Who’s Looking After the CEO? The Hidden Risks That Come With Running a Business

By Jonathan Ralph, Partner and Residency & Citizenship by Investment specialist at financial services global leader, Holborn Assets, who advises entrepreneurs, CEOs, international families and retirees on long-term residence and citizenship planning.

CEOs spend much of their working lives managing risk. They diversify investments, enter new markets, protect supply chains and put contingency plans in place for their businesses. But how many apply the same thinking to themselves and their families?

For business leaders operating internationally, the ability to live, work and travel across borders can have implications far beyond lifestyle. Changes to immigration rules, tax systems or geopolitical circumstances can affect where they can live, how easily they can do business and the opportunities available to their families.

Jonathan Ralph, Partner and Residency & Citizenship Specialist at Holborn Assets, works with CEOs, entrepreneurs and high net worth individuals considering international residency and citizenship options.

Here, he discusses the personal risks business leaders can overlook, why international mobility is increasingly being considered alongside other forms of risk planning, and how CEOs can create more options for themselves and their families before they actually need them.

1. CEOs spend a lot of time thinking about risks to their business, but what risks do they often overlook when it comes to themselves?

In my experience, CEOs are generally very good at thinking about risk within the business, but can often neglect their own personal circumstances. One of the biggest areas I see overlooked is what I would call jurisdictional risk: how dependent you and your family are on one country for your right to live, work, travel, educate your children or manage your affairs.

For the typical businessperson, these things can feel very secure until suddenly they are not. Political change, tax reform, geopolitical events or simply a change in family circumstances can alter the picture surprisingly quickly. Understanding the risks you face does not mean that you are expecting the worst-case scenario, but rather ensuring your family and personal life is kept protected against unforeseen future events. It is about recognising that personal mobility and your lifestyle freedoms are assets in their own right, and thinking about them before they become an urgent problem.

2. You work with CEOs and business leaders looking at residency and citizenship options. What are they usually looking for when they come to you?

Interestingly, it is rarely just about obtaining another passport (although that is sometimes the case). Most of the people I work with already have successful businesses and comfortable lives. What they are looking for is greater optionality.

That might mean having the right to live somewhere in Europe, creating a future base for the family, improving international mobility, or giving their children access to a wider range of educational and career opportunities. For others, there is an element of risk diversification: they simply do not want their entire personal and professional life tied to one country.

The important thing is that there is no single objective. The right structure for someone who wants to relocate in two years may be completely different from that of a CEO who wants to remain where they are today but create options for ten years from now.

3. Can where a CEO lives, or their ability to travel, have an impact on their business?

Absolutely. For an international business leader, personal mobility and business mobility are often closely connected. If you need to spend significant time in a market, build relationships with investors or clients, establish an operation or simply be physically present when something important happens, your immigration status can determine how easily you are able to do that. The strength of your existing passport and residency status(es) can play a key role here.

There is also a longer-term dimension. Where a CEO chooses to establish residence can affect where the family is based, where children are educated and, potentially, how they structure their personal and business affairs.

To be clear, your personal residency planning should not typically drive your business decisions. But for someone operating internationally, I think it is sensible to regard mobility as part of the infrastructure supporting the business rather than something completely separate from it.

4. When should a CEO start thinking about a second residency or citizenship? Is it a mistake to wait until they actually need it?

Generally, the best time to create an option is before you need to exercise it.

Residency and citizenship planning can take years rather than months. Programmes change, legislation changes and individual circumstances change. If somebody waits until they urgently need to relocate, they may discover that the solution they assumed would be available either no longer exists or cannot be completed within the required timeframe.

I therefore tend to encourage people to think about this in the same way they would think about insurance. You do not necessarily put a structure in place because you expect to use it tomorrow. You do it because having made the decision in advance gives you more choices, or simply greater protection, if circumstances change.

For many CEOs, the real value is not a relocation itself, but rather the ability to relocate should their circumstances require it.

5. Are more CEOs thinking about where their children might want to live, study or work in the future?

Very much so. In many conversations, the children actually become more important than the main applicant. A CEO may be perfectly happy living where they are, but their children could eventually want to study in London, Paris, Madrid or elsewhere, build a career internationally or start a business of their own. Parents increasingly recognise that giving them broader residency or citizenship rights can materially expand those choices.

What I find particularly interesting is the time horizon. Parents are making decisions today for children who may not need those rights for another ten or fifteen years. There is a growing recognition that our countries’ borders can be a long-term barrier to our children having full freedom to decide their future lifestyle. Many of my clients are simply trying to avoid them facing such obstacles.

6. Do successful business leaders sometimes assume the choices and freedoms they have today will always be there?

Yes, and understandably so. If you have spent twenty or thirty years travelling freely, doing business internationally and living in a relatively stable environment, it is very easy to regard those freedoms as permanent.

However, immigration rules change, tax systems change, governments change, and international relations change. We have seen enough disruption over the past decade to know that the environment in which somebody is operating today should not automatically be assumed to exist indefinitely.

Good planning is about recognising that circumstances evolve, and taking the necessary protective action before any plan needs to be executed.

Successful businesspeople routinely diversify investments, suppliers, markets and sources of capital. There is a reasonable argument that some of the same thinking can be applied to where you and your family have the legal right to live.

7. What can CEOs do now to give themselves and their families more options in the future?

The first step is simply to define what they want the option to achieve. Is the objective somewhere to retire? A potential European base? Greater mobility? Education for the children? A genuine second home? Or simply an insurance policy against an uncertain future?

Once that is clear, you can work backwards and look at which residency or citizenship routes genuinely fit what you are trying to achieve. I feel this is important because people can become distracted by collecting programmes or passports without asking whether they solve a real problem. It is not lost on me that the topic of second citizenship has become rather fashionable in recent years. I would encourage all potential investors to critically examine the problems that they are really trying to solve before they take action.

Typically, for a CEO, the objective is optionality rather than relocation. This mean making sure that, five or ten years from now, you have the ability to maintain or improve your lifestyle as the situation requires.