Family offices at ALIGN 2026 weigh legacy-asset sales and governance as families expand

At ALIGN 2026, the FO Pro-hosted family-office conference held in Dallas in September, selling a legacy asset and deciding who inside a growing family gets to do it were treated as one problem. Jennifer Connelly, who manages family services at Krause Group, the office serving the family that once owned the Kum & Go convenience store chain, distilled the work in a single sentence: "No family is the same, no day is the same, and change is the only constant."

The conference drew both family offices and the families they represent, and leaders from Still Pond Capital, Mt. Vernon Investments, Krause Group and other offices were among the speakers. Sessions took up selling legacy assets, strengthening governance as families expand, and putting AI to work under clear security rules. Because ALIGN is confidential and quotations were allowed only from speakers who gave permission, the write-up reflects only the discussion that named offices and their executives were willing to attach their names to.

Pair the first two of those themes and a pattern shows up: the decision to sell a long-held business and the question of who inside a growing family gets to make it rarely arrive separately. A sale reshapes the ownership group, and an ownership group that by now takes in cousins, in-laws and an adult next generation tends to need its decision rights written down rather than assumed. Offices that have run a founder's portfolio by hand for twenty years often find, on the far side of a sale, that they are running something closer to a small institution.

The conference ran in the industry's usual format—keynotes, panels, workshops and technology demonstrations—and several of its sessions were succession questions wearing investment labels, since direct private investing leans on a family's long horizon, a liquidity event decides what the family holds for the next twenty years, and what to do with the proceeds tends to be the first strategic call a rising generation helps make. Philanthropy folded into the wealth strategy is another assignment that can go to younger family members early, and digital assets, healthcare's regulatory load and the geopolitical backdrop filled out the rest.

Brent Wouters, chief executive of the Thompson Family Office, argued from the keynote stage that the wider trend runs the same direction: "The importance of family office capital has grown tremendously in the past decade — but wait until you see where it's going to go," he said, adding that "not only is there more money in family offices, but I think their importance and sophistication are growing." Those are claims rather than measurements, but the conference agenda is consistent with them, and every added asset class adds a decision someone in the family has to be authorized to make.

Governance, read that way, is less a committee chart than the answer to a handful of procedural questions: who speaks for a branch of the family, which calls sit with a family council and which with an investment committee, and how an investment policy outlives the person who wrote it. FO Pro grouped the sessions under strengthening governance as families expand, and the placement next to legacy-asset sales implies the two are being treated as one project — a family cannot hand off an operating company cleanly until it knows who signs for the decision.

Connelly's title is worth pausing on. Family services — education, communication, the logistics of owners who no longer share a workplace — is a function that exists because a fortune is spread across people who need something in common besides a balance sheet.

The clearest sale in the reported remarks belongs to Jessica Millstone, who with her sister ultimately decided to sell their family business to a longtime customer who could grow it and continue supporting the employees. "We felt like this was stewardship of the business, to keep it going and make it bigger than ever," she said. The governance content is in the buyer criteria — a customer the family already knew, an intent to keep the business growing, an intent to keep the staff — applied while the family still held the choice.

Selling a business is not the same as leaving the investing business. FOD's recent reporting on Millstone Investments described the office backing women's sports media after team stakes, with Heather Millstone saying that a first Allez! Sports check was hers alone and a second was written with her sister Jessica. Sports ownership is one of the few holdings that gives a rising generation both a visible enterprise and a place in the room, and it earned its slot on the ALIGN agenda on that basis, listed among the ways family offices engage the next generation and put money into their communities.

AI reached the agenda for a related purpose: FO Pro framed the session as putting the technology to work under clear security rules, which puts the policy ahead of the purchase — the same sequencing that pairs written governance with a legacy-asset sale. An office that fixes its data rules before it writes its checks is making a procedural decision in the middle of a technology one.

Nothing in the published account suggests Dallas produced a template, and three voices on a stage do not establish a trend. They establish the shape of the agenda an office inherits once its family has sold something large or added a generation: which assets stay, who is authorized to decide, what rules govern the next tool, and which family members get roles in the investments the office makes. FO Pro's report gives the themes and the quotable lines; whether any of the offices left with a revised investment policy statement or a new family constitution is not in it.