Keynotes & Workshops
I engage with researchers, business families, next-generation members, spouses, and advisors around the world. What connects these conversations is a shared question: how wealth, legacy, and money shape family life across generations.
The format varies; sometimes a keynote that introduces a research-grounded perspective and opens new conversations, other times a workshop where we explore a challenge in depth, often serving as a starting point for follow-up conversations as questions evolve.
Across all formats, I draw on academic evidence and translate it into clear narratives and practical tools, tailored to the people in the room.
All keynotes and workshops are available in both Dutch and English.
Selected keynotes:
-
A keynote on money, conversations and financial education.
In every family, there are topics that are on the table but never truly discussed. Money is often one of them. Not because no one cares, but because there is simply too much at stake.
And what we leave unsaid, we often pass on just as powerfully. This keynote explores what children pick up about money, even when it is never discussed at home. It looks at the money scripts we inherit from our parents and unconsciously pass on, why well-intentioned silence often does more harm than openness, and how to teach children to deal with money rather than shielding them from it. With concrete guidance on how to approach these conversations — and when to start.
-
A keynote on what the psychology of money teaches us about our own choices.
Everyone knows the feeling: looking back at a financial decision and thinking, What was I thinking? Even Nobel Prize winners and top investors make choices that make little sense on paper.
This keynote explores the psychology behind financial decision-making: how your upbringing, your generation, and your unconscious beliefs shape the way you save, spend, invest, and give. It is confronting and reassuring at the same time, because no one is irrational in isolation: we are simply human. Through a series of recognizable behavioural patterns, from herd behaviour to overconfidence, we explore the thinking errors we all make from time to time, and what we can do about them.
-
Bankers, accountants, lawyers, notaries, and advisors see it up close: families who talk extensively about structures and numbers, while remaining silent about what money actually means to them. Until a sale, gift, dividend, or compensation issue suddenly brings everything to the surface.
This keynote explores the advisor’s role in that conversation. It looks at the money scripts you learn to recognize in clients, why a technical discussion can suddenly become highly emotional, and how to open up the conversation without losing your professional position. Based on years of research, translated into questions you can use immediately at the table.
-
A keynote and workshop on cohesion, purpose and family capital.
A family that wants to stay together as owners has to choose that again, generation after generation. Families that have stayed together as owners for several generations show that this is no accident. They build on a shared purpose and invest in their family as deliberately as they invest in their business.
This talk looks at what keeps a business family together as it grows, and at how wealth is more than financial. It also covers legacy, relationships, human capital and social capital, and the family that neglects these runs the risk of drifting apart. It looks at the different kinds of glue that bind a family, and why a family office can drift away from the family it serves. Participants then assess their own family's capital and decide where to start.