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Forbes
08-08-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Wealth Stewardship: Setting Future Generations Up For Success
Media headlines about the wealth and succession plans of famous enterprise families offer a window into how complicated—and often messy—wealth transfer can be. Yet, they also highlight how legacy and wealth intertwine through generations, drama aside. What's clear is that, with the right strategy and good communication, wealthy families can position their next generations for success. In my experience running a family office, I've seen this issue firsthand many times. I work with successful individuals from diverse backgrounds and industries. Despite their varied paths, nearly every wealthy family shares the same worry: whether their children and grandchildren will be responsible stewards of the family's wealth. A 2020 Campden Wealth survey found that among inheritors, more than half (54%) are worried that they will lose the wealth their family created, while 44% are anxious that their children will lose it. With the right strategy and good communication, many families are positioning themselves for long-term success and avoiding becoming just another statistic. Here is what I see the most successful families doing to facilitate healthy family dynamics and grow their wealth across generations. Prioritize Financial Education One common thread among families who successfully maintain wealth is a strong commitment to, and investment in, financial education. They ensure the next generation learns not just about spending, but also about budgeting, investing, and the nuances of wealth management, starting from an early age. Many families even take it a step further, using specialized courses and formal programs to equip heirs with the skills and mindset necessary to manage inherited wealth wisely. For example, several top business schools such as Columbia, Harvard, Kellogg, and Wharton offer intensive, short-duration programs that cover topics relevant to wealth stewardship. Foster Open Communication Talking about wealth doesn't always come naturally to wealthy parents – these conversations can be uncomfortable, and if no one ever discussed with you, you may feel unprepared. On the other hand, being transparent about financial matters can significantly improve your children's abilities to lead financially sound lives. Families that openly discuss their wealth, including estate plans and wills, are better equipped to manage expectations and prepare heirs for the future. Open dialogue can also help prevent misunderstandings and conflicts that often arise during wealth transfers. Create a Shared Vision Successful families create a shared vision for their wealth that aligns with their values and goals. They involve multiple generations in discussions about this vision and "write it down," so everyone in the family knows what it is and can see their imprint on it. This collaborative approach helps ensure that all family members are invested in the long-term success of the family's wealth. Establish Governance Structures Successful wealthy families create formal governance structures, such as family offices or family councils, to manage their wealth and make collective decisions. These structures help maintain family unity and ensure that wealth is managed professionally across generations. They can also help with communication because everyone can see what the expectations and rules of the road are. These families also often carve out a portion of their assets for individual family members to manage for spending and charitable purposes. Encourage Entrepreneurship and Individual Achievement Children who grow up in affluence sometimes lack the same work ethic or financial savvy as their wealth-creating predecessors. Therefore, it can be valuable to encourage heirs to pursue their own passions and careers. This approach helps preserve the work ethic and drive that led to the initial wealth creation and improves the sense of self-worth among individual family members. Additional Keys to Managing, Growing & Preserving Family Wealth Other key areas to focus on when teaching your children about wealth include the importance of tax planning, diversification, and finding a financial advisor who's the right fit. Successful families work with financial advisors and estate planning attorneys to develop tax-efficient strategies for transferring wealth to future generations, often using tools like family limited partnerships, grantor trusts, and charitable giving. They also prioritize helping their children build strong relationships with their advisors, ensuring continuity as the next generation takes on the responsibility of stewarding the family wealth. Write Your Own Story Although the possibility that family wealth may be gained, lost, and squandered over a few generations exists, it is not an inevitable fate. By prioritizing financial education, fostering open communication, and implementing strategic wealth preservation tactics, families can increase their chances of maintaining their wealth and legacy across multiple generations. The key lies in viewing wealth not just as a financial asset but as a responsibility that requires active management, shared values, and a long-term perspective.
