Setting the Table, Introducing QCI’s Family Advising Toolkit
Looking back now, I can appreciate why I placed so much significance at the time when Liz Brunner and I bought our first dinner table. We were newly married in Washington D.C. and excited about settling into our fourth apartment in three years.
Liz found it on Facebook Marketplace a short drive away and promised it would fit in our car. We scooped it up from the previous owner’s condo- a couple amidst a move to the suburbs to accommodate their growing family- and spent the whole drive home holding onto it to prevent it from crashing through the back window of the CRV.
As usual- she was right, and it quickly became a staple of our daily routines. Seven years later, we still slam our shins into the bench seat, but this piece of wood will never leave our home. My whole life I have considered the dinner table to personify the idea of a family- and our experience with this table reinforces that belief every day.
This table seated our first dinner party as a married couple. It is where we intimately learned about each other’s careers while working on opposite sides during the pandemic. And now it is the place where our son, Sebastian, sits with us for family dinner (almost) every night.
It is only fitting that the family dinner table served as the inspiration for one of the first tools I created after advising families. After using it with several of my clients over the past year I am excited to introduce it publicly.
Setting the Table© is an experiential tool I use after the discovery stage to clarify and communicate a family’s governance priorities, succession goals, legacy needs, and generational influences. The outcomes are used to inform future engagements and opportunities to grow intellectual, social, human, emotional, and spiritual capital across generations.
Setting the Table© is one of several QCI proprietary family advising tools and modules that we utilize with multi-generational families, family offices, and foundations to navigate the human side of wealth and find family answers to life's major moments and questions.
