Family offices tend to put more structure around investments than around the people who will inherit them. An April 2026 NetNewsLedger article asked Nicholas Mukhtar, who founded the consulting firm Tera Strategies in Fort Lauderdale, which governance failure he sees most. His clients range from multigenerational wealth holders to first-generation founders who have only recently moved assets into a formal office structure. “The biggest mistake is not getting their kids involved early enough,” he said.
The Planning Numbers
A 2024 RBC Wealth Management and Campden Wealth report found that only 53% of North American family offices have a succession plan in place, and that just 30% of those offices have a formal, written plan.
NetNewsLedger notes that governance documents are often prepared for attorneys, leaving the heirs who must eventually act on them without a working grasp of their contents.
When Heirs Are Left Out
Mukhtar has seen cases, sometimes among his clients’ own clients, in which a parent dies or is hurt in an accident and the children cannot say what was built, how it was organized or where to start. “You don’t know what life has in store,” he said.
A first-generation executive quoted in Deloitte’s 2025 Family Office Insight Series described the same exposure: “If you’re going to be honest, the biggest risk to most Family Offices is the family.”
Why Accomplished Founders Put It Off
Mukhtar links the delay to the habits that built the fortune. Founders who spend decades growing a company rarely carve out time to walk a spouse or children through the details of what they own. “When you’re a high-performing, high-achieving individual, it’s even harder to slow down and actually do family planning with the people who matter,” he said.
Wealthy principals are often the least prepared for a transition, he has observed, because building the business consumed the hours that planning would have required.
What Better-Prepared Families Do
Families Mukhtar holds up as models start early and keep it hands-on. “They set their kids up with a small account at age 10 or 11, have them pick stocks, and teach them the value of time in the market, saving money, and allocating into buckets,” he said.
Those lessons continue through childhood and adolescence, years before any formal transfer of responsibility. He applies the same rule to spouses.
Mukhtar sorts the families he has advised by a single measure, which is how closely the next generation is involved. “The ones who do it well keep their family closely involved. The ones who struggle don’t,” he said.
