Family business owners (or business families) & serial entrepreneurs create wealth across one of more generations. As they focus on their core businesses they also need to focus on creating a financial wellbeing platform for their families and segregate their business wealth from personal wealth.
In its most general form, a family offices are segregated team created by a family to meet its unique wealth & investment needs, facilitate creation of a wealth holding strategy, structure a family governance plan & create & manage a formalised philanthropy vehicle. Some family offices also handle the lifestyle & travel needs of the families that they serve.
Single Family Office
If a family decides to hire its own internal team across the major functions of a family office it is known as a Single Family Office. In this structure the family will normally hire a CIO and a team of investment professionals supported by operations & finance support members.
For families with large wealth portfolios and complex requirements a CEO might also be required to oversee the function of the family office as the team required to manage the various functions needs proper business oversight.
The biggest challenge for such a setup is the cost of running the overall team, ability to hire & retain quality talent and also family time needed to oversee the whole function.
Multi Family Office
A more efficient solutions for families wanting superior quality of advice along with lower cost is to be part of a Multi Family Office platform. This kind of a family office works with multiple families even though they still provide customised service for each family.
Since the expertise of the investment & advisory teams and the support functions work with many clients the cost of working with a Multi Family Office is usually much lower that setting up a single family office. Also the family benefits from the wider experience of the Multi Family Office gained from working with a large number of clients.
This constant compounding of experience creates a big knowledge bank with the Multi Family Office which can benefit each client of the platform.