Unity Hunt's Steve Gardner on teaching a rising generation what the family office does

When Unity Hunt asked the younger members of the Lamar Hunt family what the office could do for them, the answer was that they did not know what it does and therefore did not know what to ask for—an exchange Steve Gardner, a vice president at the office, uses to describe what he and his colleagues are working against. "The challenge we have as a family office is getting the rising generation to understand that this is their family office as much as it is their parents'," he told The Family Office Professional, which published his account in October 2023.

Unity Hunt manages the wealth of Lamar Hunt's four children and their descendants; Lamar Hunt, the son of oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, was principal founder of the American Football League, the man who coined the name "Super Bowl" after the AFL merged with the NFL, and the owner of what is now the Kansas City Chiefs—a franchise the family still holds. That record, and the number of family members with an interest in how it is managed, is what the office has to explain to each generation that arrives.

Behind the teaching problem sits a colder risk: a member with an entrepreneurial bent who decides the rest of the family is not being entrepreneurial enough may want to take their money and grow their own infrastructure, which Gardner calls the family-office version of losing a client. The counterweight he describes is scale and memory—"There's a synergy of scale and knowledge," he says, and large families carry a legacy and a history that matter to understanding where the investments sit now, what the family tried and decided it was no longer doing, and what it tried successfully. The account gives no figures on how often a member leaves to build alone, and no indication that the office has changed its approach; Gardner's version of the argument is the one that gets made when the question comes up.

The Hunt family has used trusts to pass assets from one generation to the next for a long time, Gardner says, and as each generation matures its members have to work out how they want to structure their own estates—a process the office treats as teaching rather than administration. "We have the job of educating them: Should you use a trust or an LLC or some other entity to protect your wealth, both your existing wealth and any wealth you'll inherit in the future?" Because that question is put to each cohort afresh, the office's most consequential conversations run on a generational clock rather than an annual one.

The family's investments in the sports industry add a constraint the office cannot settle on its own: league rules can affect how some investments are held, Gardner says, so the structure a generation chooses for its own wealth is partly governed by bodies outside the family. The account does not identify the rules or the holdings involved, which makes that the detail most likely to travel to other families—a governance constraint running in both directions, inward through the entity choices each generation makes for itself and outward through rulebooks set by industries the family has invested in and does not control.

Family Office Daily has argued that the next governance crisis for expanding families will be asset illiquidity rather than succession. Gardner's account describes an earlier friction: heirs who have not been taught what the office does, an operation whose case for itself rests on scale and accumulated memory, and entity decisions that come back around with each generation. If that is the ordinary shape of the problem, the sensible response looks like a standing education function rather than an occasional project, and reporting to younger members becomes an operating task instead of a courtesy. One family's account is a case study and not a survey, so it cannot say how common the experience is.

Those members are, in Gardner's telling, the ones whose participation sustains the scale he cites as the office's advantage; how many have since asked for something specific, or gone off to build an infrastructure of their own, is not in the account.