Every family we work with eventually asks the same question, usually years later than they meant to: when should we start planning for succession? The honest answer is uncomfortable: the planning should have started already, and the document everyone is waiting for is the least important part of it.
What actually determines whether a transition goes well is not the trust structure or the tax treatment. It is whether the next generation has had a decade of small, low-stakes exposure to how decisions get made, before they are handed a large, high-stakes decision to make alone.
The document comes last, not first
Families who ask us to draft a succession plan before any of this groundwork exists are, in effect, asking us to paper over a conversation they haven't had. We can write the document. It will not hold if the family has not already agreed, informally and repeatedly, on what the wealth is for.
The firms that get this right tend to treat succession as a standing agenda item rather than a project with a deadline. Small decisions (which family member sits in on which meeting, which questions get asked out loud rather than assumed) do more over ten years than any single planning session.
What the decade actually looks like
In practice, it is a slow widening of the circle: an heir joining one investment review a year, then two; a seat at the family council as an observer before a voting member; a small allocation of capital to manage directly, with real consequences, well before any larger inheritance arrives.
None of this replaces the legal work. But it is the reason the legal work, when it finally happens, tends to go smoothly rather than becoming the first time the family has had to agree on anything difficult.