A letter for families and the people who serve them: succession, next generation leadership, the numbers that matter in 2027, and what it means to live well, not just long.
A note from Colleen
The wealth is moving. Trillions of dollars are changing hands, many of the people receiving it are women, and the families holding it are asking a question that has nothing to do with returns: what do we do with the time and the trust that wealth was supposed to buy us?
This edition is about people. Who looks after you. Who is stepping into the family office next. What the numbers look like in 2027. Why a hockey team might make sense for a family and why it might not. And at the heart of it, what I have come to believe longevity really is. Start there.
I hope something here is worth passing along to a family you care about.
Colleen Ferrary
Founder and CEO, Peak Fractional Leadership & Advisory Group
The night before my keynote in Barcelona, I should have been rehearsing. I had been, for days. I had made myself a little crazy over it.
Instead, I walked. Eight hours, through a city I had not seen in ten years, from the harbor all the way to the Sagrada Familia. Some streets were exciting. Some alleys were a little scary, and I peeked down them anyway.
It exhilarated me. It freed me. I believe it added something to my life that day.
There is someone in my life who wanted so badly to be in Barcelona with me. We have traveled together before, and I felt their absence that night. So I called. I sat under the stars for an hour on FaceTime, with the festival going on around La Sagrada Familia, the music, the crowds, the whole city awake, and I took them with me. We talked and laughed and soaked it in together.
It was just a phone, and it moved me. Not because of the technology, but because I have people I can turn to in a moment like that, and because I make room for them. Not only on FaceTime. I mean stopping, putting everything down, and breathing someone in.
I think about my daughter the same way. We talk every day. It does not matter what is happening. If I am in the middle of a meeting, I find the quickest way out and take thirty minutes with her on the phone. I plan for it in my week the way I plan for anything I would never cancel. It is not a favor to her. It is one of the ways I take care of myself.
Everyone is jumping on the longevity bandwagon. There are good actors and there are bad actors, and I believe most of them mean well. The science is real, and I am glad it is advancing. I do the scans too.
But the story we are being told is getting narrow. It is a story about data, protocols, and products, and it quietly leaves out the person living the life. So it is fair to ask: what is longevity, really?
To me, it is balance. It is building a life you want to stay in. You take care of yourself, your body and your mind, because it feels good, not because a number told you to. You exercise. You pay attention. And because you pay attention, you are early to things, including health concerns, instead of finding out late.
The scan, the coach, the supplements. I do those things. But I think we reach for what we can buy because we do not feel we have time for what actually fills us up: the friend who makes you laugh, learning something new, giving to something bigger than yourself, standing in front of something so big you forget what you were carrying.
That is what we are building with Privé by Peak. Yes, we will help you find the right doctor. We also want to help you find the time.
Five questions for this week
Sources: Harvard Gazette on the Harvard Study of Adult Development; Konrath S, Fuhrel-Forbis A, Lou A, Brown S. Motives for volunteering are associated with mortality risk in older adults. Health Psychology, 2012. This piece shares one person's perspective and is not medical advice. Privé by Peak does not diagnose or treat. Talk with your own physician about your health.
Robb Report is onto something.
In a piece titled Silicon Valley Was Wrong. Friction Is Life's Real Luxury, Anna van Praagh opens with London restaurateur Jeremy King, who told his staff he could replace every one of them with robots and then explained why he never would. Robots do not have empathy, instinct, or intuition, and they cannot love.
The article makes a larger point. For two decades technology promised to remove the human from service. At the very top of the market, the pendulum is swinging back. The person who remembers your table, the tailor who insists on another fitting, the hotel manager who knows your family, have become the scarce thing.
Think about the difference. An app does exactly what you tell it, one question at a time, and will not finish until you have answered all of them. Picture yourself stuck somewhere far from home, copying and pasting between screens to rebook a flight. That is not a trip. That is a second job.
Now picture having a person. You do not have to tell them what to do. They are already thinking about what could go wrong and already making it easier. You get to enjoy where you are, and you trust that it is handled.
I am not sure what to call that. A kind of love, maybe, the quiet kind, made of attention and anticipation. I suspect that "I have an app for that" will sound different in ten years, and "I have a person for that" will mean something. It will mean someone trusts you and you trust them.
Many of the people inheriting and running family wealth in the next decade will be women, and many already carry more than their title says.
Bank of America's 2026 study found that 87% of family offices have not yet passed leadership to the next generation, yet 59% expect to within ten years. UBS's 2026 Global Family Office Report adds a quieter detail: in 21% of families, the next generation is old enough to take part and has no involvement at all. UBS's own head of next generation solutions says disengagement is often misread as disinterest when it is really a gap in empowerment.
For a woman stepping into a family office, that gap is not abstract. She may be inheriting complex, multi-entity structures she did not design, at a moment she is also running a company, a household, and a family. She may be meeting the advisor bench for the first time.
