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The founders who put off succession planning longest are frequently the most capable people in the room, not the disorganized ones, in Nicholas Mukhtar’s experience advising family offices and business owners.
“When you’re a high-performing, high-achieving individual, it’s even harder to slow down and actually do family planning with the people who matter,” Mukhtar said. The same drive that builds a successful business works against the deliberate, unglamorous work of handing pieces of it away.
That irony plays out consistently across Mukhtar’s client base. A founder who makes high-stakes calls all day without hesitation will often avoid a single, lower-stakes conversation about succession for years, not because the conversation is complicated but because it forces an acknowledgment that the business will eventually run without them. Delegating tasks is routine for someone who built a company from nothing. Delegating identity is a different kind of decision entirely, and it’s the one Mukhtar sees postponed longest.
Mukhtar sees a consistent pattern behind the delay. “The ones who make mistakes are often so busy building their business, doing whatever led to their success, that they forget why they’re doing it: for their family and the next generation,” he said. Family offices research backs up how widespread that pattern is: Deloitte’s global family business survey found that while most families report having some form of succession plan, only about half describe it as thorough and well-developed rather than a document assembled to satisfy the idea of one.
Mukhtar’s advice to high-performing owners is to treat succession planning as its own decision, on its own timeline, rather than something that will get addressed once the business finally settles down, not to slow down across the board. In his experience, businesses rarely settle down on their own, and the owners waiting for that moment are usually the ones who end up planning succession in a crisis instead of on their own terms.
Nicholas Mukhtar’s clients who break the pattern tend to do it by treating succession as a recurring calendar item rather than a milestone tied to some future sense of readiness. The founders who wait for the business to feel finished before addressing it are, by definition, waiting for something that isn’t coming.
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