Family offices tend to get justified by their complexity: enough entities, enough assets, enough generations that the case for a dedicated structure makes itself. Veteran family office leader Jennifer Connelly thinks that’s the wrong place to start.
“Complexity is the tactical answer. It is not the real one. The real one is purpose,” says Connelly, who is currently Manager, Family Office at Krause Group, serving the family that previously owned the Kum & Go convenience store chain and currently owns Italian soccer club Parma Calcio 1913, among other holdings.
Connelly, whose career has also included two other roles in different single-family offices, has focused her work on building human capital and operational architecture to support families across generations: governance design, rising generation education and the structures that hold multigenerational engagement together. It’s a mandate that sits outside the investment committee and the tax attorneys, in the part of a family office that’s harder to put on an org chart and, in Connelly’s view, harder to get wrong without consequence.
A generalist by design
Connelly’s path into family offices ran through the deal side first. She started as chief of staff to a founder scaling a healthcare company, staying on through its sale to private equity and working the M&A integration on the people and culture side — the point, she says, “where the term sheet meets the actual humans who have to make the combined company work.” When the founder went on to launch his own private equity firm, she joined as a founding member. From there she moved into family offices directly, first as chief of staff to a CEO navigating early-stage succession and integration work, then at a venture-oriented family office with a deep tech focus, before joining Krause Group.
“My work is not moving the ball forward,” she says. “It is owning the experience, the preservation of legacy and the continuity of the family office across generations, with individual well-being and family flourishing as the heart of it.”
Connelly leans on family enterprise expert James E. Hughes Jr.’s framework of the forms of capital a family holds — financial, human, intellectual, social and spiritual — to explain why complexity alone doesn’t determine whether a single-family office structure fits. Financial capital, she notes, is the one every family can already name. Spiritual capital is the one that rarely gets discussed, and it’s often where the rising generation’s questions live.
“If the office is designed with spiritual capital in mind, there is room for a generation that wants to show up in the world differently than the wealth creator did, without the continuity of the legacy fracturing to make room for them,” she says.
When that purpose isn’t clearly defined, or when an office is built to serve one person’s vision of the family rather than a shared one, Connelly says the outcomes are predictable: costly staff turnover, thin family engagement, and a structure that comes apart quickly once the principal is gone. “The wrapper does not hold,” she says.
Starting rising generation work with the individual, not the role
Much of Connelly’s career has focused on preparing next-generation family members, and she pushes back on the instinct to start that work by asking what seat someone should eventually fill.
“Start with the individual: what does well-being look like for this specific person, in this specific family, at this stage of their life,” she says. From there, she runs a gap analysis between where someone is and where their fullest contribution might live, then builds development backward from that gap. She points to “The 10×10 Learning Roadmap” by Stephen Goldbart, Stacy Allred, and Joan DiFuria as the framework she returns to for this work.
She’s also candid about the failure mode she sees most often, which isn’t about the rising generation at all; it’s a two-sided expectation gap between generations. The senior generation wants more engagement; the rising generation isn’t always sure what engagement is supposed to look like, or what authority actually comes with it.
“The framing from the previous generation is usually about protecting the family or protecting the wealth,” she says. “What it reads as, to a rising generation member, is: you want me to participate, but you do not give me any decision-making.” Closing that gap, in her experience, is often less about developing the next generation and more about preparing the current one to gradually let go.
Governance built to be used, not just to protect
Connelly’s approach to governance design starts simply. “I ask questions,” she says — of the founding generation, the rising generation, family office staff, and even family members who will never hold anything beyond a beneficiary role. Governance, she argues, is easy to draft and hard to design, because the family’s values and individual perspectives have to be surfaced before any structure can actually hold weight.
She’s seen governance fail when a principal sets it alone and expects the rest of the family to comply. She’s also seen it fail in the opposite direction — over-engineered against worst-case scenarios until it becomes too complex for the rising generation to meaningfully use.
Her fix leans on giving the next generation real places to practice: observer board seats, advisory committees, or small committees with genuine autonomy over bounded decisions. She points to philanthropy as a place this has worked especially well, with families carving out a donor-advised fund or foundation for the rising generation to run entirely on their own — building mission, governance, and giving priorities at lower stakes before the larger family seats are on the table.
“Governance always ends up expressing a value, whether the family names it or not,” Connelly says. “Where the value is named and shared, the governance carries the family. Where the value stays unnamed or unshared, the governance carries the principal alone.”