WE Family Offices Becomes Certified B Corp
May 22, 2019
Since the founding of our firm, our focus has been to support successful families and help them sustain both their financial and their human capital and to help the families we serve be successful for the benefit of themselves, their communities, and the world at large. It’s a purpose everyone in our firm shares, and we actively seek to balance pursuit of profit with our pursuit of this singular purpose.
Recently, to underscore our commitment to this purpose, we became certified as a B Corporation.
To be a certified B Corporation, a company’s standards and measures of success must be different. Instead of focusing solely on profit, factors like social and environmental performance, public transparency and legal accountability are all considered. Becoming a B Corporation means we have external validation that we balance meeting and the needs of our stakeholders (the families we serve; the talent we hire; the communities we live in) with the needs of our shareholders; balancing the need to do good and do well. Here is how we do that:
- First, as fiduciary advisors, we put our clients’ interests above our own. We are paid only by our clients, with a simple, transparent advisory fee that removes any actual or potential conflicts of interest that arise from sales-based compensations. We are founding members of the Institute for the Fiduciary Standard, and since the founding of our firm, we’ve been proud to support legislative efforts to hold all advisors accountable to the fiduciary standard, ensuring their interests are aligned with the families whom they serve.
- We also seek to attract and develop employees who share our commitment and thrive in our independent environment, free from any financial services firm, bank or broker. To create a culture where employees feel valued and to express our company’s values, we enhanced our employee benefits programs to offer better work-life balance and more ways to support community involvement like paid time off to volunteer and a charitable matching program.
- We focus on helping families sustain wealth through generations, often with investments that are a direct reflection of who they are and what they do as a family.
Becoming a Certified B Corp does not change how we do business. Instead, it provides a way to validate what we have always known: Companies that effectively apply ethical, sustainable business practices perform better and become more successful over the long run. We are pleased to formalize our commitment to doing good while also doing well, and we believe our certification as a B Corp will only enrich the ways in which we serve our clients, employees and community.
