Family Business Audiocast | Episode 50 | Jennifer East
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R. Adam Smith: Welcome to the Family Business Audiocast on LinkedIn. I'm R. Adam Smith, creator of this Audiocast series. As an entrepreneur, investor, founder, investment banker, and board leader the last 25 years, I'm fortunate for my many experiences within the family firm industry. A warm thank you to our live audience on LinkedIn today, and for those listening in the future, a brief comment on why I created this broadcast.
Private companies are a passion of mine, having grown up in a family of entrepreneurs and having engaged for two decades in deals, strategic transformations, investments, and boards with an array of fascinating family enterprises, family firms, and family offices. I founded this series to offer a useful platform for listeners to hear from veterans, academics, and leaders in the vast family firm ecosystem.
Whether you're a family business owner, building, running, or advising a family office, or just expanding your family office activities, I hope these conversations are useful and enlightening. Now it's time to turn our attention to our accomplished guest on today's episode.
Today we're diving into something at the heart of long-term family success: how the rising generation steps into leadership, how families communicate across generations, and how governance structures evolve to meet the moment. My guest is Jennifer East, a trusted advisor to enterprising families globally and one of the most thoughtful voices I know on legacy, leadership, and alignment. Jennifer, wonderful to have you here.
Jennifer East: Thank you, Adam. It's a real pleasure to be joining you.
R. Adam Smith: Jennifer is founder of ONIDA Family Advisors, a globally recognized advisor to family enterprises and family offices with over 20 years of experience supporting multi-generational families across Europe, North America, and the Middle East. Based in Malta, she works globally, helping families align across generations, strengthen core values within their family offices and firms, clarify governance and vision, and develop rising leaders equipped to steward both assets and values.
Jennifer brings personal experience to her work, having served as a second-generation leader in her family's Canadian hospitality business, and having founded her own company with her husband as stewards of Class Afloat, a mission-driven school-at-sea program with a 40-year legacy. She's a trained executive coach, facilitator, and mediator, a fellow of the Family Firm Institute holding its Advanced Certificate in Family Business Advising, a faculty member of FFI's Global Education Network for a decade, and chair of Campden Wealth's European Family Office Forum.
Let's start with rising-generation leadership and identity — how can families help a younger member build a genuine sense of identity and confidence as they consider stepping into leadership?
Jennifer East: It's a real balance. The family needs to take time to explore its broader mission, vision, and values — clarity around what the wealth is for — so everyone is pulling in the same direction. That's a foundational piece.
For the younger leader specifically, growing up in the shadow of a large family legacy can make it hard to find your own light. Families need to invest real time and resources helping younger members define their own identity — their strengths, the gaps they want to fill, perhaps a leadership development plan, and understanding what they're most passionate about and what they can bring to the world. It's much easier to balance legacy with your own identity when you're standing firmly in that identity, rather than feeling dragged along by where the family is headed.
R. Adam Smith: Once they step into a role, you've spoken about the importance of clarity — job description, goals, responsibilities, reporting lines. How does that typically play out for, say, someone in their 30s or 40s stepping into a CEO role for the first time?
Jennifer East: Clarity around roles and responsibilities matters not just for the younger leader but for non-family employees and the senior generation too. It's often a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation — the older generation waits for the younger generation to demonstrate leadership skills before trusting them with big decisions, while the younger generation waits for the opportunity to demonstrate that leadership. That can create real friction.
Independent third parties help enormously here — even in the selection of younger leaders, so it's not a parent or aunt or uncle making that call, and in ongoing performance management. A subcommittee of the board focused on succession, external mentors, or coaches can help establish a framework with clear benchmarks — what's expected of the young leader, what milestones matter, and how responsibilities and development shift as those milestones are reached.
R. Adam Smith: That resonates with how millennials and Gen Z want to be empowered — not just with title and money, but with emotional intelligence and having their perspective respected. What happens when that emotional space isn't offered by the parents?
Jennifer East: When we think about legacy, there's obviously the assets and the business passed down, but success — on both the business and family side — really comes from balance. It's what's sometimes called ambidextrous leadership. One young leader once told me that running the family business would be fine on its own — it's navigating relationships with siblings and cousins who are shareholders but don't work in the business, and with older family members who've historically led, that's far more complex.
