What reachesan office.
Private transactions are rarely advertised. They move between offices, through people who have known each other a long time, and an office working with several families sees a good deal more of them than any one family would.
Two sources.
The first is the office's own search: the operators, sponsors and advisers it deals with regularly, and the work it does for its own balance sheet.
The second is the other family offices in the network. Each of them sees a different part of the market: the industries its family has operated in, the countries it knows, the people it has dealt with over decades. What reaches one office becomes available to the others. No single family could assemble that coverage on its own, which is the reason for belonging.
How it is read.
Everything that arrives is read once and read properly. What survives goes out with a written view attached, covering what the transaction is, what it costs in total, the assumptions it depends on, and the questions worth putting before anything is signed.
Most of what arrives does not survive that reading. Declining is the larger part of the work, and a family shown four transactions in a year that takes none of them has been served properly.
Nothing is sent to a family it does not suit, whatever remains of an allocation. No family is obliged to look at anything, and none is obliged to invest.
Led, not introduced.
Nothing reaches the network as an introduction. When a transaction is circulated the office has led it: negotiated the terms, carried out the diligence, and committed its own capital before any family sees the papers.
That order of events matters more than any undertaking about fees. An office paid by the party raising capital will pass on whatever pays best. An office that has already committed its own money passes on only what it was prepared to own, and that is a fair description of the difference between a network and a distribution channel.
The office accepts nothing from the party raising the capital. Its own terms of participation are set out in writing before a transaction is circulated. If an allocation is short it is divided among the families that want it, and the office does not increase its own position at their expense.
Why it improves as it grows.
A distribution list deteriorates as it lengthens, because the pressure to fill it grows with its size. A network of offices behaves differently. Every family admitted brings another part of the market into view, while the standard applied to what is passed on stays where it is. More reaches the standard; the standard does not come down to meet it.
The same applies to the office. Scale is what pays for people and systems that no family of this size could justify on its own.
What it is not.
The network is not a fund, a placement agent or a distribution channel. Nothing circulated within it constitutes an offer, and nothing is offered to anybody outside it. What it provides is sight of what an office of this kind sees, and a written view from somebody who has already taken the same position.