When it comes to family, the concerns are more about family and personal identity than tax and financial issues. Based on our research outlined below, the most significant reasons for the delay are not due to the capabilities and capacity of the advisors or to structural, commercial, or external factors. Rather, they are due to the attitudes and mindsets of the founder and complex family dynamics.

To explore how advisors navigate these challenges, we drew on two complementary sources of insight. The first was a survey of 45 accountants, coaches, consultants, lawyers, and wealth advisors who attended one of several advisor masterclasses held across Australia. Around 40% were from large advisory firms, 35% from SME focused firms, and 25% were sole practitioners. Over 40% had more than 20 years of experience and a third more than 10 years.

The second source was the collective experience of more than 200 advisors who have completed the family enterprise advisor program developed and delivered for the Family Business Association (Australia & New Zealand) over the past decade.

Advisors reported several reasons why family leaders struggle to follow through on their succession and transition plans and intentions. They stem from the attitudes and mindset of the founder, which interfere with carrying out their intentions:

Advisors identified five stages in the succession and transition process where clients commonly stall. Percentages indicate the proportion of respondents who selected that stage as the point at which clients most often become stuck.

Let’s look deeper at each element impacting elders’ avoidance:

Identity

Generational transition forces elders to confront morality: Research and practitioner literature repeatedly note that founders experience stepping back as a threat to identity and meaning; they may feel stepping down as “a personal failure or a loss of relevance.” Their business is not merely an asset; it is their life achievement, a source of status, a validation of their worth, and a place in the family. If they step aside, all that can disappear; they delay decisions that psychologically feel like self-erasure. Even the words “stepping down” evoke a loss.

Advisors are on a different wavelength: They frequently treat succession and transition as a legal process, tax strategy, governance structure, or investment transition while owners are feeling grief, fear, and loss of self. They talk past each other. To allow their rising generation to step up, they need to find another source of identity, a new role that can offer them meaning.

Founder’s identity is fused with the business: Family business founders have an unusually strong emotional attachment to the enterprise, expressed as a refusal to delegate, inability to imagine retirement, constant second-guessing of successors, postponing decisions, and keeping authority ambiguous. Many founders say they want succession while simultaneously behaving in ways that prevent it. For example, by “testing” successors endlessly, withholding authority, delaying equity transfer, avoiding formal agreements, changing plans repeatedly. They couch this resistance as “needing to see that their successors are ready” to mask their real ambivalence, leaving the new generation feeling distrusted and not good enough.

Family

Family harmony overcomes business/financial realities: Research shows that many succession and transition decisions are shaped by the desire to preserve family harmony. Families avoid planning because it surfaces difficult questions:

Successors and owners have different timelines: The senior generation feels, “There’s still time,” but the rising generation feels, “We’ve been waiting for 15 years.” This mismatch creates hidden frustration, especially if it is not addressed.

Founders often delay because they fear entitlement, poor judgment, family fragmentation, wealth dissipation, or business decline. These fears are compounded because many families avoid explicit conversations about competence. So, uncertainty persists, and the family never checks their assumptions or learns to see each other in new ways.

Conducting

Planning details feel overwhelming: Succession and estate planning involve many complex details, including taxes, boards, trusts, liquidity, shareholder agreements, family employment policies, philanthropy, ownership transfer, leadership development, and emotional negotiation.

Many owners become cognitively overloaded. This complexity itself is a major reason for stalling in succession and transition planning. When tasks feel emotionally difficult and structurally complex, procrastination becomes likely.

Advisors may focus on documents, not how to understand and use them: A recurring criticism is that planning becomes “document-driven” instead of relationship-driven. Families agree to structures they are not emotionally prepared to implement. As a result, plans remain unsigned, trusts are unfunded, governance systems are ignored, and transitions never occur operationally. This is because the emotional system remains unchanged.

Instead of merely producing documents, effective advisors help families tolerate uncertainty, build trust, develop successors, clarify roles, and create emotionally workable transitions.

References

Graves, Chris, and Dennis T. Jaffe. 2026. “Advisor Masterclass: Bridging the Succession Transition Gap.” Unpublished survey dataset of family enterprise advisors collected during the Adelaide University Family Enterprise Group national masterclass series, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, and online.