When families emphasize business and financial literacy without emotional intelligence — what get called the "soft issues" but are really the harder ones: values, legacy, relationships — they struggle not just with business success but with maintaining relationships. And as families grow larger and more geographically dispersed, the ability to build and maintain those relationships really is the core of what enables a family to succeed across generations.
R. Adam Smith: Talk about the intentionality of empowerment — how owners actually hand over authority to the next generation.
Jennifer East: I'd actually reframe how we think about it. Rather than "giving" power, it's about creating space. Someone who grows up without significant family wealth goes out into the world and builds their own identity and authority on their own terms. In families with wealth, there's a curious dynamic where the older generation feels it must "give" authority to the younger — which can feel like the younger generation needs permission.
What's really needed is space for the younger generation to take authority and make mistakes — and the ability to make mistakes is often withheld in families with a lot at stake, even though individuation requires making tough decisions, falling down, and getting back up. Being intentional about creating opportunities for risk-taking and learning through trial and error is core to this.
A second piece is letting go of fixed assumptions about what leadership looks like. Leadership doesn't have to mean running the family business or leading the family office — it can also mean leading a family council initiative or a family history project. Broadening the definition of leadership creates more real opportunities for younger family members to step up.
R. Adam Smith: You used the word "individuation" — how does that relate to imposter syndrome, especially for next-gen members facing something like the sale of the family company?
Jennifer East: It's one of the greatest challenges. Growing up with a prominent family name or a very successful family business can make it hard to separate your own identity from the family's. Individuation is that process of stepping away, sometimes making defiant choices in adolescence that go against how the family has historically operated, and eventually finding a healthy balance between your individual identity and your identity as a family member.
Some younger family members never quite make that break — it's as if there's a perpetual umbilical cord to the family. That makes imposter syndrome especially acute: it can be very hard to believe you actually have the qualifications to succeed, particularly when working inside your own family's organization. That's a big reason it's so often recommended that younger family members gain outside professional experience first — it helps both with individuation and with overcoming imposter syndrome.
R. Adam Smith: And that outside experience gives broader perspective too.
Jennifer East: Absolutely — it helps ensure that if you do choose to work in the family business, it's a choice you're making because you've determined you have the right skills, not just by default. It also teaches you what it's like to get — or not get — a promotion somewhere your family name isn't on the door, and exposes you to how other industry experts operate.
R. Adam Smith: Legacy is really the core topic for family enterprises, tied closely to mission and purpose. You mentioned defining purpose, mission, and values as foundational. Can you speak to that work, and maybe touch on the Ultra-High-Net-Worth Institute's holistic view of family capital?
Jennifer East: When entrepreneurs start out, purpose and mission are usually clear — build a business, create wealth, succeed. But as a family evolves into the second, third, and later generations, wealth alone is rarely a strong enough motivator to sustain a multi-generational legacy. With several generations of adults around the table, everyone has different views on what matters most and what the wealth is actually for.
Developing an intentional process to collectively define what the wealth is for, what values built the family's success, and what they want future generations to remember — those are essential building blocks for a legacy that can sustain itself over generations. Without that shared foundation, important decisions can become genuinely divisive, since each individual is working from their own set of priorities. A collective vision acts like a lens that helps families make decisions more effectively going forward.
R. Adam Smith: Let's turn to governance. When a family realizes its existing systems — mission, charter, council, board — aren't sufficient anymore, what's usually the starting point?
Jennifer East: It's important to think of governance as a living organism. A family constitution that sits on a shelf and is never revisited isn't worth the paper it's written on. Families typically hit a juncture tied to generational change — often when younger family members approaching adulthood want a voice the current structure doesn't accommodate, or when new in-laws join the family and there's no forum for their perspective.
At those moments, it's important for the family to intentionally have a series of conversations: what's working in our current governance, where are the gaps, and how should it evolve? Critically, these decisions need to be made collectively — since it's common for the older generation to have set the original vision, mission, and family council structure, and now younger members want a say in how that changes.
