Most family offices are built to manage money. Far fewer are built to survive the families who own them. That gap, according to Fort Lauderdale consultant Nicholas Mukhtar, is where the trouble starts.
The numbers describe the exposure. Only 53% of family offices have a succession plan, and only half of those are formal written documents, according to a survey by RBC Wealth Management and Campden Wealth. Governance, in other words, tends to get assembled reactively, when a crisis forces the issue, rather than built deliberately before one arrives.
Ask Mukhtar to name the single most common failure and his answer is immediate. “The biggest mistake is not getting their kids involved early enough,” he said. “You don’t know what life has in store.” He points to situations where a sudden death or accident leaves heirs with no understanding of what was built, how it was structured, or what to do next.
The framing he uses is telling. He treats this as a relationship failure rather than a financial oversight. The wealthiest principals, he observes, are often the least prepared for transition, not because they lack resources but because building the business consumed every available hour. “The ones who make mistakes are often so busy building their business, doing whatever led to their success, that they forget why they’re doing it: for their family and the next generation,” he said.
A first-generation executive quoted in Deloitte’s 2025 Family Office Insight Series put the risk even more starkly. “The biggest risk to most Family Offices is the family,” the executive said, particularly when no plan exists for who takes over or how. The observation reframes succession as a people problem wearing a financial disguise.
The families Mukhtar has seen struggle most tend to have plenty of wealth and sophisticated legal arrangements. What they lack is visibility. Spouses are left in the dark about what was built, adult children get kept outside operational decisions for years, and a single unexpected event waits to surface conversations that were never had.
None of this requires exotic structures to fix. It requires starting the conversation before circumstances force it. A plan that heirs understand, drafted while the principal is present to explain it, protects far more than any document filed and forgotten. The offices that get succession right, in Mukhtar’s experience, are simply the ones that stopped deferring the hardest conversation until it was too late to have it well.
