There is an irony at the heart of many family business exits. A company that has performed well generates confidence in its owners that extends well beyond the balance sheet – and when the business looks ready, the family, almost instinctively, assumes it is too. 

This year’s Family Barometer suggests otherwise. Fewer than one in five families considering an exit are genuinely prepared for one, and just 2.3 per cent are fully ready. A further 12 per cent are ‘largely ready with minor gaps’. The rest sit somewhere between ‘somewhat prepared’ and entirely unprepared. Preparation does not commit a family to selling. It gives the family the ability to choose confidently whenever the right opportunity eventually presents itself. 

What happens when families want growth without a plan?

This is the readiness paradox. The very disciplines that build a thriving company — operational focus, financial rigour, growth investment – say little about whether a family can make the collective, values-aligned decision to sell it. Business success, in other words, creates a false sense of security. Preparing a business and preparing a family are related tasks, but they are not the same discipline. 

“Business owners often wear their CEO hat when a sale comes up,” says Hendrik Kuhl, Head Wealth Planning Germany at Julius Baer. “They think about valuation, negotiations, structures, and transactions. What they often forget is that they are not only business owners. They are also parents, spouses, wealth owners, and family members.” Readiness, then, is best understood as a continuum – one whose technical surface conceals territory far harder to quantify, from the quality of family governance to the emotional willingness to let go of something that may have defined a family for decades. The visible technical work often masks a deeper challenge: preparing the family itself to make a shared decision when the time eventually comes. 

How family businesses can get their house in order

What the technical dimensions of require is reasonably well understood: simplified ownership structures, tax and legal arrangements fit for a transaction rather than merely for operations, audited financial reporting, and contingent liabilities resolved long before a buyer’s advisers start asking questions. 

As Hendrik notes, history itself can become an obstacle: “Businesses grow over time. They acquire companies, establish operations in different countries, and build structures that make perfect sense from an operational perspective. The problem is that structures designed for running a business are not always suitable for selling or transferring one.”

The same blind spot affects how owners approach their day-to-day decisions. “Business owners often continue investing and restructuring as though they intend to own the company forever,” he adds. “The question should always be: what is my ultimate goal, and how do today’s decisions support that goal?” The objective is to ensure the business is ready whenever an opportunity eventually arises. 

Governance readiness: can the family make a decision? 

A business exit is, among other things, a governance stress test – one that forces binding decisions on pricing, structure, the choice of counterparty, and what happens to the proceeds, often simultaneously. Hendrik draws a useful distinction here. Governing a business and governing a family are responsibilities that draw on overlapping but distinct skills. Family councils, constitutions, and regular assemblies only create the architecture for aligned decision-making – they do not guarantee it, and that architecture has to be tested in lower-stakes conversations long before any transaction arrives. 

“Many families have constitutions that sit in a drawer,” he observes. “But governance only does its job when it becomes part of the family’s ongoing decision-making process.” Good governance creates clarity before difficult decisions become urgent. Families that practise decision-making over time rarely have to invent a process under the pressure of a transaction. 

The hidden impact of emotional attachment

Perhaps the most striking finding from the Family Barometer is that when families enter exit discussions, the most commonly cited source of misalignment has nothing to do with structures or governance at all. Emotional attachment tops the list globally – cited by more than 60 per cent of advisers overall, and rising to almost 79 per cent in Latin America. In multi-generational businesses especially, the company holds family history and shared identity beyond its economic value. For a founder who has spent decades building something, the prospect of a sale can feel existential. 

“Families instinctively retreat into the areas they know best — structures, figures, legal considerations – because those topics feel familiar and manageable,” explains Hendrik. “The emotional side is much harder. I would go so far as to say that families sometimes emotionally avoid it.”

Questions such as “What will my role be after the sale?” or “What does success look like for my family?” resist easy answers – and families who avoid them tend to find they resurface at the worst possible moment, when a transaction is already in motion. For example, one Family Barometer finding shows that when exit discussions begin, the majority of UHNW families are described by their advisers as only ‘somewhat aligned’. A further 6.3 per cent enter those conversations in open disagreement, and under 4 per cent are very aligned from the outset. Emotional attachment accounts for much of that misalignment, cited by more than 60 per cent of advisers globally. 

Beneath the headline disagreements, subtler tensions are often at work too — among them, conflicting ideas about what a fair outcome actually looks like. “Parents often try to divide ownership equally among their children because that feels fair,” says Hendrik. “What is striking is how rarely families explicitly discuss what fairness means to each family member.” 

The next generation’s involvement is a related concern. In most cases, the next generation is consulted but has no formal vote. Only around 18.5 per cent actively participate with equal say. Hendrik sees this as a source of preventable misunderstanding: “I have seen situations where parents say, ‘If I had known you weren’t interested in taking over the company, I would have sold it five or ten years ago.’” 

What creates family alignment? 

External professional advisers emerge from the survey as the leading contributor to family alignment where it exists – cited by approximately 40 per cent of respondents globally – with family governance structures following at around 36 per cent. Worth noting alongside this: some 77 per cent of families would consider an exit if it helped preserve family unity, a finding that reframes the whole question. 

Hendrik’s advice is strikingly practical. He asks families to take two blank sheets of paper: on the first, draw life as it is today; on the second, life after the transition. “The most important starting point is not the transaction itself,” says Hendrik. “It’s understanding what kind of life you want to create once the transaction is complete.” 

What business owners need to remember

What the Family Barometer makes clear is that the most successful transitions begin long before a transaction occurs. Well-exercised governance ensures the family can reach decisions under pressure, and the habit of honest family dialogue means that when an opportunity arises, the family is positioned to act on it with conviction. Most families, the data suggests, are somewhere in the middle of the readiness continuum – aware that a transition is coming, but without everything in place to meet it well. The gap between intention and preparation is where families most often lose flexibility. Those who invest early in governance, dialogue, and ownership structures give themselves the greatest freedom to respond confidently whenever the future presents an opportunity.