Succession is the moment a family is most likely to lose control of its own affairs. What we have seen, time and again, is that the damage rarely comes from the assets. It comes from the people and the knowledge that held everything together, and from leaving their handover until it can no longer be done calmly.
86% of single family offices have no succession plan. Yet 59% expect to hand control to the next generation within ten years. Those two numbers do not belong in the same sentence, and most families know it.
Handled early, while the principal is still active, succession is a family project rather than an administrative one. It is the occasion for parents and children to say out loud what the wealth is for, what each of them wants from it, and where they see things differently. Those conversations are easier to have around a table than around a will.
It also changes the office. The team that served one generation is rarely the team that will serve the next. Someone who spent twenty years reading one principal will not read the next one the same way. A family office executive is rarely the right hand of two generations at once. Renewing the executive team is part of succession, and like the rest of it, it goes better when it is planned and transparent.
This guide sets out what succession planning should cover: the family conversation, the next generation, the knowledge one person carries, and the team that has to evolve. It rests on what our partners have seen inside families, rather than on survey averages.
Start while the founder is still there
The strongest transmissions begin years before they are needed, and they begin as a conversation.
A succession prepared while the founder is present and well lets the next generation ask their questions while there is still someone to answer them. The founder can explain what was built and why each decision was made. The children can independently disagree, test their own ideas, and work out where they want to take things. None of that is possible once the transmission is forced by incapacitation or death.
The exchange runs both ways. Parents learn what their children would want to make of the wealth, which is rarely what they assumed. NextGens come to understand why certain things were done the way they were. A family that has this conversation early makes its later decisions faster and with far less friction, because the hard questions were settled while everyone could still discuss them in the open.
Treated this way, succession also does the family good. It turns an anxious subject into a shared one. For some principals, starting a "without me" conversation can be very difficult. In which case, a third party can help to facilitate, not drive, the process: workshop to start a family's transmission project
What an unprepared succession does to the next generation
When succession is left until it is forced, the cost falls hardest on the people meant to inherit.
A next generation that has not been prepared inherits control it does not yet know how to use. They become passive holders or unprepared leaders of a structure they did not help build and do not fully understand. They are asked to trust advisers they did not choose, to ratify decisions they cannot yet judge, while holding the family united through difficult times. This is where many families begin to lose their grip on their own wealth or worse, their unity.
We were once called into a family where the founder had died suddenly, having kept the whole picture to himself. His children held the shares and none of the understanding. For the first year, the people who really ran the wealth were advisers the generation now in charge had not chosen, simply because they were the only ones who knew how anything worked. Recovering control took years, and it started with the education that should have happened a decade earlier.
What looks like disengagement in a younger generation is usually something simpler. They have not been given a real role, real information, or a reason to step in. Engagement follows ownership of the subject, and ownership has to be handed over on purpose. A structured programme for onboarding the next generation turns a bloodline into competence. The right time to begin is earlier than most families expect: the late teens and twenties for education, and the thirties for a real seat at the table.
The knowledge one person carries
In a first-generation office, the most valuable thing is rarely on the balance sheet. It sits in one person's head.
Either the founder or a long standing family office executive knows the banking relationships, remembers why each structure was built, and holds the agreements that were made on a handshake. While that person is at the centre, the office runs on memory. When they step back, the family finds out how much was never written down. This is not a matter of if, but when.
The work is to move that knowledge out of one head and into a shared record the family controls, while the person who holds it is still there to explain it. Done in time, the family keeps the knowledge even when it loses the person who carried it. Multiple ways exist to structure a knowledge base. One tool worth checking would be Trusted Family that helps families structure and keep track of their knowledge.
You are never the right hand of two generations
Succession is rarely a clean handover on a single date. It is a period, and the office has to be led through it.
The team built around one principal carried that principal's priorities, habits, and trust. The next generation arrives with its own. Some of the people who served brilliantly under the founder will go on to thrive with the successors. Others, through no fault of their own, belong to the era that is closing. Pretending otherwise strands both the family and the team.
Some of the loyal executives move to a non-exec role such as senior advisers to the family, some will simply leave the organisation. In any case, loyalty being a two way street, those are the moments where the family shows its appreciation for the work done by their stewards.
The fragile moment is the gap between one generation of executives stepping back and the next being ready to lead. A transition leader, brought in for twelve to eighteen months, holds the office steady through that gap, while working with the next generation to organise an office that matches their need and not the one of the previous generation. Westwick's Partners take on this transition role, working with families through transitions.
Where to start
If you're a founder, the right time is now. Even if the next generation is not ready to work or not even born, starting to think about how you would want the transition to go has no reason to be postponed.
Open the family conversation as early as you can. Write down what the principal knows, and move it into a record the family keeps. Name who can act, and how, in the first weeks after a death. Begin preparing the next generation young, with a real programme rather than a good intention. And look honestly at the executive team, deciding who carries into the next generation and who should be helped to move on.
The reason to do this now is simple. Succession is the one event in the life of a family and its office that is certain to come and impossible to schedule. Families that prepare for it keep their wealth, their office, and their unity intact through the change. Families that leave it to chance tend to lose all three at once, at the worst possible time.
← Back to Insights & Knowledge