Forbes
15-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Operational Excellence Is No Longer Optional For Family Offices
Pets might not have made it to become our trusted office assistants, but the agentic era will bring ... More new opportunities that will require us to relook operations. Each year, a growing number of industry reports compete for relevance by claiming to offer insight into the inner workings of family offices. This surge is understandable. The family office sector is rapidly growing but remains opaque, highly fragmented, and often misunderstood, and this makes credible data both rare and valuable. However, many of these reports fall short, both in their content and the sources for insights. Many reports rely on anecdotal evidence or small sample sizes that do little to move the conversation forward and create more noise than anything useful. Amongst all of this noise, a few sources stand out for their consistency and methodological rigour. Campden Wealth, one of the few independent research firms focused solely on the sector, has earned a reputation for producing some of the most trusted data in the space. Its long-running studies are complemented by proprietary surveys from other family office insight firms and global banks like Morgan Stanley, UBS, and Citi, which draw insights directly from their family office clients. Campden's latest collaboration with ALTi Tiedemann Global, the Family Office Operational Excellence Report 2025, continues this tradition. The new edition offers a detailed and wide-angled view of how family offices are evolving—not only in how they manage wealth, but in how they structure operations, approach talent, and define long-term purpose. When read alongside UBS's Global Family Office Report 2025 and Morgan Stanley's Future-Ready Family Office white paper, a unifying theme emerges. Operational excellence is no longer a background process. It has moved to the centre of strategy, becoming the foundation for long-term resilience and the defining feature of a future-ready family office. Across all three reports, one trend stands out. Family offices are shifting from a purely administrative or wealth-preserving role toward something far more intentional. According to Campden Wealth, areas such as governance, next-generation engagement, and family education have risen significantly in priority. Yet these are also the areas where family offices report the lowest satisfaction, suggesting a clear aspiration-performance gap. This theme is echoed in Morgan Stanley's report, which identifies the presence of a family mission statement as the single most important predictor of long-term success across generations. Family offices that help articulate and institutionalize a shared 'why' — and embed it into governance, communication, and investment strategy — are more likely to survive generational transitions with unity and clarity intact. These shifts mark a broader redefinition of the family office mandate. Offices are evolving from focusing on wealth protection to stewarding family legacy. This transition requires not only new services and capabilities but also new ways of thinking, business models and service delivery. The traditional family office model, heavily internal, staff-driven, and built for permanence, is being replaced by more agile hybrid structures. Campden's data shows that outsourcing has become mainstream, not just for compliance or IT, but for education, succession planning, and governance architecture. Morgan Stanley offers a practical lens on this shift. It encourages offices to regularly assess which capabilities are truly core, those that must remain in-house, and which are best delivered through trusted partnerships. Offices that intentionally design this delivery model around family needs, rather than legacy roles, are proving more resilient and scalable. What is emerging is a layered model of operations. Service partners, whether consultants, technology providers, or multi-disciplinary advisors, are playing a larger role in coordinating these layers. This helps ensure that the service delivery aligns with both strategic goals and operational demands. Despite the evolution of operating models and other structural changes, one often cited challenge seems to remain for family offices: talent acquisition and retention. According to Campden, recruiting and retaining the right people remains a top concern for many offices. UBS also highlights a steady increase in executive compensation, driven by intense competition for a dwindling pool of experienced professionals. Importantly, this issue is not limited to newer offices; even well-established, multigenerational family offices are under pressure to modernize outdated staffing models and reduce their overreliance on a few key individuals. However, this challenge is not unique to family offices. Across industries, roles are undergoing rapid transformation due to the continuead rise of artificial intelligence and automation. As Morgan Stanley highlights, the most progressive family offices are trying to adapt to this shift by designing talent strategies that are flexible and aligned with long-term vision. This includes succession planning not only at the family level but within the office itself — ensuring continuity as leadership roles evolve or transition. AI and outsourced talent are increasingly handling a variety of repeatable, transactional, and analytical tasks, such as portfolio reporting and compliance workflows. Gartner even highlighted this trend in their latest fintech hype curve, indicating that we are approaching the plateau of productivity for many of these technologies. This move allows human teams to focus on areas where human expertise is most valuable, including relationship-building, strategic planning, and managing complex family dynamics. Moving away from overly personalized, ad hoc structures is no longer optional. The offices that thrive in this new phase will be those that establish clear and adaptable roles, cultivate a culture of institutional memory, and utilize technology and partnerships to maximize the potential of small, high-impact teams. Ultimately, the family offices best positioned for the future are the ones that see talent not simply as employees, but as architects of continuity, innovation, and long-term relevance. Technology remains a persistent blind spot. Campden's findings paint a mixed picture. While digital