Most family offices are run on trust, instinct, and relationships. None of those are a governance framework.
We work with family principals and business owners to build the structure, oversight, and advisory discipline that protects wealth across generations — and gives the principal their time back.
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We are not a private bank. We do not manage your assets or earn from your investments. We have no product to sell you and no mandate that conflicts with yours.
We are the independent voice that coordinates your advisory ecosystem, holds your governance framework to account, and ensures the oversight structures your family needs are built — and actually used.
Think of us as the operating partner to your investment advisors. The CIO manages the portfolio. We build and maintain the governance, risk, and operational infrastructure around it.
No right or wrong answers. This assessment maps your current operating position and surfaces the gaps that matter most. Seven questions, under three minutes. Nothing is stored.
Every engagement follows a defined sequence. You know what happens at each stage, what it produces, and what decision it enables. We do not start work before we understand your situation. We do not make recommendations before we complete a diagnostic.
ILPA DDQ 2.0 — the standard used by institutional limited partners to evaluate fund managers — now spans 21 sections and 250+ questions, and an estimated 85% of institutional LPs have rejected a manager solely on operational grounds, independent of investment performance (Altss, 2025). The same discipline applies when a discerning principal evaluates an advisor. These are the criteria that matter.
Calibrate each dimension against your honest current-state assessment. Benchmarks are drawn from Citi Private Bank (2024, n=338), UBS Global Family Office Report (2024, n=320), Campden Wealth / AlTi Tiedemann (2024), and J.P. Morgan (2024, n=190). The scorecard applies weighted scoring to generate a maturity profile and priority action sequence.
One of the most consequential decisions in family office design. The right model is a function of AUM scale, portfolio complexity, internal capability, cost tolerance, and what the family genuinely needs to control directly. This assessment works through nine dimensions and generates a recommendation with reasoning.
Expand any scenario to see the typical starting condition, advisory sequence, expected deliverables, and strategic watchouts for that family archetype.
Institutionalisation is not a binary state. It is a trajectory through five distinct phases — each with specific practices that distinguish it, specific failure modes that derail transitions, and specific advisory interventions that enable progress. This framework draws on the Agreus Group maturity model, corroborated by And Simple's operational scoring system and Citi Private Bank's governance research.
Institutionalisation fails not because families lack resources or intent — but because the governance barriers are psychological as much as structural. Research consistently shows that the technical documents are not the limiting factor. These are the seven failure modes and how to identify them. Standard Chartered (2024) reports that 74% of family office professionals have observed a rise in family conflict — not from missing governance documents, but from unaddressed psychological dynamics.
A practitioner-grade IPS contains 11 core sections plus 4 critical appendices. The most common failure is not the absence of an IPS — but the presence of one that cannot be enforced. Citi Private Bank (2024): 48% of family offices globally lack an IPS; of those that have one, many contain clauses that are aspirational, vague, or internally inconsistent. Assess your current IPS below.
An IC that exists is not the same as an IC that functions. J.P. Morgan (2024) found that only 43% of family offices have an investment committee at all; among those that do, research identifies “committee capture” — where the principal’s preferences dominate proceedings — as the primary quality failure. This diagnostic assesses IC effectiveness across six dimensions based on the Agreus/Handle Private Capital IC effectiveness rubric.
The most sophisticated institutional capital pools in the world — multi-generational endowments and sovereign wealth funds — manage their portfolios around three interdependent disciplines: a perpetual time horizon with a formal distribution policy, equity orientation in its broadest form, and an uncompromising commitment to manager quality over manager quantity. Most family offices adopt the allocation profile without the discipline that makes it work.
Top endowments and sovereign wealth funds use a consistent three-stage manager selection process with ODD as an independent veto workstream. The most important shift: operational diligence is not a part of investment diligence — it runs separately, with independent authority to reject managers that pass investment review. This became standard practice after Madoff and Weavering Capital.
