Michelle Clements began running her family’s family office in 2004, “a little bit by default — because I was interested,” she says.
Over the past two decades, she has helped her family navigate significant transitions, including the creation of Synergy Trust Partners, LLC, a private family trust company. Today, as chairman of the board, Clements is focused on preparing the family for the future while also sharing her experience with others outside the family.
The structure of the family’s trust company did not emerge all at once. Instead, it evolved through several important inflection points.
After selling his second business in 2003, Clements’ father — a serial entrepreneur — asked her to serve as co-trustee of a newly created trust. The family already had trusts in place from the sale of his first business, but stepping into the trustee role prompted Clements to research what trusteeship truly entailed. In doing so, she realized that the family office had previously been embedded within the operating company that had just been sold. Once that company was gone, so too were many of the informal services the family had come to rely on.
“When the family office was part of the operating company, we didn’t even call it a family office — we just had people in the company that took care of stuff,” she explains. “When I graduated from college, someone handed me my car tag bill. I said, ‘What do I do with this?” Someone else had always paid the bill, and she never gave much thought as to whom.
Recognizing this gap, Clements made sure the family continued to receive support with practical matters, such as insurance and administrative needs. In 2004, the family formally established a standalone family office.
As she reviewed the trust documents more closely, Clements identified another looming issue. Her mother, who served as trustee for many of the family’s trusts, was approaching the age at which the trust documents required her to step down. The family asked Clements to research successor trustee options, with the goal of ensuring long-term control and flexibility — particularly because they still owned a privately held operating business and wanted to avoid being forced into a sale.
After extensive research, the family decided to form a private trust company, and in 2010, Clements led the effort to charter it. The charter was received in 2012.
Clements ran the trust company for eight years before stepping down in 2020 and hiring a non-family professional to serve as its executive leader. The transition was not immediate — she resigned four times before it finally stuck.
“After the third time, I realized I couldn’t resign until I found my replacement,” she says.
That transition helped sharpen the company’s focus. Under board guidance, Clements was encouraged to define a clear job description and concentrate the organization on trust-related responsibilities rather than the broader range of family services it had historically provided.
Today, while the entity is structured as a trust company, it functions in many ways like a family office. Trust administration makes up the bulk of the work, along with tax planning and tax preparation, and collaboration with attorneys on estate planning matters. Concierge-style services are intentionally excluded, and bill paying is limited to family members who are unable to manage it themselves. A small team within the family’s remaining operating company continues to assist with certain family services as needed.
“Every family office is different,” Clements says. “From a structural standpoint, we are a trust company,” although family office services are included.
Much of the current work centers on leadership and ownership transitions and the family dynamics that accompany them. Clements is the second youngest of seven siblings in a blended second generation, with 32 family members spanning the third and fourth generations.
“My experience is deep and complicated,” she says. “There are a lot of blurred lines as a family member sitting at the dinner table.”
Two members of the third generation are already involved in the family enterprise, and Clements has spent the past three years developing a leadership training program for the rising generation. In addition to her role as chair of the trust company board, she also serves as vice chairman of the board of the family’s operating business, Main Street Inc., which provides printing and manufacturing services to financial institutions.
As the family looks ahead, they are actively questioning whether the current structure should — or even can — endure indefinitely.
“As we think through generational transition, we ask whether the structure created by previous generations is intended to be enduring,” Clements says. “If you ask my father, who is 90, he would say yes. He created trusts long before there were assets behind them, anticipating the liquidity event that would fund them.”
Clements, however, is more focused on the near-term generations.
“My mom and I have talked about whether this was ever meant to be multigenerational,” she says. “We are structured through the fourth generation, and we could go beyond that, but the more families I talk to, the more I question the viability of family offices beyond the fourth or fifth generation.”
Central to those discussions is a shared understanding of the purpose of the family’s wealth — particularly its non-financial dimensions.
When the family council was formed, Clements’ parents drafted a letter outlining their intentions for the family’s financial wealth. The letter is read annually at family meetings.
“We want to steward the family’s human, intellectual, spiritual and social capital,” she explains. “Financial capital is a tool to support those goals. It’s meant to help supplement education and quality of life, not to create a lifestyle.”
The next generation is actively engaged in these conversations, and Clements is clear that the future will ultimately be theirs to define.
“For now, this structure works,” she says. “But I tell the next generation: You have to figure out what works for you. Giving them permission to explore is the most important step.”