Succession Planning in Family Offices
Succession is the discipline of designing transitions before they are forced. Done well, it is invisible. Done badly, it is the single largest source of family-wealth attrition.
Key takeaways
- —Succession planning is governance work, not estate planning.
- —Three transitions matter: leadership, ownership, and identity.
- —Documented decision rights before transition prevent disputes after.
- —Plans should be tested through scenario exercises, not only written.
Succession planning is often confused with estate planning. Estate planning concerns the legal transfer of assets at death; succession planning concerns the active transfer of leadership, ownership, and operational responsibility — usually well before death. Most failures of inherited wealth track to the second category, not the first. The legal documents arrive intact; the governance does not.
Working succession plans have three layers: who leads (and how that leader is selected), who owns (and on what terms shares may move), and what the family stands for (and how that identity persists across branches). Plans without all three layers tend to fail at the inflection point. The best families test their plans through scenario exercises — sudden incapacity, unexpected exit, branch dispute — and revise the plan based on what those exercises surface.
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