The Cutting-Edge Legacy Practice
For Individuals, Business & Legacy Families & Entities Globally
Legacies and family legacies are much more complex and impactful than a few stories, limited timelines, finances, legalities, and family charters. In fact, your family legacy is your single most important asset and competitive advantage, a complexity premium. It's a collection of your family’s multifaceted capitals and layers with critical tangible and intangible aspects harbouring a wealth of treasures. It’s only an illusion that it will be around in the long-run if you don’t take action and create effective practices around it. With your family legacy fading, your family will also get fragmented, and consequently your wealth will evaporate gradually. It’s critical that you treat your family legacy with the utmost importance, it has the power to make or break dynasties globally. In the era of the Great Wealth Transfer, we help you thrive for generations to come by focusing on your family and family legacy in unique and meaningful ways.
Benefit from our bespoke legacy curatorial projects, strategic legacy advisory, immersive legacy ateliers, as well as complementary legacy-based family culture, family identity, and family governance workshops purposefully crafted for your goals. We work globally with a deep cultural understanding and are uniquely qualified to bring you immense value wherever you may be on your journey. Preserve your family legacy, including your own legacy, bring it to a current relevance, engage, align, and inspire your family members around it, shape it, maximise, and showcase it, and pass it on to your next generation of legacy guardians, stewards, and custodians. Expect effective solutions, robust frameworks, profound narratives, exquisite writing, and culturally fitting rich as well as evocative illustrations.
We Are Driving a New Paradigm
Until The Legacy Atelier™
Our Founder has been driving and championing a much-deserved paradigm shift around legacies as she believes current references, scopes, extent of elaboration, and practices around legacies are restrictive, outdated, and filled with incongruent statements. Current services focus only on some aspects of businesses, philanthropy, finances, and legalities, limited family governance, as well as restrictive stories and narrative lines depicting simple chronological timelines. However, these lack extended guidance and practices on e.g., how to preserve, narrate, represent, showcase, control and maximise legacies, as well as ensure their longevity on a myriad of levels, holding invaluable missed opportunities for legacy builders and guardians, their web of impactful endeavours and complex galaxy of entities. Consequently, there is no solid understanding and current relevance to legacies, resulting in these sitting on shelves, at best, even if on digital ones. Zita knows why legacies deserve much more attention and should be considered a top priority for individuals and families around the world. Hence, after immense research, development, and years of working with families and individuals, she set up The Legacy Atelier™.
Explore Our Unique Approach
We offer a layered view of your family legacy, including your own legacy, with fitting cutting-edge strategic practices and sustainable solutions driven by a participatory design and a profound cultural understanding. Benefit from our bespoke legacy curatorial projects, strategic legacy advisory, and immersive legacy ateliers featuring unique savoir-faire. Our Founder’s unrivalled prowess in family legacies and synergistic cultural scientific fields, gained best practices, seasoned topical expertise in business families, family businesses, family offices, and family foundations, and multidisciplinary methodology as well as robust framework, including a proprietary family legacy trajectory, ensure the success of your projects. We help with your critical legacy exploration, preservation, narration, articulation, showcasing, harnessing, building upon, passing on, representing, controlling, and maximising endeavours, and the connected vital decision-making practices, whilst ensuring the longevity of your family legacy. We deliver upon a much-deserved representation and relevance of your family legacy to also anchor your family members, enhance your family identity, recalibrate your family culture, achieve family harmony, elevate the shareholder value of your businesses and other activities, whilst strengthening your strategic foresight.
Endorsement & References
“Zita is delightful to work with and she holds a remarkable prowess in all things family legacies. She is culturally astute, and her writing as well as design skills are top-notch, fitting our detail-oriented expectations perfectly. I highly recommend Zita for any high-end legacy curation and showcasing needs for business families and their family offices as well as family foundations globally and look forward to continuing to work with her.”
Dr. Corinna Basler, Director, Maybach Foundation, USA
"Keeping wealth for centuries is a very, very difficult task, given the ever-changing and mostly hostile environment. The only enduring success-factors are the continuity of character, philosophy, values, trust within, as well as how well we understand and build upon our family foundations. Hence long-term legacy and succession planning(the preparation of future generations) is tantamount to survival. From our 12-year-long acquaintance we know that Zita is exactly advocating the tools necessary for these critical family activities."
Baron Rainer von Echlin, PhD, Family Principal, Switzerland
“Zita was working on producing a video about 40 years of our industry family business. She did a great job researching and coming up with a profound legacy narration and curation. She has many ideas for preserving family history and keeping legacy for generations to come.”
May Naamani Makhzoumi, President, Makhzoumi Foundation, Dubai, UAE
“Zita is extremely thoughtful and dedicated. Such a refreshing and effective approach, even with the most complex legacy.“
Private Family Principal, USA
“Zita’s unique methodology is deeply impressive, beautiful imagery and wording too, all remarkably fitting and uplifting!”
Private Family Principal, UK
“These are the legacy projects that we needed to enhance our family identity, preserve, narrate, and showcase our family legacy, and plan for the future together, based on our unique foundations.”
