A house of family psychology · London
Wealth can be inherited. Character, purpose and leadership must be developed.
We work with
Discreetly, and over the long term, across Europe and beyond.
A different conversation about legacy
Most discussions about legacy focus on what is passed down.
We focus on who it is passed to.
Because every family inherits more than wealth.
The hidden risk · human capital
Families spend enormous effort guarding what they have built. They spend very little on the people who will one day hold it. Whether a family endures depends on things no portfolio can give, and no traditional adviser is trained to build.
Good financial, legal and tax advisers do necessary work. They are not equipped to develop the people. That is a different discipline, and it is ours.
Only around 3% of family wealth reaches the fourth generation.
Roughly 12% reaches the third, and 30% the second.
Figures commonly cited in family enterprise research. The pattern is consistent across cultures and centuries, and the cause is almost never financial.
Why generativity
Generativity is a concept from developmental psychology. It describes the drive to nurture, guide and develop the generation that comes after your own, and to leave something that outlasts you.
It is the opposite of accumulation for its own sake. It asks a quieter question: not what a family has gathered, but what it is producing, in its people, over time.
Everything we do begins here. A family flourishes when each generation takes real responsibility for developing the next, in character, judgement and emotional maturity. That is the work of Genera House.
Explore generativity in depth →The challenge
Almost every culture has its version of the same saying: from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. The research tells a similar story. A large share of fortunes are gone by the second generation, and more by the third. Money is rarely the reason.
It disappears because of what happens to the family.
It usually comes down to one or more of these:
Old wounds and rivalries split a family long before they split the fortune.
Heirs under pressure make decisions led by anxiety, not judgement.
Money is handed over before the people receiving it are ready.
Without meaning beyond the money, the next generation drifts.
Moving from founder to successor fails without prepared leaders.
No shared values, no governance, no rituals to hold the family together.
Wealth is preserved on paper.
A family is preserved in its people.
The generativity framework
The generativity framework is the structure we use to assess and strengthen the human side of a family. Select a pillar to see how it supports what comes next.
Read the framework in depth →How we work
Preparing the next generation for the responsibility, judgement and emotional maturity that inheritance and leadership require.
Strengthening the relationships and shared culture that hold a family together across generations.
Helping founders and successors move through succession with clarity and care.
About Genera House
I am a chartered psychologist based in London, registered with the HCPC. I founded Genera House to bring serious developmental psychology to the question that advisers cannot answer: are the people ready?
My background is in emotional regulation and trauma. It lets me see what most advisers miss: the grief a founder carries, the weight on an unprepared heir, the quiet fractures that surface around money, succession and identity.
The IERT method is the structured approach at the centre of Genera House. It builds the emotional foundation a family needs to stay whole, and to keep what it has built.
In practice
The following are drawn from real engagements. Details have been changed, and nothing here identifies any family. They are offered only to show the shape of the work.
A founder in his late sixties, a strong business, no clear successor. Every conversation about the future ended in silence or conflict.
Work began with the founder, on identity, purpose and loss, and only then turned to the next generation and their readiness.
Over two years a planned transition took shape, and the founder found meaning beyond the business.
Three adult children, rising tension, and a growing number of decisions that had stalled entirely.
Building a shared language for money and decisions, and addressing the older rivalries underneath them.
A family charter, regular meetings, and decisions made together rather than through lawyers.
A capable next-generation member, paralysed by the weight of expectation and quietly withdrawing from the family.
Work on identity, judgement and emotional regulation; learning to separate herself from the inheritance.
She chose a role on her own terms, and re-engaged with the family and the business.
Insights
Money can be transferred in an afternoon. The capacity to carry it takes years.
Stewardship is a temperament, not a legal arrangement.
The invisible inheritance decides whether the visible one endures.
Why comfort, unmanaged, can undo the very people it is meant to bless.
Continuity is a human achievement, not a structural one.
The asset that decides whether every other asset survives.
Private consultation
We take on a small number of families each year. The first conversation is private and entirely at your pace: a careful look at where your family stands now, and what may need to be strengthened for what comes next.
