A small company with one client
A single family office is a private company owned by one family, staffed by employees who work for that family and nobody else. That is the whole idea, and everything else follows from it.
The alternative arrangement is a multi-family office, which does similar work for a number of unrelated families and spreads its cost across them. Cheaper, less controlled, and the right answer for many.
What sits inside a family office?
Scope varies enormously. A common set:
Investment.
Setting the family's allocation and appointing the external managers who execute it. Some offices also invest directly.
Consolidated reporting.
Producing one view of everything the family owns, which sounds simple and is not.
Administration.
Cash management, payments, tax filings, insurance and the paperwork of holding companies.
Coordination of advisers.
Keeping the lawyers, accountants, tax advisers and bankers pointed in the same direction.
Governance support.
Servicing the family council, keeping records, preparing the material the family needs to decide anything
Personal matters.
Property, aircraft, luxury assets, philanthropy, staffing, concierge services. Some offices do all of this. Others keep matters aligned strictly with business outputs.
What it does not do
A single family office does not remove the need for external specialists. Tax opinions, legal work and professional audit must still come from outside — regulated, and independent.
This structuring also does not, on its own, produce unanimous agreement within a family. An office can serve a family that governs itself well, but it cannot substitute for governance, and a family in conflict will simply conduct that conflict through the office instead.
How families end up with one
Usually after a sale. The business is gone and the proceeds are large. The finance director who used to handle everything now works for someone else. That is the moment the question arrives, and it is generally the worst moment to answer it. The decision is being taken during an emotional year, by people being courted by an industry that has been waiting for this transaction to close.
In our view, there is no harm in waiting for the right time to make this decision. The capital can be held simply for a year while the family establishes what it truly needs.
Every family office was built around one family's particular circumstances. Copying the structure without the circumstances produces an office that does work nobody needed and misses the work that mattered.
If you are at the start of this question, we would be pleased to talk it through.
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