transformation is widely accepted as essential, many offices continue to rely on fragmented systems and manual processes. UBS notes that only 8% of family offices currently use AI tools, yet over 40% plan to adopt them soon. Morgan Stanley offers concrete examples of AI in action, from portfolio reporting and deal evaluation to onboarding workflows and risk monitoring. These use cases are promising, but implementation is often hindered by a lack of foundational structure. Offices cannot simply plug in technology and expect transformation. Instead, digital tools need to be mapped to an operating model that already reflects strategic clarity. The sequencing matters. Without a clear architecture of governance, data, and accountability, even the most sophisticated tools underdeliver. But with those foundations in place, even modest automation can yield disproportionate returns. A significant shift across recent reports highlights how families are increasingly aligning their investments with their core values. There seems to definitely be an interest in values-aligned strategies, with the rising generation taking the lead on this trend. This is something that has been discussed a lot, but more in the context of sustainability. The reality is that values alignment is about more than sustainability and requires greater coherence between capital allocation and family identity. This evolution affects more than just the traditional notion of social responsibility. It starts with an investor or owner, defining their values and how these relate to the various spheres in their world - community, people, planet and beyond (for some). Investment strategies can now reflect these family values, serving as a tangible expression of their impact and role in the world. Offices that can help align these values with actual investment decisions are becoming essential strategic partners. In practical terms, this means embedding purpose into every aspect of the investment process—from deal sourcing and due diligence to structuring and impact measurement. It calls for new frameworks that extend beyond traditional returns to also consider legacy, risk tolerance, and community involvement. Taken together, the insights from Campden, UBS, and Morgan Stanley point to a deeper redefinition of operational excellence. No longer a static checklist of compliance or efficiency, excellence is becoming a dynamic capability — the ability to adapt, align, and deliver under changing conditions. True operational maturity means having a clear mission that informs every decision. It means building an office structure that is flexible, collaborative, and designed for longevity. It requires talent strategies that are forward-looking, not reactive. It means embedding technology that works with, not against, strategic clarity. And perhaps most critically, it involves anchoring financial decisions in a sense of purpose that transcends generations. The era of quiet competence in the back office is giving way to something more ambitious. Families are demanding more. Complexity is rising. And the expectations placed on family offices, both from within and beyond the family, are growing faster than ever. Operational excellence is no longer optional. It is the platform on which everything else depends.
CNBC
12-06-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Family offices are struggling to recruit and retain staff, and salary isn't the biggest challenge
A version of this article first appeared in CNBC's Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to the high-net-worth investor and consumer. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox. Investment firms of the ultra-wealthy spend as much as 72% of their budgets on C-level staff, according to a new report. And yet, even family offices with massive portfolios face headcount problems, per a survey by wealth manager AlTi Tiedemann Global and research firm Campden Wealth. Nearly eight out of 10 family offices reported difficulty hiring and 54% expressed concerns about retaining key staff. The survey, provided exclusively to CNBC, polled 146 family offices between November 2024 and March 2025. The problems are particularly acute for large family offices, despite being able to offer more competitive salaries, with 92% of firms managing at least $1 billion reporting recruiting challenges. Large family offices also reported higher turnover, averaging one employee departure every nine months, according to the report. Smaller family offices with $150 million to $249 million in assets generally reported fewer retention issues, as they could rely on family members for many key roles. Many older family offices, regardless of size, need to find new talent as staffers retire, said Erik Christoffersen, head of AlTi's multifamily office practice. There is also fierce competition from institutional investors over a shrinking pool of top-tier investment professionals, he said. "I'm not sure that family offices are prepared for the sticker price shock of the going market rate to really attract and keep great talent year after year," he added. Perhaps a bigger challenge than compensation, according to Christoffersen, is the lack of clear or attractive long-term career opportunities in the family office space. Fifty-five percent of respondents identified this as a substantial impediment, while only 26% cited compensation. "I'm not sure it's always that compelling a job description, and I think they need to really spend more time showing what's so great about our family office," he said. As for current employees, he said, "family offices can revisit the organizational structure to maximize the strengths of those talented individuals, so you can broaden and make more interesting their job and ideally compensation also can go upwards with it." Better benefits and more flexibility, especially remote work, also make it harder for employees to leave, he said. Christoffersen added that all family offices, other than the very largest, should take advantage of outsourcing to cover any gaps in-house. In light of market volatility that is unlikely to go away, having best-in-class talent is more crucial than ever, he said. "In the last decade, with low cost of capital and very little volatility, you just saw all ships sailed great or the tide rose for all boats," he said. "Now in this decade, we're seeing much more volatility. And you can't just rely on a passive index portfolio."