Manager selection begins at the portfolio level, not the manager level. The question is: what does the portfolio need, and what set of managers can provide it? Screens include minimum track record (typically 3+ years for established strategies), fee structure reasonableness, minimum AUM thresholds, and quantitative performance filters.
Key quantitative metric: PME (Public Market Equivalent) — not IRR alone. PME compares the private fund’s actual cash flows against a hypothetical investment in a public index over the same period. A manager with 18% IRR but a PME below 1.0x is delivering worse risk-adjusted returns than a passive alternative. Top endowments use Cambridge Associates private equity benchmarks as the primary PME comparator.
ODD runs independently from investment diligence and has veto power. A fund that clears investment diligence but fails ODD is rejected. This is the institutional standard established after Madoff (2008) and Weavering Capital (2009), where failures were entirely operational, not investment-related.
Manager selection is not a one-time decision. Trigger-based monitoring reviews are the institutional standard — not just annual reviews.
Institutional capital pools use a three-tier liquidity architecture. Tier 1 funds operations and near-term obligations. Tier 2 provides strategic buffer. Tier 3 captures the illiquidity premium. The architecture only works if each tier is explicitly sized — and if capital calls from Tier 3 can be funded without liquidating other positions. Use this tool to assess your current liquidity architecture.
Every advisory engagement produces documented outputs — not verbal recommendations. These are the formats and frameworks we deploy across the engagement pathway.
These are the objections we hear most often. Addressed not to persuade, but to clarify where our advisory model sits relative to your existing arrangements.
Most family offices do. J.P. Morgan (2024) found that 71% of family offices use external investment management, and Citi (2024) estimates that 52% of AUM is managed in collaboration with or exclusively by external managers. The question is not whether to use external managers — it is whether those relationships are coordinated, evaluated independently, and held accountable against documented objectives. Cambridge Associates (2023) identified fee duplication across uncoordinated external managers as a structural cost problem that "can erode performance and reduce strategic flexibility" without the principal's awareness. Private banks are not structurally positioned to provide objective oversight of their own mandates — their revenue model and ours are different. Our role is to ensure existing managers operate within a coherent governance framework and are evaluated on terms that serve the family's interests, not their distribution targets.
That is often the correct instinct — and one worth testing. Citi Private Bank (2024) found that only 47% of family offices formally measure performance against their own stated annual goals. If performance is not measured against documented objectives, it is difficult to confirm whether additional advisory creates value or not — because the baseline is unclear. The diagnostic is designed to answer that question concretely. If the existing arrangement passes the diagnostic with no material gaps, that is a useful finding in its own right. If it does not, the diagnostic identifies where the gaps are costing the family money, time, or risk exposure — without obligation on either side.
It is — and the research confirms it. Deloitte (2024) surveyed 354 single family offices and found the average AUM across their sample was $386M, the average family wealth $684M, the average team size 8 people, and the average annual operating cost $5.2M. The variation within those averages is enormous: from offices running on $700K per year to $24M. Every family office is unique. The value of an institutional framework is precisely that it is calibrated to the specific family — not applied as a template. What is standardised is the process: the structured diagnostic, the governance gap analysis, the risk register, and the advisory cadence. The outputs are always bespoke. We do not offer products.
That is often the right starting position. McKinsey (2024) sets the minimum viable AUM for a single family office in Asia Pacific at US$100 million, noting that operating costs below this threshold typically consume 4–6% of AUM annually. Campden Wealth (2024) found that a lean office with AUM below $250M typically spends ~$1M per year on operations — before external manager fees. Building a full family office before that threshold is justified may consume more resources than the structure saves. Our engagement model does not require a full office. It begins with identifying which elements of institutional discipline are most urgent and most achievable for your specific situation — an IPS, a reporting framework, a cybersecurity audit, a governance diagnostic — and engaging on those priorities without requiring a comprehensive transformation mandate.
