Growing up in a large entrepreneurial family and as a pioneer of the family office space, Patricia Saputo knows the challenges of wealth for individuals and families.
Trained as a tax professional and skilled in areas such as accounting, investing, estate planning, management and leadership, she worked as a senior tax manager at Deloitte until the family’s dairy processing business, Saputo Inc., went public in 1997. In 1998 she became the leader of a single-family office for her branch of the Saputo family, Placements Italcan Inc., and began an 18-year term serving on the public company’s board of directors.
Three years ago, she co-founded and today is executive chairperson and strategic advisor to Crysalia Inc., a consultancy that helped her own family office and now assists others dealing with succession, governance, change management and other issues.
She also chairs a Montreal-based group of TIGER 21, the peer membership organization that brings together a global network of ultra-high-net-worth entrepreneurs, investors and executives to discuss issues, from when and where to invest to legacy planning and philanthropic involvement.
Canadian Family Offices spoke to Patricia Saputo about what she learned as part of a successful family enterprise, how she guides individuals and families through difficult transitions – and why she does it.
How did your upbringing in the Saputo family influence what you’re doing now?
Coming from a Sicilian background, I had a very patriarchal upbringing, where my father, having five daughters, knew that we would not be the ones who would take over the family business one day. My parents told us education is what we should be looking at, so we could go in whatever direction we wanted.
I took that literally and just kept educating myself in different areas. Being among hardworking family, my grandparents, my parents, my aunts and uncles, I just kept on working very hard and kept on wanting to learn more and know more. That eventually led me to Crysalia, TIGER 21 and everything else that I’m doing.
Placements Italcan Inc. is in the business of investing. Necessity is the mother of invention, and we were looking for somebody to help us with the transition of wealth from one generation to the next. In Canada I couldn’t find someone who does this at the level that I needed, so I co-founded Crysalia in April 2021. That helped us, and now I’m also here to help other families.
How does Crysalia help you to manage your family office and assist others?
The human capital, the social capital, the intellectual capital, the symbolic capital and the financial capital, all of that encompasses what we do in a family office. Crysalia is specifically on the human capital side, the development of the individual, the family and the ecosystem in which they work. That’s ‘chief learning and development office’-type thinking, helping the individual know themselves, helping them know where their place is within the family, then helping them understand where they belong in the community.
What is a chief learning and development office?
It’s all about the learning side, and then once you’ve learned something, applying it. It’s about transforming, protecting and improving an individual within their family contours. So we have personal touchpoints, one-on-one, and we have family workshops so that you can identify the person’s goals and the family’s goals, and do the two align? And if they don’t, well, what are you going to do about it?
What is TIGER 21 and what does it do?
TIGER 21 was founded 25 years ago by Michael Sonnenfeldt, who developed it because he had sold his first business and realized that it’s not easy to replicate that success. He decided to start a peer organization with people in the same boat. It now has over 1,400 members all across the globe, with $160 billion in collective personal assets.
I became a member in 2013, given my interest in continuous learning, and I became chair of a Montreal TIGER 21 group in 2023. Being with a peer-to-peer group of people helps to navigate on the investment side, and it also brings personal growth. We talk about the life cycles of a person, their business and family.
Most TIGER 21 members have had a liquidity event and they’re starting a new life cycle, which is usually on the investment side of things. In general, entrepreneurs make terrible investors, so before they dwindle away the value that they’ve created, it helps them to navigate this new world and touch upon all the aspects of a person. So it’s not only their investment but the family side of things. You can speak to others who understand the dos and don’ts, what’s worked, what hasn’t.
How do you figure out what makes a family tick?
It’s that alignment of the goals of the individual and the family. If they don’t align, and you don’t know what the glue is that keeps them together, then it kind of falls apart there. So is it about the family togetherness? The love of the family? The health and well-being? Or is it about the business and the financial ability to pay out the distributions? Do you want the business to prevail, or do you want the family to prevail? Or both?
Obviously there has to be a balance if you’re going to make it all work.
Exactly, because if you don’t have that balance, then yes, unfortunately, one will suffer over the other. Some people are fine with that, and others say, ‘No, we have to find the right balance.’
Why do you work in this field?
Everything that I’m doing between my family office, Crysalia and TIGER 21, I do because I love imparting my knowledge to others. I’m a member of a wealthy family, I’m a tax professional who understands estate planning and tax issues, and I realize that you can’t lose the human side, the relationship side of things, when you’re a family surrounded by wealth.
And individuals, because it’s not all about the families, but the individuals that make up the families.
What kind of discussions do these individuals get into through Crysalia? And how can that help them?
