A first-person perspective on what working with family businesses taught me about the conversation most advisors avoid – and why the ones who have it change everything.

This piece was inspired by an article published in the ICAI Bengaluru Branch SIRC Newsletter UTKARSHA, June 2026, written by CA K Ullas Kamath, Founder UK&Co and Former JMD, Jyothy Labs Ltd. His framing of the CA’s role in family businesses is one of the clearest articulations of this problem I have encountered – and it prompted a reflection I have been meaning to write for a while.

There is a particular kind of pattern recognition that comes from sitting across from family business founders across different industries, different revenue stages, and different levels of organisational maturity. It does not come from a certification or a framework. It comes from the accumulated weight of watching the same conversation get deferred – sometimes for years, sometimes permanently – while the business that needed it most kept running on the assumption that there would always be more time.

The conversation I am describing is succession. And in seven plus years of advisory work – after spending the better part of three decades inside organisations as a finance and operations leader – the single most consistent observation is this: the families that navigate succession well are not the ones with the most capable next generation. They are the ones where someone in the family discussion room or Board Room was willing to have the conversation before the situation forced it.

CA K Ullas Kamath, writing in the ICAI Bengaluru Branch SIRC Newsletter UTKARSHA this June, puts a number to what most people in this profession already know but rarely say out loud. Only 30% of family businesses survive to the second generation. 12% make it to the third. By the fourth generation, the number is 3%.[1]

Those are not market statistics or the result of bad products or insufficient capital. They are, in large part, the result of conversations that were scheduled for later and never arrived. The succession plan that was going to be sorted once the business crossed a certain revenue threshold. The capital allocation question that was going to be addressed once the next big contract was signed. The governance structure – family council, dividend policy, clear rules about who can and cannot be on the payroll – that was going to be formalised “once things settled down”. Things did not settle down, because they never do in a growing family business. And the conversation that could have changed the outcome remained permanently on the agenda for next quarter, and then the quarter after that…. until a health event or a family disagreement or a business crisis made deferral impossible and the options considerably narrower than they would have been.

The CA is in a unique position in this story, and it is worth being honest about why that position is so often underused.

A CA who has worked with a family business for years knows things that no board member, no banker, and no outside consultant typically is aware of. They have seen the financials when they were honest and when they were optimistic. They have watched the founder make decisions under pressure that contradicted everything the strategy document said. They know which family member is drawing more than the business can sustainably support – and they know the founder knows it too, and has chosen not to address it, because addressing it means a conversation that nobody is ready to have at Sunday lunch.

Well… here is the dimension that rarely gets examined honestly. The same proximity that gives the family CA their unique advantage also creates a particular kind of blind spot. When succession is discussed, the assumption in most family – CA relationships are that it will be internal – a son, a daughter, a nephew who has been working in the business for a few years and is being groomed, or more accurately assumed into, the next generation of leadership. The possibility that the most capable successor for a particular business at a particular stage might be someone from outside the family – a professional with the right domain expertise, the right leadership profile, and none of the emotional weight that family dynamics inevitably carry – rarely enters the conversation. Not because the idea is wrong, but because the CA is operating entirely within the family’s own assumptions rather than challenging them. The advisor who has been too close for too long can lose the ability to see what someone further back might see clearly.

This is not a failure of intent. It is a structural limitation of a relationship built on trust within a closed system – and it is one that the most effective advisors learn to recognise and name, even when naming it is uncomfortable.

Often, young CA’s 2 – 3 years into practice ask this question to me & other senior CA’s – what new services they can offer to our clients that are family run businesses? The evolution of the CA’s role in a family business is not about adding new services or stepping into territory that belongs to lawyers or management consultants. It is about using what is already in the room – the trust, the history, the full picture of the business’s financial position and the family’s dynamics – to ask the questions that nobody else has the standing to ask.

What happens to this business when you are not running it? And have you genuinely tested whether the person you have in mind for that role is the right one for where the business is going? …. rather than the right one for where it has been? Who makes capital allocation decisions when the founder is no longer the final word? … and what happens when the family disagrees? Is the governance structure that holds this business together built on documented frameworks or on the personality of the person who started it?

Of course, these are not the kind of questions that surface naturally during an audit engagement. They require deliberate effort, the willingness to raise something the client has not asked about, and the kind of relationship where difficult truths can be received as evidence of care rather than overreach. The CA who builds that relationship and then uses it to ask only the questions the client wants to answer is leaving the most consequential part of their role unattended – which is precisely what CA Ullas Kamath’s piece makes so clear.

The conversation was always going to happen later. For the family businesses that are still here across multiple generations, someone made sure later came sooner than it needed to. That is the role. Not just the one CAs should aspire to – the one the families they work with most need them to fill.

Inspired by “The Trusted Advisor: Redefining the CA’s Role in Small and Medium Family Business” by CA K Ullas Kamath, published in UTKARSHA, ICAI Bengaluru Branch SIRC Newsletter, June 2026, Volume 14, Issue 11.

This article reflects the personal perspective of the author. Statistical data cited is drawn from publicly available third-party research.

References

[1] Survival Rates of Family Businesses Across Generations | UTKARSHA, ICAI Bengaluru Branch SIRC Newsletter, June 2026 | CA K Ullas Kamath