Handing over the reins of a family’s wealth is never really about the wealth. Any family that has been through it. genuinely through it, not just the paperwork side of things, will tell you the same thing. The hard part is not getting through the restructuring, the tax considerations or the governance documentation. The hard part is looking at someone you love and trusting them with something you bled for.
That trust does not arrive on its own. And at Lockmore Capital, we have seen too many families discover that too late.
Preparation Is Not a Briefing
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Most families do the visible things. They introduce the next generation to the advisers, walk them through the portfolio, make sure they know what they own and roughly what it is worth. It feels responsible and it looks like preparation. But it is not.
What nobody tells you is that knowing the assets you have is the easy part. What actually determines whether the next generation handles wealth well is whether they have ever been put in a position where it genuinely mattered what they decided to do with those assets. Where there was something real at stake and they had to figure it out themselves. That does not come from a theoretical meeting, but rather this is a skill forged by active participation in the direction of your assets – from being given responsibility early enough that there is still room to recover from getting it wrong.
The families we see do this well share one habit: they started far earlier than felt necessary at the time, and they never really stopped.
Governance That Actually Does Something
Family governance gets a bad reputation, and honestly, it has earned some of it. Too many families spend serious money producing constitutional documents that live in a folder and get referenced approximately never. That is administration with good intentions, but it is not worth the time and money spent on producing it.
What governance looks like when it works is much messier and more human. It is a next-generation council where younger family members have genuine influence over philanthropic decisions. They are not afraid to speak up, and the family trusts them enough to listen to them, giving them actual influence. Arriving at this point is contingent on giving someone in their late twenties real responsibility for a specific part of the family office’s activity, with the expectation that they report back and are held to account. The younger generation must build the muscle of decision-making in conditions where the stakes are meaningful but not catastrophic.
“The families who come to us already thinking structurally navigate transitions with far less damage. And by that I mean determining who holds which decisions and knowing how disagreements will surface, and how to tackle them, before they become something much worse,” says a senior adviser at Lockmore Capital. “This kind of clarity built in advance is worth ten times the clarity that you try to manufacture under pressure.”
Where to Start
If you are reading this and recognising your own family in any of it, these are the questions worth sitting with before any adviser meeting or any formal succession conversation:
- Has the next generation ever been given a decision with real consequences – not hypothetical input, but actual ownership of an outcome?
- Do they know why the family built what it built, not just what it is worth?
- When disagreements arise, is there a structure for resolving them, or does everything quietly default to whoever has the most authority in the room?
- Have you told them what you expect of them, explicitly, rather than assuming they already know?
- If something happened to you tomorrow, would they know what to do? And more importantly, would they know what you would have wanted?
None of these have clean answers. But the families who have wrestled with them tend to be significantly better prepared than those who have not.
What Switzerland Gets Right
Families based in or connected to Switzerland have a genuine advantage here. The density of multi-family offices, independent trustees and long-established fiduciary expertise means the infrastructure for serious succession planning exists locally and is genuinely world-class. Families here do not need to reinvent anything.
What they do need is the willingness to engage it before something forces them to. Succession planning that starts because of a health scare or an unexpected family dispute is always going to be succession planning on the back foot. By that point, the decisions that deserved years of careful thought are getting made in mere weeks, under intense emotional pressure and with relationships already strained. The families who avoid that are the ones who treated this the way they treated any other long-horizon investment worth their salt – with patience, sufficient lead time and an intrinsic sense of what they were actually trying to protect.
The Question Nobody Asks Early Enough
Underneath all the governance frameworks and advisory structures, there is a conversation that matters more than any of them, and we find that it rarely gets had early enough. This is the question of what the family actually believes wealth is for, across its generations.
When the next generation understands the meaning of the legacy their predecessors has built their relationship to everything else changes. When they view the business they hold responsibility for as more than an abstract value statement, looking at it as something they have stakes in because they have wrestled with alongside the people who built it. That is when a legacy is truly strengthened. They stop thinking of the family’s assets as something that will one day belong to them and start thinking of them as something they are already responsible for, and something that they actually care about. That shift is subtle, but it is everything.
At Lockmore Capital, we do not think of this as just succession planning. We think of this process as the most important investment a family can make, and like most important investments, the returns depend almost entirely on how early you start.