R. Adam Smith: Doing that "collectively" is genuinely tricky, especially creating a safe environment for vulnerable communication.
Jennifer East: The outcomes of governance — the constitution, the family council structure — matter, but it's really the process of getting there that's most valuable for families. Thinking of governance as an ongoing conversation rather than a one-time document helps. Families unaccustomed to sitting down for these conversations often need a regular, facilitated cadence of family meetings — bringing in outside expertise not just to build communication skills but to keep the family on track, since there's always something more urgent competing for attention. A family already in the habit of these conversations finds it far more manageable than one starting from scratch after years of silence.
R. Adam Smith: You emphasize separating family ownership from management. Why does that distinction matter so much?
Jennifer East: Think of it as wearing different hats. A family member who's only an owner has a very different level of information than one who's an owner and works in the business — different perspectives on reinvestment versus dividends, for instance. In a young business, one or two people wear all the hats, and decisions blend seamlessly at the kitchen table.
As the family and business grow more complex, with distinct groups of owners and operators, trying to run things the same way leads to owners making management decisions without adequate day-to-day information. Disciplined separation of these roles helps people recognize when they're making a management decision they may not actually be equipped to make — minimizing conflict over decisions people may not have the right knowledge to make.
R. Adam Smith: How do families think about codifying values into a family charter or constitution, especially in relation to a board of directors?
Jennifer East: Ideally, a family evolves from a board made up only of owners and their advisors into a more robust fiduciary board that brings in outside expertise. That can feel like a loss of control for families — even bringing on an advisory board with no fiduciary power can feel that way.
If the goal is a fiduciary board with non-family members bringing in expertise the family doesn't have internally, the board needs to clearly understand the family's values and goals — are we growing this to sell it, or to pass to great-great-grandchildren? Having those wishes codified and documented lets the board implement decisions on the family's behalf, which gives families real reassurance through the process of letting go of some perceived control.
R. Adam Smith: Governance gets genuinely complicated as families grow — think of the BMW, Walton, Pritzker, or LVMH families, with multiple branches and entities. What protects against a governance crisis as that complexity builds?
Jennifer East: It's important to regularly assess the level of complexity and reassess governance as it grows. In a smaller family, a simple group of owners directing a board might be adequate. As complexity increases — more entities, more geographic spread — families may need additional layers: perhaps a family assembly alongside the family council, giving all family members, shareholders and non-shareholders alike, visibility into the business, plus a shareholder or owners' council tasked with bringing each family branch's perspective to the board.
Without these additional layers, family issues can end up being debated directly at the board table instead of being resolved within the shareholder or owner council — so having distinct structures for each stakeholder group becomes crucial as complexity increases.
R. Adam Smith: Before we wrap — tell us about ONIDA Family Advisors, and what the name means.
Jennifer East: ONIDA means "the one searched for" — the long, elusive solution — which is where the name of my firm comes from. The firm has a particular orientation toward working with global families, something I've been passionate about for 20 years. Having lived in a number of jurisdictions and worked globally, I'm especially glad to support families with investments and businesses across multiple jurisdictions, as well as family members navigating the cultural journey of being raised in one part of the world, educated in another, and blending the two.
R. Adam Smith: Wonderful — and you're based in Malta most of the time. Thank you for such a thoughtful conversation today on rising-generation leadership, governance, and legacy.
Jennifer East: Thank you so much, Adam. It really was a pleasure — I enjoyed our conversation on the rising generation and on how families can take their governance and communication to the next level, since that's so crucial to long-term success.
R. Adam Smith: This is our 50th official episode of the Family Business Audiocast — wonderful to have you on it. To our listeners, thank you for joining us. This is R. Adam Smith, signing off. Stay tuned for the next episode of the Family Business Audiocast, available live on LinkedIn, YouTube, and X.
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Explore the strategic intricacies of family business success with the RAS Family Business Audiocast. Join R. Adam Smith as he delves into exclusive discussions with global leaders shaping the future of private wealth and enterprise. Each episode offers a rare glimpse into the core decisions driving prosperity in high-stakes markets. Tune in to gain expert insights and innovative strategies that empower family businesses to thrive across generations.
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