discussion of Cincinnati, local sports teams, and Cincinnati-style chili, omitted here as personal banter rather than substantive content.]
Chili aside — Skyline's been a family business for 75 years, a good example of a brand succeeding with a singular focus, similar to a single-family office. What are you seeing regarding singular focus on one company versus larger family offices diversifying, especially to accommodate the next generation and diversify operating risk?
David Burleigh: Some of that depends on where the family is in its history. People build wealth by concentrating risk, not diversifying it — most family offices exist because someone doubled down on a market, technology, or process. Once you have significant wealth from doing that, you have to shift toward protection as well as accumulation, which usually means diversifying.
I write about this in the book under "entrepreneurial stewardship" — the idea that a family, optimally, holds both mindsets: the entrepreneurial mindset (not just at founding, but ongoing) and the steward mindset, someone shepherding what another person built and aiming to pass it on in at least as good shape. Weaving those two mindsets together isn't easy, but families who manage it are far better positioned — assuming they have people with the right capabilities, or are willing to go find them.
R. Adam Smith: We've discussed transaction preparation extensively on the podcast with past guests. Let's touch on "found capital" before we wrap — the idea that wealth for the next generation isn't just money, but legacy and community impact, alongside feelings like imposter syndrome or guilt that can come with inherited wealth.
David Burleigh: This is important, especially with trust assets — it's easy to feel like "I didn't create this, I just happened to be born into this family, I sort of found it." That's understandable, but I think it's critical that people choose to take ownership of their connection to that capital rather than avoid it.
Some people respond by essentially ignoring it — pretending it doesn't exist, not telling anyone. I think that's a mistake. Everyone has abilities and something to contribute; how that gets used depends on the family and its structure, but you should make use of what you bring to the table — you'll be happier over your lifetime if you do.
So the solution is figuring out your unique ability, being honest about it since it's a good thing, and plugging it into the broader family and what it owns. That's more effective, more satisfying, and — in the sense that it reduces risk for the family — actually safer. It takes nerve, going back to your earlier point about courage, but doing it well makes everyone in the family better off.
R. Adam Smith: Wonderful. To wrap up — is there a family business out there you admire, or something inspiring from your day-to-day work you'd like to share?
David Burleigh: If I pick one company I'll leave others out, so I'll share something else instead. I really admire — without naming names — a second-generation family member connected to a very large real estate portfolio, who's ended up in a pivotal family role not by choice but by circumstance, and has done an outstanding job stepping into things other family members weren't positioned to do. People like that don't make the news or seek publicity — they're just quietly doing the work, and it's genuinely what makes a lot of the economy turn. That profile — someone who takes ownership of what they own — is really the name of the game.
R. Adam Smith: That's courage, modesty, and determination all together.
David Burleigh: That's right — all three.
R. Adam Smith: I'd like to thank our Family Business Audiocast attendees today, and of course you, our esteemed guest, David Burleigh. David, thank you for joining today.
David Burleigh: You're welcome — thank you very much for having me. It was really great.
R. Adam Smith: This is R. Adam Smith, signing off. Stay tuned for the next episode of the Family Business Audiocast on LinkedIn.
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