Family Office
Contents
Trevor L Taylor is a Miami private investor and the founder of Fortius Capital, a private investment vehicle. A family office belongs to the same broad world of private capital, though it has a narrower job: it is a private company that a wealthy family creates to manage its own money and affairs, with no outside clients and no public shareholders. Researchers at the Wharton School describe these firms as close, trusted confidants to wealthy families1, advising them on how to invest the family money and how to keep the family itself working together.
What a family office is
The phrase sounds modest, and that is part of the appeal. A family office usually sits apart from any operating business the family owns. Its staff answer to the family rather than to customers, and its purpose is continuity: keeping investments, tax filings, property, insurance policies and charitable plans organized under one roof so that nothing depends on a single memory or a single adviser.
Size varies widely. A small office may employ a handful of people who coordinate outside banks and accountants. A large one may run its own investment team and operate much like an institution. Most of the work happens out of public view, which is why outside estimates of the industry tend to come from surveys rather than filings.
The structure also differs from a private bank or a wealth manager. Those firms serve many clients and earn fees from each relationship, while a single family office works for one household and is paid for by that household. The family sets the priorities, approves the budget and decides how much risk, privacy and paperwork it wants to carry. That control is the main reason families accept the cost of running an office instead of simply opening accounts at a large institution.
Where the idea came from
The model is older than most people assume. Fortune notes that family offices have existed for roughly two centuries, and that one of the first was established by the family of J.P. Morgan2. The same report found that most of the single family offices operating today were founded this millennium, a sign that a very old structure has become newly popular as private fortunes have multiplied.
What the office actually does
Investing is only one line on the job description. A Bloomberg profile of the office that serves Google cofounder Sergey Brin described former bankers and philanthropy experts working alongside security and yacht staff3, along with an archivist and a photographer. That mix captures the range of the work, from portfolio decisions to the logistics of a family’s daily life.
Larger offices increasingly build formal investment arms. Bloomberg reported that the office backing the family behind Hermes created a separate company to oversee fund and asset management4, so that new holdings can sit outside the core luxury business. Separating the family’s operating company from its investment capital is one of the oldest reasons for having an office at all.
How large the sector has become
Counting family offices is difficult because so few disclose anything. Deloitte Private estimates there are about 8,030 single family offices worldwide, up from roughly 6,130 in 20195. Its projection calls for more than 10,720 by 2030, with assets under management rising from $3.1 trillion to $5.4 trillion.
Annual surveys give a closer look at the larger offices. The UBS report for 2025 drew on 317 single family offices across more than 30 markets6, where the average family was worth $2.7 billion and the average office managed $1.1 billion. Those figures describe the top of the market; many offices run on far smaller sums.
The same survey shows how offices think about risk. Respondents ranked a global trade war as their main concern for the year, ahead of major geopolitical conflict and higher inflation, and most planned to keep overall portfolio risk about where it had been. Offices with long horizons can afford to sit through volatility that would force a shorter term investor to sell, and that patience is often described as their main structural advantage over funds that must report to outside clients every quarter.
Who staffs a family office
Growth has created a talent problem. CNBC reported that universities are adding programs to train future office leaders, including the Booth Family Office Initiative at the University of Chicago7, because offices are competing hard for investors, accountants, lawyers and estate planners.
Pay structures are changing as a result. A separate CNBC report found that offices are giving senior staff equity and profit shares8 to compete with private equity and venture firms for the same people. A family that once relied on a trusted bookkeeper may now need a chief investment officer, a tax specialist and a technology lead, each expecting terms that resemble a professional investment firm.
What the surveys reveal
Academic work stresses that the office exists to serve people as well as portfolios. The Wharton Global Family Alliance survey, which covered offices across 21 countries9, tracked investment returns but also technology, human capital and philanthropy. Its most striking finding was about continuity: only about a third of offices had plans for passing ownership, management and control to the next generation, and only a third of family stakeholders knew those plans existed.
That gap explains why so much of the advice written about family offices concerns governance, communication and wealth succession planning rather than asset picking. The UBS survey found a similar pattern, with roughly half of offices reporting a formal succession plan for family members. Families that do plan tend to write down who decides, how disagreements are handled and how younger members are prepared to take part.
For readers comparing structures, the next question is usually whether a family needs an office of its own or can share one, the subject of the entry on single and multi family offices. Related entries on coinvestment and capital allocation cover how offices put money to work. Across all of them, the Wharton researchers’ conclusion holds: a family office is judged less by any single return figure than by whether the family, its records and its decisions stay intact from one generation to the next.
