ABOUT US

Families are stronger together.

As a private asset management and family CFO office, i3 Global Enterprises helps families in business navigate the unique financial challenges and interpersonal conflicts that threaten long-term wealth preservation and growth.

Our core pillars >

Intelligent wealth transfer is a critical step in developing a multi-generational family governance system. This step provides clarity by determining what decisions belong where, who has authority and how leadership roles cascade across family members and entities.
Successful family enterprises often use their free cash flow to invest in private assets. Over time, these assets are accumulated, while founders and their subsequent generations can gradually lose sight of how each individual asset affects the whole: an enterprise’s long-term planning, tax consequences and revenue potential, for instance. Our wealth analysis and comprehensive reporting guard against this gradual misalignment.
Sophisticated wealth architecture depends on solid financial controls, which includes attention to fundamentals like meticulous accounting and bookkeeping. We partner with families to refine or rebuild their enterprise’s financial infrastructure, so forecasting and long‑term decisions are grounded in reliable, actionable clarity.
i3 works with families in business to optimize the financial performance of their private assets. This can include risk assessment or uncovering new sources of return, overseeing real estate portfolios, leasing, property management or providing oversight for day-to-day operations.

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BELIEF

02
APPROACH

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HISTORY

OUR BELIEF

A Key Differentiator of i3.

Our guiding belief is that families are stronger together. This belief informs so much of what we do as a firm. Granted, it’s true that such a belief isn’t profound or unique. Most people like the idea of family and togetherness, but too many don’t take the necessary steps required to keep a family together. Even more, most families in business don’t know how or where to begin to make togetherness happen.

The results can often threaten the life of a family enterprise. In fact, the average life span of a family-owned business is just 24 years, according to Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business.

Any number of scenarios can be blamed for these data points, but typically enterprise growth introduces increased complexities in a family’s ownership structure. Among them: Generational tax planning, yes, but also intensifying family dynamics, a marketplace that evolves and changes over time, and as such, the resulting evolving needs and expectations that are often assumed and not clearly communicated across stakeholders.

Despite each family member’s kinship, a family enterprise is a collection of individuals, each coming into the business with his or her own independent beliefs and ways of doing things. To steal a line typically attributed to legendary college football coach Bobby Bowden, “It’s not the X’s and O’s, but the Jimmys and the Joes.”

To become a generational family enterprise, the important work ahead involves two sides of the same coin: financial and relational. Giving proper weight to each of these — the X’s and O’s and the Jimmys and Joes — is a key differentiator of i3.

OUR APPROACH

Independent pieces become a thriving collective.

As family enterprises experience increasing growth, these businesses often use their free cash flow to accumulate assets and expand business interests and partnership investments. While this growth signals success, it also invites complexities involving generational tax planning and the expanding involvement of family members. In turn, these challenges can threaten long-term wealth preservation, enterprise growth and family cohesion.

i3 Global Enterprise works with families to mitigate these challenges by establishing a well-developed Family Ecosystem.

Family Ecosystem

The i3 Family Ecosystem is a process, or mapping system, if you will, designed to bring Control (relational, family governance) and Economics (financial planning and analysis, accounting, and, when needed, asset management) into a symbiotic relationship to serve the family enterprise.

We like the word “ecosystem” because it's designed to do the one thing families in business need above all else: Take independent entities and informational resources — family data, behavioral data, legal and business documentation, reporting and accounting, for instance — and harmonize each into a single, thriving collective.

Yet, an ecosystem’s effectiveness relies on an understanding of what must live and thrive within that system. That brings us to the information piece of the three “i’s” in i3. It’s not flashy. But it is critical.

After working with families in business for decades, we’ve learned that many family enterprises accumulate “filing cabinet assets.” And, often, these assets are now worth a lot of money. Much of what we do as a firm is built around this first step: Uncovering the history and operating details of an enterprise by collecting, organizing, presenting and analyzing every document and item in that proverbial filing cabinet. It’s a family’s library of information; and it’s the piece that makes our ecosystem go.

i3: Information, Infrastructure, Investment

Information lays the groundwork for establishing order and shared expectations across family members and stakeholders. Next, there’s infrastructure — our durable Family Ecosystem, which aligns four (4) core pillars: succession planning and family governance, wealth analysis and reporting, financial infrastructure and forecasting and private asset management (if needed). While each of these areas can operate independently of the other, the output of the four serves the larger collective: the family and its enterprise.

Investment is the final piece, the last of the three “i’s.” It comes only after information has been collected and organized, informing how the infrastructure is built. Once these steps have been completed, capital allocation can be made using a family’s desired structure, while honoring its long-term plans for the enterprise.

The third "i" of “i3” — the investment piece — sets into motion an enterprise’s growth cycle, where new investments lead to new information. More information means a more robust infrastructure. With each cycle, the infrastructure becomes increasingly layered, mimicking the symbiotic and layered relationships of an ecosystem. Each growth phase is designed to set up greater investment opportunities and an increasingly sustainable family legacy.

For more information about i3’s Family Ecosystem, reach out using our Contact Page, select “i3 Family Ecosystem” under Areas of Interest and we’ll send additional materials. Or email us at info@i3resources.com.

OUR HISTORY

The inherent traits of families in business.

i3 Global Enterprises was founded nearly 20 years ago on December 7, 2007. Earlier that year, i3’s founder Kevin Heaton and his wife, Filomena, had just become first-time parents to a baby girl. A timely blessing in a year otherwise marked by the difficult end of a family business partnership.

In 2008, the young family would begin rebuilding their lives. And they’d do it by focusing on what they knew best: family business.

Kevin grew up in a family-owned manufacturing company founded by his grandfather in 1955. It’s now in its third generation of family leadership. But once Kevin left home, he wouldn’t return to the business that raised him. Instead, as a young man, he set out on his own path.

First, as an investment advisor at Merrill Lynch. Next, he developed the U.S. presence of a Swiss-based, $250-million-dollar hedge fund. From there, he was named the chief financial officer (CFO) of a family-owned home services company. In just two years, he grew revenues from $2 million to $30 million.

Each work experience would lay the groundwork for i3 Global, a private asset management and family CFO office. Its inception marked the beginning of the most rewarding chapter of Kevin’s professional career, a seemingly natural outcome given that i3’s work with families is in lock step with who Kevin is as a person. It’s a company built on lived experiences and lessons learned over generations.

Today, i3 enjoys a remarkable season of growth with an expanding team of specialists. Many of the individuals who make up i3’s team have their own unique experiences in family-owned businesses and business ownership, and these experiences represent an important differentiator of i3 and the work we do. Shared backgrounds —across i3 staff members and i3 family clients — create a common understanding of what methods work against the backdrop of a family enterprise.

We understand that families in business must manage the financial challenges inherent of many successful enterprises, but there’s an equally important complexity that must be addressed with the same amount of attention and expertise: The interpersonal conflicts that often arise alongside the expanding involvement of family members.

Incongruence among family members can threaten an enterprise’s long-term wealth preservation and growth, yes. But even worse, conflict for families in business threatens family cohesion outside of business. What happens at the office almost always comes home.

Because of the unique complexities of family enterprise, Kevin believed families in business need three (3) things above all else: information, infrastructure and investment — the three “i’s” of i3. This still holds true today.