Wealthy Families Are Writing Mission Statements to Avoid Fights, Lost Fortunes
Advisors help families spell out their values for generations to come.
By JULIET CHUNG
Wed, Oct 22, 2025 11:01am
5 min
5 min
Serial entrepreneur and investor James Harold Webb has done careful investment and estate planning to pass down his wealth to his five children, their three spouses, and six grandchildren. He also got everyone together to write a family mission statement.
“The entire goal is to preserve the family and to preserve the wealth,” said Webb, 65 years old, whose ventures include buying and building 33 Orangetheory Fitness franchises in Texas that he sold to private equity.
The mission statement for his 16-person blended family: “Life is a gift that cannot be wasted. Family is the essence of that life and, as a family, we will work hard. We will play hard. We will live in the pursuit of knowledge. We will love our family unconditionally. We will give more than we take to ensure a better world.”
A family mission statement lays out principles and goals in a few sentences. The aim is to avoid the fighting that has destroyed fortunes and left relatives battling in court, or just make sure younger generations don’t squander the fortune.
Behind the trend is the extraordinary wealth creation in recent years and a boom in family wealth and concierge services catering to it.
Sometimes known as a declaration of purpose or vision, mission statements aren’t legally binding. Some advisers embrace the statements as a way to increase a family’s chances of what they consider success, preserving their wealth for a century or more.
Advisers point to Gilded Age dynasties that have disappeared to warn about depleted fortunes and families that no longer are connected.
Wealth advisers like to reference a 2023 book written by Victor Haghani and James White, “The Missing Billionaires,” which notes how rare it is for great family fortunes to last beyond a few generations.
Some families opt for a more robust, legalistic document, called a constitution. For families that own businesses, constitutions can lay out what minimum requirements family members and their spouses must meet to be able to work at the business. To try to avoid drama later, they also can define who even counts as family, such as stepchildren.
Some family members put the mission statement on the back of their business cards or hang them, framed, on a wall at home.
“It’s going to be the family’s why. Why are we doing what we’re doing? Why are we making all this money?” said Shawn Barberis, whose firm, More Than Money 360, works with families including Webb’s to create mission statements and prepare the next generation for leadership. “Every family gets off the tracks a little bit and it can get them refocused.”
Webb was born to teenage parents in rural Mississippi. He says he is astonished that he has been able to create what he calls “generational wealth” for his family, including from a medical-imaging business he sold in 2017 for $94 million. He and his wife, Cathy, split their time between Frisco, Texas, and San José del Cabo, Mexico.
Webb and his wife, plus the children and their spouses, sat around a conference room at a Frisco hotel several years ago to come up with their mission statement at the encouragement of Barberis, with whom they’d started working several years after they got married.
With Barberis guiding the discussion, Webb and his family spent a few hours talking about what was important to them to brainstorm their mission statement.
Webb now kicks off his family’s annual meeting by reading the mission statement aloud and leading a discussion of whether it needs revision. Then, he updates the family on his finances and estate plans before they break for games and a meal.
The mission statement by itself isn’t enough to hold the family together long-term, Webb said. But, coupled with transparency and financial education, he figures his family has a shot at maintaining its wealth for generations.
At UBS , which has a big business advising wealthy families, Sarah Salomon, head of family advisory and philanthropy, and her team help families that typically are worth at least $50 million write mission statements.
They’ll often kick off discussions by handing each family member a pack of cards inscribed with words such as “curiosity,” “reliability” and “spirituality”—and asking them to choose the cards that resonate with them the most.
Advisers sometimes have family members look at a series of images and riff on what they see. A photo of redwood forests, said Elisa Shevlin Rizzo, head of family office advisory at J.P. Morgan Private Bank, has prompted themes of permanence and environmental stewardship.
“If we know one of our core values is stewardship and legacy, maybe we don’t use the trusts for current consumption to fund extravagant lifestyles,” Rizzo said.
Colorado vacation homes and luxurious Airbnbs in Utah are popular sites for brainstorming mission statements, Salomon said. She typically steers clients away from offices, preferring settings where family members can relax and reflect.
Doug Baumoel, whose Boston-based consulting firm, Continuity LLC, focuses on resolving conflict among family business owners, says values exercises work best when the values family members choose are ones they actually practice.
“Inevitably, the most difficult family member will choose ‘family harmony’ as their most important value,” he said.
As Sam Schmidt, 61, an investor in businesses for decades, simplified his interests in recent years, including by recently selling his IndyCar racing team to the McLaren motor-racing outfit, he wanted to gather his family in Las Vegas to discuss the family’s purpose.
Coming together to share and communicate, Schmidt said, was just as valuable as the end statement, if not more so. With a third-party facilitator, they came up with a mission.
It reads, in part, “Our mission is to preserve, grow and steward resources while prioritizing generosity so that we may invest in family through education, life enriching experiences, and quality time together.”
Schmidt also is trying to pass on financial advice to the next generation, naming family trusts different variations of DSTP, for “Don’t Spend the Principal.”
Some families’ rallying cries have been passed down like well-worn stories. Anya Paiz, 23, said her family’s mission statement is so ingrained it’s rarely discussed. Her take on it: Do good by doing well.
She grew up in the U.S. hearing the family lore about her great-grandfather, an orphan who started a grocery store in Guatemala in 1928 that his children turned into one of Central America’s leading supermarket chains—and later sold to Walmart .
Her grandfather’s philosophy was that the better he did, the more he would be able to provide for his family and community. Paiz said setting herself up to do well was part of the reason she emphasized education; she recently graduated from New York University.
These days, she sees her extended family at its annual reunion, which stretches from lunch to dinner at a relative’s home in Guatemala City.
With members flying in from the U.S., Switzerland and parts of Central America, the family in attendance numbered 103 last December, she recalled. Tags listed people’s names, their branch of the family and the generation they represent.
Rodolfo Paiz, Anya’s father and a family business consultant, said various branches of the family have evolved their own versions of the informal family mission statement. That can make sense as families change, he said.
“You can’t expect children of a sixth-generation family worth $200 million to go through the kind of cold and hunger and scarcity that their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents went through,” he said.
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
By
Thu, Sep 3, 2026 5 min
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