Qatar Tribune
27-05-2025
- Business
- Qatar Tribune
QFC, Campden partner to boost family businesses
Tribune News Network Doha The Qatar Financial Centre (QFC), a leading onshore financial and business hub in the region, partnered with Campden Wealth, a global membership organisation for families of significant wealth, to host the Qatar Family Office Showcase at The Ned, Doha. This high-level event convened family offices, high-net-worth individuals, international investors, and prominent families to explore opportunities in wealth management, with a particular focus on family businesses in Qatar. QFC Chief Executive Officer Yousuf Mohamed Al Jaida emphasised the significance of the gathering, stating, 'We are witnessing an unprecedented generational wealth transfer, with over $84 trillion set to change hands in the coming decades. This shift is prompting families of significant wealth to re-evaluate how they manage, preserve, and grow their assets across generations. Family offices have emerged as a trusted and strategic model to navigate this complexity, and with global assets under management expected to exceed $5 trillion by 2030, their relevance is only accelerating. At QFC, we are proud to support this transformation and position Qatar as a leading hub for wealth stewardship in the region and beyond.' Campden Wealth CEO Dominic Samuelson said, 'The showcase brought together international family business owners and family office principals with regional and local families to share insights and experiences, lay the ground for generational relationships, and inform on the benefits and opportunities for establishing a family office structure in Doha, Qatar.' A cornerstone of the programme was the panel session titled 'From Vision to Reality: Qatar's Ecosystem for Families & Investors' moderated by Al-Jaida and featuring Invest Qatar CEO Sheikh Ali Al Waleed bin Khalifa Al Thani and Vice Chairman of Nasser Bin Khaled & Sons Group Sheikha Hanadi Al Thani. The discussion offered valuable insights into how Qatar's investment environment, cultural foundations, and public-private collaboration are creating a robust ecosystem for multigenerational family businesses and international investors alike. Throughout the day, participants took part in expert-led workshops focused on practical topics including Tax & Regulatory Regimes, Structuring for Wealth Preservation, Trusts and Foundations, and Succession Planning. Distinguished speakers from organisations such as Invest Qatar, Nasser Bin Khaled & Sons Group, PWC, Charles Russell Speechleys, FFF International, and JTC group provided insights on how families can effectively navigate global trends, anchoring their strategies within the framework of Qatar's robust regulatory and business ecosystem.
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Europe's billionaires—who pay their family office CEOs $370,000 a year—are worried they can't find the talent to manage their fortunes
Europe's ultra-high-net-worth families are moving fast to get their affairs in order ahead of the Great Wealth Transfer, but the biggest challenge to handing over their fortunes is an apparent lack of available workers keen to take a pay cut to manage their billions. A report by HSBC Global Private Banking and Campden Wealth looked at the state of European family offices, surveying 101 offices that accounted for $136 billion in combined wealth. Ensuring strong returns and learning how to roll out generative AI were key concerns from those families. The biggest obstacle, however, is finding suitable people to manage their fortunes. More than a third (36%) of wealthy respondents to the survey said there was a limited pool of available talent with the appropriate personal skills to manage their estates. Just under a third (32%) said they struggled to find leaders with suitable interpersonal skills. Operating a family office can be a lucrative gig. The research shows the best-paid CEOs at family offices rake in $500,000 (€476,000) a year, though the average is $288,000 (€274,600). While attractive, the figures don't compare favorably with other investment jobs at a similar level. Executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles found the average salary for private equity-backed CEOs was $447,000 (€426,000). Meanwhile, the lowest-paid family office CEOs only earn around $120,000 (€114,000) a year. Looking deeper into the figures, families with more than a billion dollars in assets pay their CEOs on average just $370,000 (€353,000) a year in base salary, with an 88% bonus. The baseline figure represents less than 0.037% of those families' fortunes. For family members, the figure is lower, as it is for CEOs of family offices worth less than $500 million. In a bid to attract talent, the report says, family offices are turning to added incentives to get the best talent on board. Most offer a discretionary performance bonus, while a minority co-investment opportunities or a share of generated profits. Family offices have historically used prestige to recruit leaders, who are also lured in by their smaller setup. They are typically in the single digits of employees, allowing each worker to have a defined impact. They also tended to attract heirs keen to carry their legacy. However, there are fears these factors don't have the same pull for non-family members as they once did. Meanwhile, younger generations are increasingly less enthralled with retaining their parents' legacy and more interested in building their own. One U.K. founder of a family office told the authors: 'I think that there's going to be a shortage of people to run family offices. The family members who were born in the 1960s and have been running the family office for 15 years or 20 years are retiring. 'Many next gens will want to do their own thing away from the family office and recruitment of staff will become progressively harder. Who is going to fill the gap? Family offices will be forced to bring in more professional staff from financial institutions and their culture will change.' One family office CEO, however, told the authors that compliance and regulatory overload at larger investment firms was making more investment managers consider moving over to a smaller family office setup. The attractiveness of hiring a non-family member to manage a family office is growing as baby boomers hand their companies and fortunes over to the next generation. This can save a grisly succession battle among offspring, which increasingly involves multiple siblings and even cousins descending from the same founder. The CEO of a U.K. family office told the authors: 'Among our next gens are seven cousins, the offspring of three siblings. All or some will go on to work in the family business or family office. I'm not sure how well they will be able to work together if there are effectively seven family members competing for the top job.' Editor's note: A version of this article first appeared on on December 5, 2024. This story was originally featured on Sign in to access your portfolio
