The conversation most families put off

Every family I have worked with has one conversation it keeps putting off. Not the will, though the will is usually part of it. The conversation about what all of this is for.

I have sat at a lot of dining tables over twenty years. The pattern is nearly always the same. The parents have built something, a business, some property, a portfolio, often across two or three countries. The children know roughly that it exists. Nobody has ever sat down and said out loud what should happen to it, or why.

Why it gets put off

The reasons are always good ones. It feels morbid. The children are too young, then too busy, then too far away. There is a worry that talking about money will change how the children behave, or how they see their parents. And there is a quieter reason that people rarely say: the parents have not fully decided themselves.

So the conversation waits. And what I have learned is that it does not wait quietly. It waits in the form of assumptions. One child assumes the business is theirs because they work in it. Another assumes everything will be split equally because that is what fair means. A spouse assumes a house is safe because their name is on the door. None of them are wrong to assume. Nobody told them otherwise.

The child who is already gone

The other thing that has changed in the last ten years is where the children are.

A generation ago, the next generation was down the road. Now the daughter is a lawyer in Lisbon, the son runs something in Singapore, and the family business is in Nairobi. They come home twice a year. They are doing well, and they are not coming back, and everyone knows it, and it is still somehow not part of the plan.

This matters practically. If the person who will inherit the business does not want to run it, the plan has to say what happens instead, and it has to say it before the parents are gone. If the children live in three countries, the paperwork has to work in three countries. A will that is perfect in one place can be worthless in another.

What the conversation actually is

It is shorter than people fear. In my experience it comes down to four questions, and the parents can answer them alone first, before anyone else is in the room.

• What do we want to happen to what we have built?
• Who do we want to look after it, and who do we want to benefit from it? Those are often different people.
• What do we want our children to know now, and what can wait?
• If we did nothing at all, what would happen? This one is usually the most useful.

Once the parents can answer those, the family conversation is not a confrontation. It is an announcement, with room for questions.

Where I come in

My job is not to have the conversation for you. It is to make sure that when you have it, what you decide can actually be done: that the trust exists, that the company shares sit where you think they sit, that the will in one country does not quietly undo the one in another.

The families who do this early do not talk about it as a big moment afterwards. It becomes ordinary. The children know the shape of things. The parents stop carrying it alone. And the album on the dining table, when it eventually comes out, is just an album.

If you recognise your own family in any of this, that is usually the sign that it is time.