Family Business NextGen

Family Business NextGen is a week-long online programme for the rising generation in business-owning families. It runs as five daily conversations of about an hour each, live rather than recorded, and is published by Family Business Magazine. The stated subject matter is governance, succession, family dynamics and career planning.

Who attends

The audience is next-generation members of family businesses: the people who will inherit ownership, or a role, or both, and who are working out what that means. It is not aimed at family office executives or at advisers, and it is not an investment programme.

The badge on this listing marks it as a business families event rather than a family office one, and that is the right way to read it. A twenty-five-year-old wondering whether to join the family company, or how to be a useful shareholder if they do not, is the person this is built for.

How access works

Registration is open online through the Family Business Magazine events page. There is no application, no qualification step and no membership requirement, which is unusual on this circuit and is the point: the barrier to a young family member attending a three-day conference in another city is real, and this format removes it.

Family Business Magazine does not publish a rate on its events index. The programme has run on both paid and free terms depending on the edition, so check the current registration page rather than assuming.

What attendees get

Five one-hour sessions in a conversational format rather than lectures, held at a fixed time each day so that attending fits around a job. The topics are the ones next-generation family members actually face: how governance works and what a shareholder is expected to do, how succession is planned and how it goes wrong, the family relationships that sit underneath both, and how to build a career either inside or outside the family business.

The low commitment is the strongest argument for it. Sending a next-generation family member to a major conference costs several thousand dollars and several days, and is often wasted on someone who does not yet know what questions to ask. An hour a day for a week, from wherever they already are, is a far easier first step, and it gives the family a sense of whether the interest is real before spending more.

The same publisher runs in-person events for family enterprises through the year, including ALIGN and its Transitions conferences, which are the natural next step for anyone who finds this useful.