The Power of a Peer Group

By Katie Darnall

 It all started when I was 14 years old.

Well, technically, it started when I was born. But the first real milestone in my journey as a RisingGen happened when I was 14 and invited, as the eldest G4 family member, to attend our first ever Family Council Meeting.

At 16, I started working in the family business during the Summer.

At 19, our G2 family leader and Chairman assigned me the project of relaunching the Family Council, which had promptly died after that first meeting five years earlier.

At 24, after going straight from undergrad through a dual Master’s Program, I was recruited into the family business full time.

And by 26, I was a family member, an employee, leading our Family Council initiative, shadowing our Board of Directors, and seeing my name in a trust document that declared me a “beneficiary.”

It was a lot.

At that point, I was no longer naive about our family resources or our family dynamics. I understood enough to know that all of this came with significant opportunity and responsibility.

What I didn’t understand was where exactly I fit into all of it.

It was difficult to explain the strange combination of things I was feeling - gratitude for the opportunities I had been given, a huge sense of responsibility to my family, confusion about what was expected of me, disappointment when things didn’t work the way I thought they should, and a genuine desire to do all of this “right.”

I kept thinking, “Surely someone else out there has gone through this.”

Surely there were other people trying to figure out how to be a good family member, a responsible beneficiary, a contributing member of a family enterprise and society, and also just a person trying to build a life of their own.

There had to be people who understood.

Finding the People Who Get It

Fast forward to today. I left the family business, gained outside work experience, worked on the professional side of the family enterprise and family office world, and have now come full circle back to working with my family and as a coach for others navigating similar circumstances.

Along the way, I found the people I had been looking for.

I met other RisingGen family members trying to figure out their own place within their families. I met people who had struggled with questions that sounded very similar to mine. I found mentors, teachers, colleagues, and friends who could listen to a complicated family situation and simply say, “Yep. I get it.”

There are people out there with answers.

And sometimes what you need isn’t an answer at all. You just need someone who understands the question.

Looking back, I wish I had found a peer group in my early 20s. Not because it would have magically solved my family’s challenges or handed me a roadmap for my life. I just think I would have felt a lot less alone.

I wish someone had put me in a room with other RisingGens and had given us permission to ask the questions that were running through my head:

Does anyone else feel this way?

How are you handling this?

How do I honor my family while figuring out what I want?

How do I carry this responsibility without letting it consume me?

That’s one of the things I now appreciate so much about Cohort and Scholars. I wish I had found peer groups sooner that could have helped me take everything I was experiencing and turn it into more direction and confidence.

Because the questions don’t disappear as you get older. They just change as your role changes, as your family changes, and as your relationships change.

What “Prepared” Means to Me Now

Today, I finally feel like a prepared RisingGen family member.

And the funny thing is, it has very little to do with how much I know.

I certainly don’t know everything and I don’t have all the answers.  I haven’t finally checked every box that may or may not have been clearly communicated to me by the generations before me.

It’s more of an internal knowledge.

I know that whatever comes my way, I can figure it out. I know how to ask better questions, and I know when I need help. I have people I can call. And maybe most importantly, I trust myself.  I trust that I can be a responsible member of my family while also creating a life that feels like mine.

That confidence took me a long time to build. It came through experience, mistakes, learning, hard conversations, and a lot of personal growth.

But it also came from people and community.

You Don’t Have to Figure It Out Alone

If I could give my 24-year-old self one thing, I don’t think I’d give her a perfectly detailed RisingGen development plan.

I’d give her a Community.

You can find people who will learn with you, challenge you, support you, and help you find your own way - not your parents’ way, not your grandparents’ way, and not even the way of other RisingGens and family members.

Your way.

And maybe that’s why this work feels so meaningful to me now. I get to help create the kind of space I wish I had found earlier - a place where people navigating the complexities of family business and family wealth can ask questions, learn from one another, build real relationships, and figure out who they want to be within all of this.

In many ways, I get to be part of creating what my younger self was searching for.

It took me a long time to find that kind of community and peer experience.

Now that I have, I can tell you that it makes all the difference in the world.