The One-Page Framework

Part of Running a Family Office Under $100M

This is the playbook condensed to one reference page. The full chapters carry the detail and the caveats; this is the version you bookmark and come back to — before an annual review, when something feels off, or when someone asks what you're trying to do with your money and you want a clean answer.

I work in wealth management, and this page is close to the mental checklist I run when I see any family's setup for the first time. None of it is advice. It's the questions and patterns that decide whether a setup actually works.

The core idea

A family office is just a wealth operating system: a coordinated way of running your financial life. You created wealth through concentration. You keep it through diversification, and the move from builder to owner is where most of the damage happens. Whether you ever call anything a "family office" matters far less than whether someone is thinking about how all the pieces connect. At lower wealth levels, that someone is probably you. Either way, the function has to exist.

Five functions

Every wealth operating system performs the same five jobs, whatever its size.

Investment — allocation, manager selection, monitoring, and one person who checks it all works together rather than in pieces.

Tax — structure, timing, compliance, coordination. This is where serious money is quietly made or lost: an 8% return taxed at 20% leaves you more than a 10% return taxed at 45%. Structure decides what you keep.

Estate — documents, trusts, succession, prepared heirs. Most founders defer this indefinitely, and deferral can cost more than any market loss.

Risk — insurance, asset protection, cybersecurity, contingencies. Preventing a £5M loss does the same work as generating a £5M gain, and it's usually easier.

Admin — reporting, entity maintenance, documents, coordination. Unglamorous, and the reason everything else functions. If you can't see your complete picture, you can't manage it.

The five interact. A change in one moves the others, which is why advice that treats them separately keeps failing.

Three models

Most founders at £5–50M belong in the first two columns. My view: moving up a model for status rather than complexity is one of the more expensive mistakes available at this level. Match the model to your actual complexity, not your ego or your peers. The full comparison is in Three Operating Models.

Principles that matter

• Structure should match complexity. Building for £50M when you have £12M is as expensive as running £25M on £5M infrastructure.
• Pace beats speed. Cash earning 4% while you figure things out costs almost nothing next to a rushed £2M mistake. The first 90 days after exit are for stabilising, not deploying.
• Fees compound. An extra 1.5% a year on £10M, left running for twenty years at around 7% growth, costs you roughly £10M of ending wealth. Most founders have never calculated their all-in number.
• After-tax beats gross. A 2% improvement through structure is easier to get, and more certain, than a 2% improvement through better picking.
• Liquidity is oxygen. Each illiquid commitment looks manageable until they add up. The practitioners who survive cycles tend to keep 30–40% genuinely liquid, counting unfunded commitments in the total.
• Protection is invisible until it isn't. The cyber basics take two hours, the insurance review takes one a year, and the estate documents take a few weeks. Not doing them can cost everything.
• Someone must see the whole picture. If your advisers don't talk to each other and nobody coordinates, you have silos, not a system.

Ten diagnostic questions

If you can't answer these, you've found the work.

1. What is your total net worth across all accounts and entities — can you state it within 5%?
2. What is your all-in cost, every fee and every layer, as a percentage of assets?
3. What share of your wealth is illiquid or committed, including unfunded commitments?
4. When did your tax adviser, estate lawyer, and investment adviser last speak to each other?
5. If you were incapacitated tomorrow, could your spouse find and access everything within a week?
6. Do you have hardware security keys on your primary email and financial accounts?
7. Is your liability cover sized to your current net worth, or the one from five years ago?
8. When were your estate documents last updated, and do they reflect your life today?
9. Do you have an Investment Policy Statement — and did you follow it through the last downturn?
10. Can you draw your entity structure on one page and explain why each piece exists?

Eight warning signs

You don't have the full picture: assets you'd have to look up, entities you're not sure still serve a purpose. Advisers who never push back — if nobody has ever told you no, either you're always right or they're not doing their job. Months of silence, then contact at billing time. Vague answers when you ask what you're paying. Everything requiring your initiative, so nothing moves when you're busy. Complexity that only ever grows: new entities and accounts, nothing consolidated or closed. Insurance and estate documents from a different life — old coverage, old addresses, ex-spouses still named. And cash parked "while you figure things out" for over a year, which is usually paralysis disguised as prudence.

The annual review

Half a day, once a year, six areas. Structure: does each entity still earn its place, and has anything changed (residency, family, wealth level) that affects it? Team: is each relationship working, anyone outgrown, any gaps? Costs: the all-in percentage, and whether each fee is matched by value. Portfolio: drift against targets, new concentrations, total illiquid exposure including unfunded commitments, performance against a sensible benchmark. Protection: cover, cyber basics, documents, asset inventory. Governance: does the IPS still describe your life, did you follow your own process, and which decision this year do you regret — and what would have prevented it?

If you remember nothing else

A good tax adviser before structural decisions. Simplicity until complexity genuinely earns its place. Pace over speed. Downside first: security, insurance, documents. Know your numbers — the whole picture, the all-in cost, the liquidity share. Make someone responsible for the system, even if that someone is you. And review once a year, because drift is quiet.

Where to go deeper

Just had an exit — The First 90 Days After Exit. Exit on the horizon — Pre-Exit Wealth Planning. Existing setup that's drifted — Auditing Your Existing Setup. Feeling overwhelmed — The Minimum Viable Setup is permission to keep it simple.

FAQ

Q: Do I need a family office at $10M?
A: Almost certainly not as an entity. At that level the function matters, not the structure: a coordinated network of specialists with you as the quarterback covers all five functions for roughly 0.5–0.8% all-in.

Q: What does running wealth like a family office cost?
A: Across the three common models, all-in ranges run about 0.5–1.5% of assets, depending on how much coordination you buy rather than do yourself. The number to watch is the uncounted one — overlapping advisers and product fees that can quietly push true costs past 2%.

Q: How often should a wealth setup be reviewed?
A: The pattern among well-run setups is one structured half-day a year, plus a triggered review after any major change: a sale, a move, a marriage, a divorce, a death. Annual is enough to catch drift; much more is usually noise.