Governance for a family worth twenty million, not five hundred

The governance advice available to a family worth twenty million dollars was written for families worth five hundred million, and the gap shows in every paragraph that does not fit.

What the frameworks assume you already have

Open a published governance framework and it will prescribe a Family Council. The IFC Family Business Governance Handbook describes a five-to-nine member elected body meeting quarterly with written terms of reference. It assumes you have enough relatives to hold an election. It assumes someone other than you has time to chair it. It assumes a family office is already in place to staff the meetings and maintain the records.

A family worth twenty million dollars may have none of those things. The wealth is first-generation. The husband owns the business and the wife handles everything the business does not. The children are in college or working for someone else. There is an attorney, a CPA and an investment adviser, but there is no staff position called Director of Family Governance, because twenty million dollars does not generate enough investable income to carry that overhead.

The institutional thresholds begin far above this. The asset minimum for single-family offices sits between one hundred million and five hundred million. Multi-family offices appear to require between twenty-five million and one hundred million. At twenty million, you have professionals and accounts. You do not have an office.

So when a framework prescribes formal governance structures borrowed from institutions, it is describing what should be done with wealth you do not have, by people you have not hired, for a family that has not yet split into branches.

The questions that need answering anyway

The absence of a family office does not mean the absence of a governance problem. The questions arrive the same day the balance sheet crosses ten million. Who decides when the company gets sold and what gets done with the proceeds? Which child is being prepared to take over and which one is being prepared to manage wealth they did not earn? What happens if the husband dies while the business is still the largest single asset and the estate plan was last updated when the company was worth a third of what it is now?

Those are governance questions. They are not solved by convening a Family Council. They are solved by deciding who holds the authority to make each decision, what happens when the current holder cannot, and whether the documents in place still reflect what the family agreed to when circumstances were different.

At this wealth level that may mean three moving pieces. First, how the operating business passes or sells, which is written into the operating agreement or the buy-sell accord. Second, how the investment accounts transfer at death, which depends on beneficiary designations and titling as much as it depends on the will. Third, what the revocable trust actually does, because a family may have one without having read what it says about who controls the assets if the grantor becomes incapacitated.

Why nobody wrote this for you

The gap is not an accident. The publishers who produce family governance research — Campden Wealth, the larger multi-family offices, the consultancies that serve ultra-high-net-worth families — do that work because families above one hundred million dollars pay enough in fees to justify the cost of the research. A framework aimed at a twenty-million-dollar family would be used by people who do not generate the revenue to cover its development. So it does not get written.

What fills the void instead is material aimed upward. A family worth twenty million reads the same articles as a family worth two hundred million, and concludes either that governance does not apply to them or that they are failing at something they should have built years ago. Neither is accurate. The problem is not the family. It is that the template does not scale down.

Governance at this level does not look like an organisational chart. It looks like making sure the people who would have to act in an emergency know where the documents are, what the documents say, and which professionals hold which pieces of the picture. It looks like a conversation about what happens to the business if the owner is not there to run it, held while that is still a planning question rather than a crisis. It looks like reading the buy-sell agreement now that the company is worth nine million instead of two, and asking whether the insurance still covers the number and whether the valuation formula still makes sense.

Where the estate tax actually enters

The 2025 federal estate tax exemption is $13,990,000 per person. A married couple can shield $27,980,000. A family worth twenty million dollars, if the wealth is jointly held and the planning is current, may not have a federal estate tax problem. They have a coordination problem.

The coordination problem is that the exemption applies to what you own at death, but what you own at death depends on how everything is titled. Jointly held property, tenancy by the entirety, beneficiary designations on retirement accounts, transfer-on-death registrations, payable-on-death bank accounts — each one overrides the will. A revocable trust only governs assets that were moved into it. Whether the investment accounts went in but the business interest stayed out, or whether the house was titled to the trust but the vacation property was not, depends on what was done when the trust was funded.

The result is an estate plan on paper and a different one in practice. The attorney drafted for one set of facts. The CPA optimised for one year's return. The operating agreement was written when the children were minors and nobody thought about who would hold the founder's interest if both spouses died in the same incident. Each professional did their job, and the seam opened between them.

That seam is the governance problem for a family at this wealth level. Not the lack of a Family Council. The absence of anyone whose job it is to look at all of it at once and say out loud what does not line up.

The federal exemption may fall

The 2025 exemption is scheduled to sunset at the end of that year unless Congress extends it. If it sunsets, our reading of Section 2010 of the Internal Revenue Code is that the exemption would appear to revert to roughly half the current level, adjusted for inflation from the 2017 baseline. That would place a family worth twenty million back inside the taxable range.

Whether that happens depends on legislation that had not passed as of this writing. Treating it as certain is a mistake. Treating it as impossible is also a mistake. A family near the threshold needs to know what the documents say now, so that if the exemption falls there is time to act rather than to start reading.

Florida repealed its state estate tax effective January 2005. That repeal remains in effect. A Florida resident with twenty million dollars in assets faces federal estate tax only, and only if the combined estate exceeds the federal exemption in place at death.

What right looks like at this scale

Governance at twenty million is not a structure you install. It is a set of questions someone answers before they become urgent. Who holds each piece of the wealth and how does it pass? What does the operating agreement say about a sale or a death, and does the current value of the business still fit the mechanism it prescribes? If the primary earner cannot make decisions, who holds the authority to act and do they know where the accounts are?

The right answer generally involves three things. First, an estate attorney reading the trust, the will, the beneficiary forms and the business agreements in the same sitting, and marking where they do not align. Second, a business attorney reading the operating agreement or the buy-sell accord against the current facts — how much the company is worth, whether the insurance covers it, whether the triggering events still make sense. Third, a meeting where the family's attorney, CPA and adviser are in the same conversation, each describing what they were asked to optimise and what they assumed someone else was handling.

That is not a Family Council meeting. It is a coordination meeting. For a family worth twenty million dollars it may be the first time all three professionals have been in the same room. The value is not in the framework. It is in forcing the question of whether the pieces still fit together.

Bottom line

A family worth twenty million dollars faces a coordination problem rather than a governance structure problem. The governance advice in print was written for families with family offices, multi-generational wealth and enough relatives to need formal voting. Such a family needs something narrower: a clear answer to who decides what, documents that reflect the current facts, and professionals who have compared notes. That is governance at this scale. It does not require electing a council. It requires knowing what the documents say and whether they still work.

This article describes the law and the common planning structures as they stood in January 2025. It is not advice about any family's specific situation. That requires reading the actual documents and depends on facts this article does not cover. The professionals who should review it are an estate attorney and a business attorney licensed in the state where the family resides and where the business operates.