Choosing and working with a multi-family office

A single family office is a small business you have to build, staff and govern. Many families do not want that, and they are right not to want it. A multi-family office offers a way out: pooled infrastructure, a deeper bench than you could afford alone, and someone else to carry the recruitment, the systems and the compliance. You buy a result instead of building a department. The logic is sound.

The trouble is that the firms pitching this are good at pitching. The sales process is smooth, the people in the room are senior and likeable, and the deck answers questions you had not thought to ask. None of that tells you what the day-to-day will feel like in year three. A good multi-family office and a polished one look identical across a boardroom table. Your job is to find where they differ.

Follow the money first

Start with how the firm is paid, because everything else follows from it. A flat fee on assets, a retainer, a charge for time: each creates a different set of incentives, and you want to understand which way yours point before you sign anything.

The question that matters most is whether the firm makes money from its own products. If it manages the portfolio, sells the funds, places the insurance and books the foreign exchange, then advice and manufacture sit in the same house. That is not automatically wrong. Plenty of capable firms are built that way and disclose it plainly. But it means the recommendation to use an in-house product is never fully neutral, and you should price that in. Ask directly what share of the firm’s revenue comes from your fee versus from products and third-party commissions. A clean answer is reassuring. A vague one tells you something too.

Independence is a word every firm uses and few define. Push on it. Independent of whom? Free to recommend a rival’s fund, a different custodian, an outside manager when the in-house option is weaker? A firm that can say yes to all of that, and show you a case where it did, is describing real independence rather than a marketing line.

Meet the people who will actually do the work

The team that wins the mandate is rarely the team that runs the account. The named partner who charmed you across lunch will reappear at the annual review and not much in between. So ask who services you day to day, how senior they are, how many other families they look after, and how long they tend to stay. Turnover in the people who know your affairs is a real cost, paid in repeated explanations and dropped threads.

Client concentration cuts both ways and is worth understanding. A firm where one or two enormous families dominate the revenue will, quietly, prioritise them. A firm spread across hundreds of accounts may treat yours as one file among many. Neither is disqualifying. Both are worth knowing before you become the small client or the neglected one.

Then ask for references, and ask for the right ones. Not the trophy client, but families that resemble yours in size, complexity and temperament. A firm built around liquid portfolios will struggle with an operating business, a property-heavy estate or a family spread across four tax jurisdictions. Speak to someone who has put the firm through the kind of problem you actually have. Ask them what went wrong at some point, because something always did, and listen to how the firm handled it. The recovery tells you more than the brochure.

Conflicts deserve a plain conversation rather than a clause buried in the engagement letter. Who else does the firm act for, and could those interests ever collide with yours? How are referral arrangements with lawyers, banks and managers disclosed and paid? A firm comfortable with these questions has answered them before. One that bristles has told you what you needed to know.

Recognition across several independent sources is a useful filter before you ever take a meeting, and it is the logic behind how this directory is built; our methodology explains what counts and what does not. It narrows the field. It does not finish the work. The real diligence happens in the questions above, and in checking that the firms you shortlist hold up when you vet them properly rather than taking the pitch at face value.

A multi-family office can be the most sensible structure a family adopts. It can also be a comfortable arrangement that slowly stops serving you while the invoices keep arriving. The difference is set in the choosing. Probe the incentives, meet the operators, talk to families like yours. Then decide.