Admission.
The office admits a small number of families. They are looked after by the same people, to the same standard, as the family that built it.
Two kinds of family.
Families establishing
an office
A family that has reached the point of wanting its own office, and would sooner use one that already functions than spend two years assembling it. The licence, the systems, the reporting and the people are in place, as is the network, and the work begins in the first month rather than the second year.
Time is the obvious saving. The more valuable one is order at the start: a policy written before any position is taken, a record kept from the first day rather than reconstructed afterwards, and an independent view in place before the first significant decision.
Families with an
office already
An office that has been running for years, with its own people, systems and relationships, all of which stay as they are. What this office adds sits at the investment level: a second and independent view on the decisions that matter, formed outside the family and outside its staff, and sight of the transactions that reach a network of offices rather than one.
Nothing is restructured and nobody is replaced. If the family later strengthens its own team, the office helps write the specifications and sits in the interviews.
The process.
The first step is a conversation, with no documents and no obligation on either side.
If both sides wish to go further, the office examines everything the family owns: every statement from every institution, each fund broken down, each manager measured after cost, and the portfolio assessed alongside the operating business. A single document then sets out what is held, what it costs to hold, what it is exposed to, and what the office would change, in the order it would change it.
A family is free to take that document and act on it alone. If both sides wish to continue, the engagement begins from it.
Fixed, and agreed in advance.
The office is paid a fixed annual fee, agreed in advance and invoiced quarterly. It does not move with the value of the assets, and there is no share of gains, no commission, no retrocession and no transaction charge. For its work as an office it has no other income.
What sets the fee is the complexity of the work rather than the size of the wealth: the number of institutions and countries involved, whether an operating business is within scope, and how many members of the family take part. It is discussed at the first conversation and fixed before anything begins.
When a family invests alongside the office in a private transaction the office is a principal in it, and its terms are set out in writing beforehand.
How it ends.
The engagement runs for six months initially, and thereafter on thirty days' notice from either side. Because the office holds nothing belonging to the family there is nothing to unwind: the policy, the record and the decision file are the family's as they are produced, and a copy sits with them throughout.
Some families will want their own people in time, and the office helps them find them. Most keep it on afterwards as the independent layer above their own team, which is the one thing an in-house office cannot supply itself.