The distinction matters. Bureaucracy is process for its own sake. Institutional discipline is a documented decision architecture that enables faster, more confident decisions under uncertainty. J.P. Morgan (2026) identified the lack of a succession plan for key decision-makers as a top-three risk for 33% of family offices surveyed — tied with regulatory risk and family conflict. Families with a documented IPS, defined governance structure, and clear communication cadence consistently report better decision-making in time-compressed situations — liquidity events, market dislocations, family disagreements — than those operating ad hoc. The purpose of the framework is clarity, not overhead. It can be designed to be as lightweight as the principal requires.
Discretion is non-negotiable in this practice and a structural feature of how we engage, not an afterthought. This diagnostic tool stores nothing: no data entered here is transmitted, retained, or accessible to any third party. All engagement discussions are conducted under a confidentiality agreement before substantive information is exchanged. Our advisory model is designed for principals who have serious privacy requirements — including concerns about competitor intelligence, family dynamics, and regulatory exposure. Notably, the cybersecurity landscape for UHNW individuals has worsened: Deloitte (2024) found that 25% of families with wealth exceeding $1 billion have been directly targeted by cyberattacks. Discretion is both a professional obligation and an operational priority. We structure engagements accordingly, including secure communications protocols and information minimisation principles.
This is more common than most principals acknowledge — and the research is unambiguous about its consequences. Williams and Preisser (2003), in the most widely cited longitudinal study of family wealth transfers, found that 60% of wealth transfer failures are caused by breakdown of trust and communication within the family, 25% by unprepared heirs, and 15% by lack of shared family purpose. Fewer than 5% are attributable to technical or professional errors. The implication is that investment returns and legal structures are secondary to family cohesion and governance communication. Our advisory practice addresses both: governance frameworks are meaningless unless the family has a shared understanding of why they exist. We engage with family dynamics as a substantive advisory matter, not a soft one. Where family alignment is the primary issue, the governance diagnostic and succession framework typically take precedence over investment process work.
That is exactly the right question to be deliberating — and the evidence should inform the answer. UBS (2024) found that 60% of family offices have an in-house CIO, 10% use an outsourced CIO, and 30% have no CIO at all. McKinsey (2024) sets the minimum viable AUM for an in-house model in Asia Pacific at US$100 million, with full viability more realistic above US$500 million–US$1 billion. OCIO adoption among institutional asset owners has risen to 46% (CIO Magazine, 2025) but remains at only 10% among family offices — a gap that reflects preference for control rather than cost efficiency. This decision does not need to be made comprehensively at the start. Our Build vs. Buy engine above provides a structured framework covering nine dimensions including AUM complexity, internal capability, technology gaps, talent access, and compliance requirements. It generates a recommendation and explains the reasoning behind it. This is a starting point for a structured conversation, not a binding prescription.
Understanding the full stakeholder ecosystem enables coordinated, non-duplicative advisory across all dimensions of the family office.
The advisory function serves as the principal's strategic coordination layer — aligning specialists, holding them accountable, and ensuring coherent governance across all relationships.
Sophisticated principals apply the same rigour to evaluating their advisors as institutional investors apply to evaluating fund managers. These questions are drawn from institutional due diligence practice. A current advisor unable to answer any of these clearly deserves a more structured conversation.
A practical self-assessment tool for family offices committed to institutional-grade operating standards. Each item represents a practice that distinguishes institutionalised offices from informal ones in the primary survey data (Citi, UBS, Campden, J.P. Morgan 2024). Click to mark items complete and track your coverage against the peer benchmark.
The first conversation is always confidential, always without obligation, and always focused on your specific situation. We do not pitch. We listen, we ask questions, and we tell you honestly what we see.
Generated from your diagnostic inputs. This note is formatted in the style of an institutional advisory brief — concise, evidence-based, and decision-oriented. Print or save for use in your next stakeholder discussion.
Complete the Principal Diagnostic above to generate a personalised assessment of your family office's current maturity, structural model, and operating context.
Pathway recommendation is generated following diagnostic completion and maturity profile assessment.
First engagement will be recommended based on urgency triggers, maturity level, and principal priorities identified in the diagnostic.