Who will take over the roles of key family members and professional staff once those currently serving retire? This is one key question a significant number of family offices are putting off answering.
“We see a lack of planning, a lack of communication, a lack of transparency — and, frankly, just pushing it off until they can’t push it off anymore,” says Harry Cendrowski, managing director of Cendrowski Corporate Advisors.
A recent survey, the “Global Family Office Report 2025” from UBS, found that only about half of family offices have a succession plan in place. The figure varies by region, with just 36% of North Asian family offices reporting that they have a succession plan, compared with 65% of Southeast Asian family offices and 64% of those in the U.S.
Respondents whose family offices do not have a succession plan offered a variety of reasons, including that the beneficial owner doesn’t feel it’s a priority (29%), the beneficial owner hasn’t decided how to divide the assets (21%) and the beneficial owner hasn’t had time to discuss the matter with the family office (18%).
Those who have created a succession plan noted a number of challenges:
- Transferring wealth in the most tax efficient manner: 64%
- Setting up the right legal structures to transfer assets: 48%
- Ensuring the family’s assets stay protected through the generations: 46%
- Preparing the next generation to take on wealth responsibly and in-line with family goals: 43%
- Defining family governance: 36%
Experts — including family members who have been through the succession planning process with their own family offices — offer these tips for a smooth family office succession:
- Look at the big picture.
Bryn Monahan says her family office is in the midst of succession planning at the staff level.
“The CEO has been with us for over 40 years (in various roles), and our board also has both family and independent members who are ready to retire,” says Monahan, senior consultant at Relative Solutions and a fourth-generation family and board member with Foster Holdings. “The biggest challenge is ensuring the outgoing CEO and independent board members don’t all retire at the same time. As such, we recently hired a new board member to replace an outgoing independent. We also have been making strategic hires, for close to 10 years, to ready the office staff for a change of CEO, and to be able to promote to this role from within.”
Monahan notes, though, that the board also maintains an updated job description for the CEO and has relationships with recruiters, so they could look outside if needed.
- Look beyond the CEO.
“You need to be able to backfill any of the leadership positions. The next CEO is important, but you also have to look at everybody surrounding the CEO and make sure there is continuity for the team,” says Joshua Nacht, principal consultant with the Family Business Consulting Group. “If one person who is part of the internal team moves up to CEO, who moves into that person’s position? It’s like a big jigsaw puzzle: You move one piece, and all the other pieces move as well.”
- Involve the next generation.
The UBS survey found only 26% of those with a succession plan consulted the next generation about it from the outset. Just over one-third of respondents (36%) consulted the next generation after speaking with the current generation, but a similar number (35%) did not consult the next generation at all.
Families do, however, have expectations about how they envision the next generation being involved: Almost 60% say they want them to sit on the board, according to the UBS survey, and 44% want them involved in philanthropy. Smaller percentages cited strategic asset allocation (41%), investment management (39%), direct investment deals (31%) or taking on a management or executive role in the family office (31%).
How open should the succession planning process be? That depends on factors including the size of the family office.
“You have certain family offices that are very, very small, and the family might just say, ‘OK, this is the next CEO.’ With family offices that are larger, there’s more structure,” Nacht says. “When you have a family office that’s working with fifth- and sixth-generation families, you’ve got a lot of different stakeholders. You’re going to need a more open, transparent sort of democratic process so that everybody feels good about the leadership.”
Family culture will also play a role. “But I think more transparency, a more open process, is probably going to feel more fair and ultimately be more effective than something that’s opaque or secretive,” Nacht says.
- Make both short-term and long-term plans.
What happens if future generations don’t have the interest or the experience to fill family office roles currently filled by family members? Josh Kanter, president of Chicago Financial, Inc. (a single-family office), says his family created a contingency plan for family office leadership that could also turn into a long-term succession plan.
“We’ve had no solid succession planning for the two senior leaders of our family office who are 62 and 68 now. So, about 10 years ago, we started a search for an MFO that would be both a contingency plan for short-term succession if one of those two senior leaders were gone, and could function as a long- or longer-term solution until the family decided if it wanted to continue the SFO and how it wanted to staff it,” says Kanter, who is also and founder and CEO of leafplanner. “This would likely mean our first non-family CEO. And since we cannot groom someone in-house and none of the rising generation have yet expressed an interest, the contingency plan, which could be a permanent solution if that’s the choice the family makes, was a form of very deliberate succession planning.”
- Don’t forget the information succession.
Cendrowski suggests family offices keep historical records of the deals they enter into and those they reject.
“That way, later, when somebody says, ‘I’ve got this hot new deal,’ somebody else can say, ‘Wait a minute, we looked at something like that three years ago, and these are the seven reasons we didn’t invest in it,’” Cendrowski says.
Kanter has developed the leafplanner platform to help their family office and others ensure “that all family members have what they need both day-to-day, and in the event of a need for an ‘information succession,’” he says.
- Look to the future.
One common mistake family offices make when creating a succession plan is to focus on how the office has operated in the past.
“You don’t necessarily want to hire a CEO to do what you’ve always done. You want to hire a CEO to carry you to where you’re going,” Nacht says. “The family continues to grow, and the assets continue to grow. What the family wants may evolve. So the family needs to get clear on where they’re going and hire a CEO who can fulfill that — not just somebody who has been where the family has already been.”