Family governance planning often takes longer than the tax work, Ghazi says

The call tends to arrive after the money has moved. Mohsen Ghazi, a partner at Ashurst Perkins Coie who advises family offices, hears from families who have just been through a liquidity event and want advice on reducing the tax bill. His first line back to them, as he tells The Family Office Professional, is a regret: "I'll say, 'I wish you had called me 15 months ago.'" Pre-liquidity planning, in his framing, is about preserving optionality, and the closer a family gets to a transaction or a deal, the fewer meaningful choices it has left.

Planning too late is the first pitfall on the list the publication compiles from Ghazi and other advisors who work with families through business transitions. The difficulty is that it is not always clear when a liquidity event will happen, which makes the start date hard to fix. Ghazi's position is that starting early has less to do with predicting the sale than with making sure the family still has choices when it comes. Three to five years is ideal, he says; one to two can still be very productive. The tighter constraint arrives with the buyer: once a serious buyer or a signed letter of intent is on the table, "you're often working with a much narrower set of options."

The framing the publication gives the exercise as a whole is blunt. By the time most families call for tax advice, it says, the best options are already gone, and the real work of liquidity planning starts years before a deal rather than months after one. The pitfalls it gathers run from family governance to advisor coordination, which puts two quite different kinds of problem under one heading.

Ghazi's breakdown of lead times is where the operating detail sits, because the items on his list do not share a deadline. Estate gift planning generally benefits from acting while enterprise value is lower. Charitable planning and ownership restructuring have to be coordinated with the transaction itself. State residency changes, which he describes as very popular right now, require what he calls meaningful, factual lead time. And family governance and family office planning, he says, often take longer than the tax work does, because the families need to decide what they actually want.

That last observation is the one worth holding on to, and the reason is structural. The technical items can be scheduled against a transaction: a gift is worth more when value is low, a restructuring has to be sequenced with a closing, a residency move needs lead time that a deal calendar may not leave room for. The governance question has no comparable trigger. Nothing in a deal timetable requires a family to settle what it wants, and Ghazi does not put a number on how much longer the conversation runs, only that it often outlasts the tax work.

The practical consequence, on his account, is narrower choice rather than failure. A family that starts late is not shut out of the planning it needs; it simply has fewer meaningful options left by the time it asks. Across a sale process, that distinction matters, because delayed governance work does not produce a blocked transaction so much as an execution problem — a residency change that cannot be made real, a gift measured against a higher enterprise value than it would have carried a year earlier.

Justin Bakewell, managing director and head of client strategy at Pitcairn, splits the pre-sale questions into two that families need to begin discussing well in advance. Attractiveness is a property of the business: whether it is profitable, whether operations are running smoothly, whether it carries customer concentration, among other variables. Readiness is a different conversation, and the subject is the owners. Bakewell asks whether ownership is ready and aligned, and whether it understands all of the different ways to get capital out of the business to achieve liquidity. The published extract ends mid-sentence there, so the rest of his readiness list is not in the material.

Read the two advisors together and the weight lands on the ownership side of the sale. Ghazi's long-running item is a family deciding what it wants and how it will work together; Bakewell's readiness test is a question about owners rather than operations. That reading is inference rather than a claim either man makes, and the source supplies no method for dating the governance conversation — no milestone, no document, nothing analogous to the filing or the closing that forces the technical work forward.

What the material does supply is the sequencing advice itself. Start early enough that the family still has a choice set when a buyer appears; treat the governance and family office discussion as the item with the least external pressure behind it; and take three to five years as a preference rather than a rule, since Ghazi also allows that a shorter runway can be productive. The 15-months-ago line is the part that travels. The decision it refers to carries no deadline of its own, which is why, on the advisors' own account, the call keeps arriving late.

For family offices staffing this work, the open question is what would force the governance conversation onto a schedule. The material offers none, and neither advisor proposes a mechanism that operates independently of the family's own willingness to begin.

That gap is the useful takeaway for anyone running a single-family office through a pending sale. Tax, charitable and restructuring work has counterparties, filing dates and advisors who will chase it; a conversation about what the family wants has none of those, which may explain why it is the item most easily deferred and the one Ghazi describes as taking longest.

What is not in the material matters too. Neither advisor addresses how a family should judge alignment once it starts looking, and the extract does not carry Bakewell past the mid-sentence where ownership readiness is defined, so his standard for what counts as ready, and any succession or legacy guidance he attached to it, is unavailable here.

That leaves the advice in the piece at the level of sequencing rather than method, which is consistent with how both men frame it: the business can be valued, and the owners cannot, so the owners get a runway instead of an answer.

The watch item is whether the governance conversation stays a preference rather than a deadline. Ghazi's 15-month benchmark is a regret, not a rule, and nothing in the material suggests families have found a way to make it one.