Great wealth often is accompanied by great complexity. For any family with close to $100 million or more in assets, managing them can be a full-time job. The sudden increase in the population of ultra-wealthy families, resulted in the increase of the need for family offices. Establishing a family office gives the ultra-wealthy greater oversight over their wealth, more privacy and access to customised services to suit their specific needs.
What do single-family offices do?
There is no template for how family offices carry out the services that a wealthy family needs, but single family offices typically fall into 5 categories and sometimes overlap.
- Coordination Office. These types of family offices are lightly staffed with between 1 to 3 employees filling positions such as administrative assistant, former finance or legal employee of the family-run business. This type of office often handles less immediate administrative matters like providing concierge services for the family and coordinating outside advisors.
- Within the Family Business. In this set up, employees who work for the family-owned business, spend part of their time catering to family office services. These are often employees in the finance department, and they typically focus on administrative matters, trustee services, tax, and estate planning, as well as managing outside advisors. In this structure, an outside provider usually handles investment management.
- Investment Management Office. Employees in this type of family office structure are primarily investment professionals. Sometimes an investment management office will focus on one category of investment, such as investing in private businesses, and outsource everything else.
- Philanthropic focused. Wealthy families who donate hefty sums of money to charity or have large foundations might have a family office that supports the family’s charitable interests and operates the family‘s philanthropic entities. This kind of office sets and executes the family’s philanthropic strategy, undertakes charitable organisation search and due diligence, and handles administrative matters related to charitable giving and monitoring.
- Comprehensive Family Offices. Especially for the families in the higher end of the spectrum, some family offices are full-service, meaning that their family office provides the entire suite of services: administrative, concierge, philanthropic, investment management, and whatever else the family needs. These fully-staffed family offices typically employ more than ten people and some have more than 25 employees. However, this kind of family office is usually out of reach for families with less than $1 billion in assets.
Which responsibilities should family offices delegate?
With thoughtful planning, a family office can reap the benefits of outsourcing services that don’t fit its purpose while focusing on the family’s strengths. Making these decisions isn’t easy, but this framework will help wealthy families have the conversations that will help them get it right. Beginning to decide which functions your family office is better off delegating, you should ask yourself a few questions:
-What are your family office personnel great at?
-What world-class expertise do you have?
-What is best left to others either because it’s either not important to you or not your area of expertise?
The answers to those questions will naturally vary from office to office, but they are important in helping your family office maximise effectiveness.
When you are deciding what to outsource some functions that are often best left to others include:
-Activities that a larger firm could do more cheaply or efficiently.
-Things you cannot do at a world-class level.
-Areas where having a provider that works with multiple wealthy families would be helpful.
-Lower Value Work.
Outsourcing to a reputable multi-family concierge service provider
As mentioned above, unless your wealth is in the billions of dollars and you are able to run a comprehensive family office that covers the entire suite of services, your family office will not function at its best if it is not delegating certain tasks that are not typically in their wheelhouse. In this situation, it is best to seek out the best family office service providers. A Multi-Family Office (MFO) is a firm that provides family office services to a select group of ultra-wealthy families.
Cevalon provides dedicated multi-family office luxury concierge, travel and lifestyle management services in London to discerning clientele. These include Private Family Offices, Single-Generation Members of Wealthy Families, High Net-Worth Individuals (HNW), Private Foundations, plus private individual and corporate clients.
With the assistance of Cevalon’s services, your family office will be able to focus on wealth management, being able to entrust your family’s bespoke upkeep to qualified professionals that have had vast experience dealing with other wealthy families. With Cevalon as a partner, never again will your staff have to search Google for a “chauffeur service near me” to book you a limousine service in Munich. Wherever you are in the world, your family office needs a partner that has a presence to tend to your needs. Cevalon’s reach includes private family office travel management services Dubai.
Cevalon’s Family Office Services Include:
-Family Office Travel and Private Charter Services, Yacht and Aircraft Management
-Family Office Chauffeur and Transport Services
-Family Office Concierge Services and Household Staff Recruitment
-Family Office Lifestyle and Property Management Services
-Family Office Security Services
Most MFOs only work with wealthy families with complex affairs and are used to providing customised services.
Additionally, many MFOs are wholly independent and not motivated to sell high-cost products and services, which helps a single-family office control its costs.
As such, Cevalon can be an effective partner to backstop the single-family office and provide customised outsourced services.
