Most wealth management firms say they run family briefings. Most of them don't, really. What they run are annual portfolio reviews that happen to include spouses. A true family briefing is a different thing: a scheduled, structured, multi-generational conversation about wealth, values, and succession — with an agenda that isn't driven by quarterly performance.
The agenda
The best briefings we've seen run 90 minutes and use a standard agenda that adapts to each family:
- Opening (10 min) — acknowledgements, introductions across generations, setting the tone that this is about the family, not the portfolio.
- Values conversation (20 min) — what the primary client hopes the family will do with the wealth. Not the numbers. The purpose.
- Heir perspectives (25 min) — each heir shares, in whatever depth they're comfortable with, what they think about inheriting, stewardship, and their own financial identity.
- Open questions (20 min) — the hard topics: fairness, timing, governance structures, the family business if there is one.
- Commitments (15 min) — three decisions the family makes, in writing, to carry into the next briefing.
A family briefing is worth running only if something changes because of it. Otherwise it's theatre.
The conversation starters that actually work
The hard part of facilitating a family briefing is the silence. Most families aren't used to talking about wealth across generations. The advisor's job is to open questions that break the silence without becoming intrusive. A few that we've seen work consistently:
- 'What's one thing you've learned from watching how your parents have handled money?'
- 'If you had to write down three values you want this family's wealth to serve, what would they be?'
- 'What's something you wish had been said — or unsaid — in this family's conversations about money in the past?'
- 'What would success look like for this family 20 years from now?'
The follow-up that converts
The most common mistake: running a good briefing and then doing nothing for 12 months. The best firms treat the briefing as the start of a workflow. Within a week, the advisor sends a written summary of the conversation, the three commitments the family made, and the proposed date for the next briefing. Heritance automates this summary and documents it in the platform — the same briefing audit trail the firm needs for Consumer Duty compliance.
Done well, a family briefing is the clearest signal a firm can send that it treats the family, not just the portfolio, as its client. Done badly, it is awkward theatre. The difference is structure. That's what Heritance provides.
