If you hold $5M–$100M and make your own decisions about your money, you already have people around you. An accountant, a lawyer, a tax adviser, probably someone running a portfolio. At some point, a conversation starts about hiring one more, a dedicated person to coordinate the rest of them.
Most founders at this level already use more than one firm. Nobody decided that, it just happened. Capgemini's World Wealth Report 2026 found 39% of wealthy clients worked with a single firm in 2019, and by 2025 that was down to 19%. So four out of five now spread the work around, and only 17% call the experience "seamless and personalised". I see this a lot in the wealth industry. Four good providers, and nobody joining them up.
Solo doesn't mean alone, and it doesn't mean doing everything yourself. It means one person is accountable for the decisions. So what you are deciding is who coordinates all of them, sets the priorities and tells them what matters, and the open question is whether that person should still be you.
This Week in 30 Seconds
- When to hire. As a rule of thumb, a dedicated person starts to make sense somewhere around $50m–$100m. Below that the coordinating job is the founder's, and hiring too early is how it goes wrong.
- What it costs. Morgan Stanley and Botoff put a family office chief operating officer at about $195k of base salary at the midpoint for offices under $500m. On $30m that's 0.65% of the portfolio a year, roughly what advisers told Cerulli they expect to charge on portfolios over $10m.
- What to do this week. Write the job description for the person you'd hire. One page: what they own, what they decide alone, what comes to you, and how you'd judge the first 12 months. If you can't fill it, you have your answer on timing.
- On the Radar. A tax trade that has grown from $2bn to $170bn, an AI rule worth applying to any tool you're shown, Greece on the pre-budget shortlist, and the biggest name in the family office deal data turning out not to be a family office.
When to hire a family office manager
The industry has a standard answer, and it's a good one. "We're like a general contractor," Tom McCullough said back in 2023, when he ran Northwood Family Office. "In the trades you'll have plumbers and electricians. In our business, those are lawyers and accountants." Someone has to see the whole job. But Northwood was a multi-family office, so the contractor came with the firm. Hiring one yourself is a different decision.
How I think about it:
It comes down to your stage and portfolio size. At $30m–$50m, having one dedicated specialist coordinating everything is too early, so the founder needs to do the coordinating and keep control of the decisions. $50m–$100m is where it probably makes sense to hire a dedicated person, and even then there is no reason to rush the decision. It's like with a business. You can hire a CEO to run it at a certain stage once you know what you are doing, have systems and frameworks that work, and are comfortable delegating. Do it too early, and the new hire will most likely fail.
Those are rough numbers, not a rule. Complexity moves them more than size does: more entities, more countries and more illiquid holdings bring it forward, a simple setup in one country pushes it back. Below $30m it's the same answer, only more obvious. At $5m or $15m, the coordinating job is yours, and the only question is how well you do it. Same as the June piece on building or outsourcing under $100m: hand over the work, keep the understanding.
What a family office manager costs at $30m, $50m and $100m
What does it cost? That depends on which job you're pricing. Cowen Partners puts a family office chief investment officer at roughly $350k of base salary at the midpoint for offices under $500m. But a CIO runs the money. The job here is coordination, which is cheaper. