Books by Gerald Le Van
Gerald Le Van, the founder and managing director of the Le Van Company, has authored six books dealing with mediation and wealth issues.
Healthy Wealth in Families
Sharing Prosperity Happiness and Purpose
Inevitably, shared wealth will have a profound effect on family relationships. Families who are "joined at the wallet" encounter rare opportunities and dark hazards. Gerald Le Van's new book, "Healthy Wealth in Families" offers guideposts and warning signs to families searching for happiness and purpose in the midst of their prosperity.
“Gerald Le Van's guidance and expertise have enormously benefited our family. The financial peace of mind we have achieved through his direction has made our 'golden years' truly golden.”
Harvey C. Fruehauf, Jr.
President, HCF Enterprises, Inc.
“Gerald Le Van displays a warm and knowing respect for the intelligence and capability of families involved in successful business together. In engaging vignettes he touches the core of fundamental issues that arise in these ever complex multidimensional connections. Importantly, he offers valuable, practical approaches to preserving and improving the well being of family relationships while continuing to steward the family enterprise.”
Mary G. Boehler, Sr. Vice President & Manager
Northern Trust, Family Business Division
“Drawing on examples from King Lear to Paris Hilton, Gerald Le Van displays his remarkable insights into families that are joined at the wallet and provides approaches to avoiding when possible and resolving where necessary conflicts related to family businesses. His avuncular style does not mask but enhances his experience and expertise. He effectively makes the case for intergenerational planning, teamwork, outside directors, and family councils in the pursuit of happiness and preservation of the relational estate for business families.”
Daniel H. Markstein, III
Attorney
Learn the secrets of transformation and success in Gerald Le Van's book
The Survival Guide for Business Families
As Gerald Le Van follows the JacMar family, a composite of many of his own clients, from the bedroom to the board room, he identifies the key issues and problems faced by every business family today. Le Van has helped many business families successfully navigate through times of turbulence and transition.
In The Survival Guide for Business Families, he makes his secrets available to the public for the first time. He leads the reader step-by-step through thirty-nine questions that everyone involved with a family operated business must address in order to plan for the future.
The Survival Guide for Business Families teaches families to recognize the emotional and organizational work that only they—and not their lawyers, accountants or financial advisors—can do to secure their future. It gives them the communication and coping skills to get through crises, such as a leadership transition. Le Van shows that business families are not alone in their struggle, and that they can not only survive, but prosper.
Positive results are certain after following Le Van's unique blend of advice to such questions as:
- How do we select the next leader of our company?
- Must we offer every family member a job?
- Should key employees own stock in our family business?
Raising Rich Kids
Fast forward to October 2032. Camp Denim is holding a week-end reunion for those who attended as children in the summer of 2002. Betsy, one of the returning campers is working on her PhD degree. In a summary of her research Betsy writes:
The greatest transfer of private wealth in human history is well underway. Never have so many become so wealthy. Never have the wealthy left so much wealth behind. As the wealthy die, trillions flow from their estates to favored charities and fortunate heirs. The media call them Trillionheirs. They luxuriate in a new gilded age underwritten by inheritances. Conspicuous consumption rages once again. Opulence and ostentation abound. The chasm between rich and poor grows wider. Never before has there been such widespread anxiety about the potential harm inheritance can do.
Quite innocently, Betsy coaxes six returning campers into a discussion about “raising rich kids.” Their frank and sometimes painful conversations expose a variety of turbulent money issues.
- Sallie has divorced her way to wealth but her teenage twins refuse to spend it.
- Roger, son of a compulsive spender, tries to teach his own son too much too soon about money.
- Avery an affluent missionary physician is torn between her religious calling and her daughter’s pleas to leave Africa.
- His partner, a wealthy trust beneficiary, urges Fred to give up medical practice for the sake of their children.
- What must his sons sacrifice if Ernesto is to reach his full potential as an entrepreneur?
- How can Betsy understand family wealth if the men in her own family won’t talk to her about it?
- Country singer Connie Alden shares her famous raunchy wit and a tender sensitivity hidden from adoring fans.
The dark legacy of F. Willard FitzWillard beclouds these conversations about kids and money. FitzWillard founded the Healthy Wealth Movement and authored “Let Money Solve Your Problems.” FitzWillard advocated money solutions to money problems. He taught that children could be controlled with money.
Deep into their money discussions, Betsy and her cohorts learn that six of their children have wandered off in violent weather. A dramatic rescue effort ensues.
Sobered and shaken by soul-bearing and near catastrophe, these middle-aged descendants of today’s baby boomers leave the Camp Denim reunion with deeper insights into money’s role in their family lives.
Their stories will jump start overdue money conversations in your own family.
Families Money and Trouble
JacMar Corporation is a dynamic family-owned company that does business on six continents and has grown ten times since its founder’s death. The JacMar family is prominent and powerful, closely joined at the wallet, but estranged by the events of a terrible night long ago.
The business press is replete with stories about internal strife in prominent business families. That’s the noisy bad news. Largely unreported is the quiet good news about business families who manage their differences.
The JacMars teeter back and forth between the good news and the bad. Their struggle to keep family and business together is quite typical. Eventually they learn to manage their differences without adverse publicity, but their quiet good news is hard won.