What makes a family office transition different from a corporate succession?

A family office transition carries stakes that corporate succession does not. It is not just a change of management — it is a transfer of values, identity, and purpose across generations. The family's capacity to remain united through the transition is both the precondition and the goal. Corporate succession optimises for continuity of performance; family succession must also optimise for continuity of the family itself.

What did thirty years at the Pinault family office teach about transitions?

Three decades inside a single family office teach one thing above all: the quality of the transition is determined long before the transition begins. Families that navigate it well have spent years building shared values, clear governance, and next-generation preparation. Families that struggle are those for whom the transition is the first serious conversation about these questions.

How do you preserve family identity through a governance transition?

Family identity is preserved in transitions by keeping the family's values explicitly at the centre of every governance decision. Structure serves the family — not the other way around. When governance is designed around the family's actual dynamics rather than imported from a corporate template, transitions can be managed without asking the family to become something it is not.

Insight · 21 April 2026

On transitions in a family office — a conversation with PwC

In PwC Switzerland's Family Business Stories podcast, Gilles Erulin reflects on three decades inside the Pinault family office — and what that experience reveals about what transitions in a family office actually require.

PwC Switzerland invited Gilles to record an episode of their Family Business Stories podcast — a conversation about what thirty years inside Financière Pinault / Artémis taught him about transitions, governance, and the specific discipline required to carry a family through a change of generation without losing what made it worth preserving in the first place.

The conversation covered ground that sits at the heart of Westwick's work. Three themes emerged that are worth stating plainly.

Transitions are decided long before they begin

Families that navigate generational transitions well are not families that managed the transition better. They are families that spent the preceding decade building the conditions for it: shared values made explicit, governance structures that pre-empt disputes rather than resolve them, a next generation that has been given real responsibility and real stakes before the moment of transfer arrives. By the time the transition begins, the outcome is largely already determined. Westwick enters early — often years before the formal transition — precisely because of this.

The Pinault experience and what it taught

Twenty-six years inside a single family office is long enough to see everything: acquisitions and exits, crises and recoveries, the moment when a founder's vision is tested by the generation that did not build it. The most important lesson from those years is that the families who preserve what they have built are those who remain clear about what they are trying to preserve — and who refuse to let the structure of the office override the logic of the family.

This is not a platitude. It has concrete consequences. It means that governance decisions are evaluated not only on their technical merit but on whether they serve the family's long-term unity. It means that advisors who optimise for the office — its efficiency, its compliance, its institutional standing — are less valuable than advisors who keep the family's purpose in view. And it means that the CEO of a family office has a fundamentally different job from the CEO of a corporation — a distinction that is easy to state and hard to operationalise.

Governance without losing the right to be different

Family offices are under pressure — from lawyers, accountants, regulators, and the weight of institutional fashion — to adopt governance frameworks designed for corporations. Some of this pressure is legitimate. Most of it is not. The structural advantage of a family office — its speed, its long-term horizon, its privacy, its capacity to hold positions that institutions cannot — depends on preserving the family's right to be different. Governance that strips this away in the name of best practice has misunderstood what it is governing.

The conversation with PwC is here: https://www.pwc.ch/en/insights/family-business-stories/episode-24.html

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