Does she know the advisors, and do they know her? A relationship built with one spouse or one generation does not automatically carry over.
Is there a written plan for the day decision rights change hands? Succession is easier to discuss before it is urgent.
Who is the one person looking across all the lanes for her? The wealthier a family becomes, the more experts surround it. Everyone can be excellent in their own lane while no one looks across them.
That last question is why we built Privé by Peak: one person who learns the rhythms of your life and handles the details, so your attention goes where only you can put it.
Sources: Entrepreneur on Bank of America Institute; Citizens Private Bank; Crain Currency on Bank of America 2026 Family Office Study; UBS Global Family Office Report 2026
On November 5, the IRS published its 2027 inflation adjustments (Rev. Proc. 2026-35). Here is what changed for estate and gift planning.
| Item | 2026 | 2027 |
|---|---|---|
| Estate and gift exclusion, per individual | $15,000,000 | $15,480,000 |
| Per married couple | $30,000,000 | $30,960,000 |
| Annual gift exclusion, per recipient | $19,000 | $20,000 |
| Annual exclusion, gifts to a non-citizen spouse | $194,000 | $201,000 |
The 2026 figure of $15 million came from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which set the exclusion at that level going forward and began annual inflation indexing in 2027. The top federal estate tax rate remains 40%.
Gifts above the annual per-recipient amount count against the lifetime exclusion, so what you give during life reduces what remains at death. For families who have been waiting for certainty, the structure now moves with inflation, and planning conversations can focus on how to use the exclusion well.
Kip and Kevin Kolson's firm works with families on using life insurance inside trusts, including charitable trusts, as part of how wealth moves between generations. Planning like this is typically done with a family's own estate attorney and tax advisor, and Family Wealth Leadership also coaches family members and next generations on the relational side of wealth.
This is general information, not tax or legal advice. Peak does not provide tax or legal services. Please speak with your own advisors. Sources: The Tax Adviser; Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney; IRS
What two famous Canadians know about ownership.
Michael Bublé is a part-owner of the Vancouver Giants, a junior hockey team in the Western Hockey League. In 2023 his longtime friend Drew Scott of Property Brothers joined the ownership group, and a Prime Video documentary series, Hometown Giants, follows the two of them as co-owners.
They did not buy an NHL franchise. They bought into a team they love, in a community they know, alongside a majority owner. That is worth noticing, because it mirrors what more family offices are now doing.
Sports ownership has moved from a passion purchase to a planned allocation for many family offices. Entry is controlled by the leagues, and franchises cannot be created at will, so scarcity supports value. Private equity can now hold minority stakes in the NFL, which opened that door in 2024, and the Khosla family's record $9.6 billion purchase of the Seattle Seahawks shows how far prices have climbed. Many family offices are choosing minority stakes in major and minor league hockey over majority control, because a minority position asks for less day-to-day involvement.
One Dakota Marketplace report puts the Ross-Arctos Sports Franchise Index at 16% annualized returns over the ten years through the first quarter of 2026, with low correlation to stocks and bonds. Past performance is not a forecast, and a franchise is not a liquid asset.
Leagues vet buyers closely. Family offices should expect unusually intrusive diligence into structure, background, and potential conflicts. Capital with no fixed exit date tends to suit this asset better than money on a fund's clock.
That second question is a leadership and governance question. It is also the one we hear most from families who are curious about ownership.
This is general information, not investment advice. Sources: ESPN; CTV News; PitchBook; Canadian Family Offices; Dakota Marketplace; Family Office Exchange
[Two or three sentences from Safir Bashir on the project: location, type, stage, and why the UK market. Keep it descriptive. Avoid return projections and avoid language that invites investment.]
[Two or three sentences from Jonathan Batchelor on the program: international health coverage, medical evacuation, travel protection, access to leading doctors worldwide, and any tax-related benefits as he describes them.]
The most capable people in any organization attract more to carry. A TopResume survey of 500 C-suite and aspiring executives found that nearly 40% had considered leaving their role in the past year, and burnout, stress, and work-life balance were among the top reasons. As AI adds to leaders' workloads, the question to ask is what your company does to protect their time.
A Harvard Business Review piece from UC Berkeley researchers described a small study at one tech company: employees worked faster, took on more, and let work spill into more hours of the day. Time saved was quickly filled. The hours AI frees up are only worth something if you decide who they are for.
Sources: HR Dive on TopResume; Harvard Business Review via beSpacific
Forward this letter to a family, an advisor, or a friend who is thinking about what comes next. If you would like to talk about governance, succession, or what it would look like to have a person for that, I would love to hear from you.
Email Colleen GrowAtPeak.com PrivePeak.com+1 (858) 333-0663