They find their passion, and by finding their passion, they can go off and do what it is they feel they are set up to be doing, and not be forced to do things they don’t want to be doing. They can have a conversation with the family and say, ‘Just because I’m the first born, it doesn’t mean I’m taking over the business. I have no interest. I want to be a musician instead.’
The issue is how do you get the family through those types of conversations, so that everybody can have their independence to do what they want, but be interdependent in a structure of sorts? Some people feel that they’re born with handcuffs, because they have the ‘trust’ already set up, there’s a business already set up. How do you navigate through that whole process, understanding that not all kids want what the parents think they want? How do they allow them to make those choices that are different than what they were born into?
Enterprises like Crysalia are not so common in Canada. And do many of them focus on financials as opposed to these family dynamics?
I think of it as a numbers game, Canada being a smaller country with fewer enterprising families than Europe and the United States, which are more mature. As for focusing on financials, well, that’s the way the banks and the investment advisers see it – it’s all about the money, because that’s the easy part. In the non-financials, you need to have the right consultant, because they’re not all made the same, the way investment advisers are not all made the same.
Do families typically seek this kind of help? Or perhaps they don’t know what they don’t know?
But then there’s those that say, ‘Thank you for opening up my eyes, because now I’m going to do something about it.’ And those are the people that then will seek out further knowledge, learnings and education, whether it’s in peer-to-peer group learning or hiring consultants to help them out.
To me, it’s an investment in yourself, it’s not an expense. A lot of the family offices will say, ‘How long will it take for that return on the investment to pay off?’ Well, only time will tell, because they’ll be better people, because they’ll understand governance, they’ll understand from others what not to do, how not to make mistakes.
Is there more demand for outside peer support and services like yours in family offices?
Yes. A lot of the people hired in family offices don’t have the human capital side. They don’t have that emotional quotient, because they’re all about the numbers. And sometimes they say, ‘I need to distance myself from being a facilitator during the meeting and hire outside to help the family.’ There are a lot of synergies in what you get from hiring outside.
When guiding individuals and families through transitions and difficult issues, what common issues do you see that many people would relate to?
Everybody has what we call their winning conditions. You are a certain type of person day to day, but the moment you see that you’re losing control of a situation, that you’re being poked at by whoever’s around you, you become a different person. So we always try to understand, what are your winning conditions? And is a person poking at you because they’re losing theirs? If you both feel that you’re in conflict with each other, you try to ‘up’ each other. How do you work through those difficult conversations, the ability to then move on to the next phase? Because those transitions are the difficult moments.
What are the obstacles that prevent families from reaching their true potential as self-actualizing, enterprising families?
We call it the hats and the rooms. Do you know what hat you wear, and the room you wear it in? There’s a three-circle model, where you have the family room, the owner’s room and the operator’s room. Are you wearing your family hat in the boardroom? Are you wearing your operator’s hat in the family room? Are you wearing your owner’s hat in the operating room? You need to wear the right hat in the right room, and understand that the context you’re speaking from, whichever hat you’re wearing, is understood by the person you’re speaking to.
You’ve spoken about the unrecognized people in the family, the less involved or maybe the disaffected, as well as those who marry into entrepreneurial families. What is their impact?
There’s a whole conversation about voice and vote. Who’s the voice that’s been whispering in your ear? When you go to the table to vote, you’re not bringing yourself, you’re bringing a whole slew of people — pillow talk, family, friends, others — but you’re the one casting the vote. So the voice and who is influencing the vote, the decision maker, is a huge topic.
It’s all rooted in my Saputo family background. I have a very good understanding of the whole enterprising family environment, because I’ve been born into and raised in it. I’ve seen what it’s done to other families, because I’ve been in that milieu and seen how it’s hurt people, hurt relationships. It’s always been, ‘Okay, how do you not go from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations? How do we avoid that happening?’ So that’s why I went on this learning journey of trying to figure out how we help others out there.
Finally, how did the glass ceiling that you faced influence you and bring you to where you are today?
My father is one of eight siblings, and those eight siblings had 21 children. Out of the 21 children, 17 were girls, four were boys. So the girls knew it’s not our business to run one day, it’ll be one of the boys. It was just the culture. My parents told me that nobody can take away your education. And that continuous learning brought me on a trajectory where I find myself today. And it’s all part of giving back.
My leadership style is like a wolfpack, where the leader of the wolfpack is at the back, not at the front. Because from the back, you guide everybody moving forward. Being one of so many cousins — and I’m at the younger end of the 21 — you’re not as vocal as the older ones are. So you learn to watch, and by watching and learning, you can help guide.
And that’s exactly the role that I play today, whether at the family office, at Crysalia or at TIGER 21. Stay behind, guide and let people do what they need to do to allow themselves to move forward.
Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
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