Most enterprising families understand the potential benefits of a formalized family office, but customizing and building one is a complex task, and integrating it effectively into your broader enterprise is not always a straightforward process.

The decision to launch a family office often comes in the wake of a liquidity event — most typically selling some or all of the family business — or after years of accumulating windfall profits without a formalized structure to manage and redeploy them. When reflecting on the sizable fees paid to investment and wealth management firms to protect and grow these assets, or the privacy and customization a fully-owned and operated structure could provide, some families then rush to build out a family office to coordinate shared services such as investment management, estate planning, and philanthropy.

However, they often neglect to define the core vision and purpose of the organization and overlook critical questions about governance — including whether it even makes sense to launch a single-family office at all or to first experiment by joining an existing multi-family office to better understand the full range of costs and benefits.