Family Offices, Succession & Suitability
A quieter conversation about legacy, not just control
Family offices are supposed to be the grown-up end of finance. The place where urgency calms down, time horizons lengthen, and the focus shifts from quarterly optics to generational stewardship.
In practice, that calm surface often hides a lot of pressure.
You are not only managing capital. You are managing ghosts, expectations, rivalries, old promises, and the very human hope that “the family name” will stand for something good long after you are gone.
That is where this work lives: at the point where spreadsheets and bloodlines collide, and where the hardest questions are not about allocation, but about people.
When succession feels more like obligation than legacy
Most families with a serious office have some version of this story.
There is a founder or wealth-creator whose drive built the capital. There is a next generation, or two, who grew up inside that story and cannot entirely escape it. Somewhere along the way, a quiet assumption calcifies:
“Of course one of them will take over.”
That assumption can be flattering and suffocating at the same time.
Titles and roles slowly start to form around surnames rather than suitability. A son or daughter is “groomed” for leadership because they share the bloodline, not because anyone has taken a hard, curious look at their temperament, judgement, or actual interests. The family may have a “black sheep” who doesn’t fit the mould and is treated as a problem, not as a person whose different path might carry its own kind of wisdom.
None of this is simple malice. Most of it is love and fear tangled together. Love that wants to see the next generation “safe” and “provided for.” Fear that the whole structure might unravel without a clear successor sitting in a visible seat.
The trouble is that capital does not erase human nature. Put the wrong person in the wrong role, give them a grand title they did not choose and cannot quite inhabit, and you do not just create organisational risk. You create a quiet kind of cruelty.
The question underneath the lofty balance sheet
A lot of family-office work circles around the same surface themes: governance, mandates, risk budgets, philanthropy, trusts, voting rights. They all matter.
But beneath those lies a harder question that rarely gets enough airtime:
What does “good stewardship” actually look like for these people, in this family, with this story and this amount of capital?
Sometimes that answer points toward a carefully prepared successor. Sometimes it points toward a different structure, where professional managers run the office and family members play to strengths elsewhere. Sometimes it points toward simplification rather than expansion.
This is also where legacy becomes real.
Walk any serious financial district and you will see bronze plaques and carved names on stone that few people can now place. Grandees whose reputations once felt permanent are, in practical terms, gone. The memory of most board chairs, founders and benefactors fades within a generation or two.
So the question shifts:
If almost no one will remember the names, what do you actually want the money, the structures and the stories to do for the living?
Sometimes the truest legacy is not another foundation, another building or another vehicle. Sometimes it is less complexity, fewer obligations, and a family who feel less trapped by a structure that was meant to serve them.
When the role and the person don’t match
You already know, from your professional life, what happens when someone is promoted beyond their competence in a public company or institution. People work around them. Politics fills the gap. Costs show up later.
In a family office, the same thing happens with higher stakes and fewer safety valves.
A son is put in charge of investments because he “should” learn. A daughter is steered toward philanthropy because she is “good with people.” A cousin is offered a role to keep the peace. None of these decisions are inherently wrong, but they are often made with almost no neutral discussion of suitability.
Questions that rarely get asked plainly:
Does this person actually want this role, or are they trying not to disappoint anyone?
How does this role fit their temperament: introvert or extrovert, detail or big-picture, steady or restless?
What kind of pressure will this role quietly apply to their marriage, health and inner life?
Are we asking them to be a custodian, an entrepreneur, a figurehead, or a lightning rod?
When those questions stay unasked, the office can become a polite trap. From the outside, the successor looks privileged and fortunate. From the inside, they may feel like conscripts in a war they never chose.
Over time, that misfit can show up as burnout, quiet resentment, acting out, risky side bets, or the deadened compliance of someone who has given up on having an inner life that belongs to them.
Where I sit in these conversations
I do not replace your lawyers, accountants, or investment advisers. They have their lanes and they are important.
I work in the human lane: where suitability, conscience, temperament and long-term consequence meet.
My background is in institutional investing and leadership advisory. I understand solvency, mandates, governance, and the politics of serious capital. I also understand what happens to people when you ignore hairline fractures long enough: in health, in marriages, in careers and in families.
In family-office work, my role is to be a quiet, steady outside confidential mind who:
takes each person’s intelligence and agency seriously, including the so-called black sheep
asks questions no one inside the system feels free to ask
notices who is actually carrying the emotional and practical load, not just the titles
holds a long view on what certain decisions are likely to do to people over ten or twenty years, not just this quarter
Sometimes that means long, patient conversations with the principal about what they really want their remaining working years to feel like. Sometimes it means shadowing the next generation and listening more than I speak, slowly becoming a trusted confidant rather than another adult telling them who they should be. Sometimes it means gently naming unsuitability where everyone can already feel it but no one wants to say the words.
Education, “black sheep” and the courage to diverge
Family offices often reach for education as a kind of insurance policy. An MBA here, a law degree there, perhaps a professional credential or two. These achievements have real value. They also carry a quiet risk: confusing more schooling with clearer direction.
I work with families and young adults on education pathways from a different angle. The question is not “Which degree will look most impressive beside the family name?” The question is “What education, if any, is actually suitable for this person’s interests, capabilities and likely path?”
That includes making room for divergence.
Sometimes the person least suited to run the office is the one with the strongest surname. Sometimes the supposed black sheep is the only one willing to tell the truth. Sometimes the healthiest outcome is a clear, respectful decision that a family member will not be placed into a role which would harm both them and the enterprise.
Defusing that tension takes time, tact, and a firm commitment to seeing each person as a whole human being, not just as “the heir,” “the spare,” or “the problem.” That is the work I do.
Legacy without heroics
The world will only remember an infinitesimal fraction of its leaders, founders and trustees. That reality is not an insult. It is a kind of mercy.
Once you accept how small that remembered slice will be, you are freer to ask better questions:
What would a quietly good outcome for this family look like in twenty or thirty years?
What structures and roles would leave people more alive, not more trapped?
Where might simplifying, selling, or stepping back be an act of courage rather than defeat?
Sometimes the bravest move a principal can make is to say “no” to one more board, one more vehicle, or one more generation of complicated governance that no one really wants to inherit. Sometimes real freedom means spending the remaining years not in constant defence of a structure, but in relationships that feel honest and unforced.
My work is to stand beside you while those questions are asked and answered, without trying to steer you toward a pre-packaged “legacy solution.”
How this work actually happens
Family-office work is rarely a single meeting. It is slow, relational, and often quiet by design.
We talk one to one, and sometimes with carefully chosen small groups, always in strict confidence. I listen, ask questions, and help you map the human landscape of your office: who is suited to what, where the real pressure points are, where unspoken resentments and loyalties live.
Over time, we move from talk to decisions: a role clarified, a successor prepared or released, a board seat declined, a structure simplified, an education path rethought. None of it is about perfection. All of it is about suitability: work, roles and responsibilities that genuinely fit the people who hold them.
If you recognise your world in this description – serious capital, complicated family, a sense that something about the current path is off even if you cannot name it – then you are the person I had in mind when I began offering this work.
You do not have to untangle legacy, succession and suitability on your own.