Private Family Principal, ME
Meet Your Legacy Aesthete & Team Members
Zita Nikoletta Verbényi is the Founder, Legacy Aesthete, and Legacy Strategist at The Legacy Atelier™. She is a Top Recommended Family Business Adviser in 2021/22/23 by Spear’s 500 with her cutting-edge and bespoke legacy curatorial projects, strategic legacy advisory, and bespoke legacy ateliers driven by a deep cultural understanding. Zita is a seasoned family business and family office topical expert, and senior international content professional. She holds an unrivalled prowess in family legacies and a wealth of expertise, and profound insights into the most critical dynamics and matters facing business, entrepreneurial, and legacy families, as well as individuals of wealth. Zita built a multidisciplinary methodology and framework around complex family legacies and an unrivalled family legacy trajectory as a guiding and benchmarking tool to ensure the longevity of family legacies. She is a Philologist, cultural scientist and the 1st PhD Candidate in Family Legacies with a novel research dedicated to extending upon the current domain of legacies. She holds an MA in Philology (Diploma in Comparative Aesthetics in ITA) and a Programme in Cultural Management at ELTE University. She is a Member at the Museums Association and may also bring in other top trusted professionals as team members, if necessary, as well as major cultural institutions, to further enhance your bespoke legacy projects. Expect meticulous research, exquisite writing, profound narratives, and evocative designs. Zita is multilingual, based in London, and travels globally.
Dante De Lucia is the Founder & CEO at Competitive Legacy and a family principal of their family business. He is an Independent Corporate Director and Advisor who works with Family Business owners, their Board, and its C-Suite team to strengthen their family and corporate governance structures, internationalise operations and implement strategic action plans for harmonious intergenerational transitions. Certified by the Institute of Directors of England (IoD), Dante holds an MBA from Alfred University, and has 22+ years’ experience in Strategic Management Consulting for Families in Business. Dante has worked with a varied type of enterprises such as multigenerational family businesses, family offices, their trusted consultants, entrepreneurs, as well as business associations, and educational institutions. Dante motivates comprehensive conversations around strategic scenarios that aim to facilitate agreed steps towards profitable and sustainable strategies based on the shareholder’s expectations, family projection and competitive landscape. Dante is based in Miami and collaborates with Zita, and the Team, on specific family governance projects. Dante may also help with vital corporate governance-related services, if of interest.
Orsolya Hulley is a Librarian, Editor, Bookseller and Translator. Amongst her clients are well-known family publishing houses and bookseller companies, including Springer Nature, whose showroom she managed for many years, and Harrassowitz, a leading supplier of scholarly monographs, subscriptions, research materials and literary texts, as well as the Goethe Institut.
Orsolya works in German and English and is involved in museum projects, overseeing and managing museum competitions and beyond. Orsolya is also an award-winning author and translated numerous literary works.
Andrea Forrai is a Philologist and Interpreter, having worked with heads of state, ruling families, embassies, blue-chip companies and UHNWIs for the last 25+ years, reflecting her dedication to excellence, cultural sensitivity and profound understanding of the delicate nature of high-stakes communication. She is also a seasoned luxury travel professional adept at thriving in demanding environments across the globe.
Andrea holds a BA in Philology from ELTE University with a diploma in Germanic Studies, specialised in Netherlandistic Studies. She also spent a semester at Utrecht University and another at the University of Groningen. She works in English, Dutch and German.
Pillars & Values
Trust - Confidentiality - High Ethics - Privacy - Thoughtfulness - Diversity - Inclusion - Responsibility
Culture - Knowledge - Guardianship - Stewardship - Custodianship
An important note: we are fully aware, embrace, and guide you around cultural, social, and further sensitivities around your legacy, including the nuances around language-related narrative changes and are uniquely qualified to guide you on, and execute upon, fitting and elaborate legacy narration, articulation, showcasing, and representation practices.
Mission for the Longevity of Legacies
Business, enterprising, and legacy families around the world strive to ensure the longevity of their complex family, business, investment, and other activities making up their ever moving galaxies. What sets the world’s most innovative and prominent business and legacy families apart, is that they have been thriving for generations by focusing on their family legacies as their most critical competitive advantage and complexity premium.
We engage and enable individuals and families to thrive by researching, understanding, preserving, showcasing, benefiting from, shaping, structuring, maximising, representing, and passing on their complex family legacies to the next generation of legacy guardians, stewards, and custodians, and ensuring their longevity. We are committed to highlighting that legacies are highly complex, precious, undervalued, and underestimated, whilst advocating for and championing precious work helping you enhance and maximise your legacy journeys and turning your family legacy as a shared joyful preoccupation.
Long-Term Vision for Legacies
The Legacy Atelier™ empowers individuals and families to thrive via their legacies for generations to come.
We envision a world in which a legacy no longer means and represent a hindrance, but immense value, we are sparking a global movement and effective action around legacies, prompting legacy builders, guardians, stewards, as well as custodians to lead with their legacies benefiting family members, employees, other stakeholders, and communities globally.
Exploring the World of Narratives
Our Founder has been passionately exploring the world of narrative constellations since the age of 10, when her country of origin went through a whole narrative re-set with streets being renamed and books rewritten. From the age of 13 came her intercultural and cross-cultural immersions whilst spending summer weeks around Europe in international schools learning different languages. These experiences were followed by living in various countries and explorations in Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Literature, Linguistics, History of Arts, Hermeneutics, further fields of Aesthetics and Philosophy during her university years, including PhD studies.
Zita believes that multigenerational family legacies are masterpieces. She possesses a unique ability, and a trained comparatist brain, to map, analyse, synthesise, preserve, purposefully curate, and showcase the most critical and complex facets, threads, and overarching narratives of multigenerational family legacies through their different family eras; familyisms, as well as help these to be passed on to the next generation of legacy guardians, stewards, and custodians.