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The sense maker in the room

Jacqui Clarke

I help families protect what they have built, prepare the next generation and make the big transitions without chaos.

Based in Sydney, working with family members worldwide.

Jacqui Clarke
Jacqui Clarke
Where it started

The kitchen table was the boardroom.

I grew up in a family business. Work, money and family life all ran through the same kitchen: suppliers paid, jobs quoted, decisions made over dinner. My parents never sat us down to “teach money”. They simply lived it in front of us.

That is where I learned the thing thirty years of advising has kept confirming: money is never only numerical. It carries expectation, history, duty and fear, and families handle it well when they can talk about it, and badly when they cannot.

Shame has no place in this work. Clarity does.

The sense maker

The specialists each hold a piece. I hold the whole.

In most rooms I am the sense maker: the one who takes tax, law, investments, insurance and the family’s own views, and turns them into a decision the family can actually make.

The families I work with rarely lack advisers. They come because the challenge is no longer just structures or tax. It is children who are not yet ready, competing views across the family, and gaps in protection nobody owns.

I ask what is not being asked. I say the thing everyone is thinking. And I stay until the decision is made and holding.

Clients tell me I am calm, practical and straight-talking. I can hold the hard line when it is needed, and I do so with care.
Jacqui Clarke
30+ years
advising significant private families and their enterprises
Big 4
former partner, more than twenty years with Deloitte
Maxima Private
co-founder, private-client advisory
Author
Stop Worrying About Money (Wiley, 2023): Chanticleer International Book Awards, Grand Prize
30+

Years in advisory — across tax, structures and family wealth.

20+

Years with Deloitte — former partner of the firm.

6

Boardrooms — current and recent director and adviser seats.

Thirty years of advisory experience

What I bring.

Fellow Chartered Accountant, Chartered Accountants Australia and New ZealandChartered Tax AdviserRegistered Tax AgentGraduate of the Australian Institute of Company DirectorsFellow of the Taxation Institute of AustraliaJustice of the Peace
Board and governance, current

BKI Limited, Non-Executive Director. Burton Contractors Shareholders Board, Adviser.

Recent

SMEG Australia, Chair and NED. Cleary Bros Group, Beetaloo Energy Australia Ltd (formerly Empire Energy Group), Humpty Dumpty Foundation, Non-Executive Director.

Committee experience

Audit and Risk, Remuneration, Nomination and Investment.

Board work matters here for one reason: it is where you learn how consequential decisions are actually made, with incomplete information, competing interests and real deadlines. That is the room families need me to be useful in.

Beyond the practice

The public side of the work.

The book

Stop Worrying About Money, the philosophy behind the practice, written for everyone.

About the book

Speaking

Keynotes and boardroom sessions on family wealth and the conversations it needs.

Speaking and events