Nicholas Mukhtar doesn’t need a hypothetical to explain why family governance matters. He’s watched the actual scenario play out, more than once, among the family offices and business owners he advises.
“I’ve seen situations, sometimes through clients of clients, where someone passes away or there’s an accident, and the kids truly have no idea what their parents built, how they built it, how things are set up, or what to do,” Mukhtar said. Estate documents typically exist in those cases, so the failure usually has nothing to do with the legal paperwork. What’s missing is the informal knowledge that never got passed down because no one scheduled the conversation.
Mukhtar traces the root cause to a single, avoidable habit. “The biggest mistake is not getting their kids involved early enough,” he said. “You don’t know what life has in store.” The phrase carries more weight than it might in another context, since Mukhtar isn’t describing a distant statistical risk. He’s describing families he has worked with directly, where a routine transition became a crisis because the next generation was never brought into the picture.
The pattern he describes tends to hit hardest in families that seem, from the outside, the most stable. A business running smoothly and a family communicating well on the surface can still be one unexpected event away from the exact scenario Mukhtar describes, if the next generation has never actually been shown how the business or the family’s wealth works.
His advice to business owners isn’t complicated, even if it’s uncomfortable to act on. Bring the next generation into real conversations about the business well before there’s any reason to expect a transition. The families who wait for a clear signal that it’s time, in Mukhtar’s experience, are gambling on getting a warning they may never receive.
Nicholas Mukhtar treats the advice as a low-cost insurance policy against a high-cost failure, not as a pessimistic take on family business: a handful of conversations now, against the alternative of a family discovering, at the worst possible moment, that no one ever had them.
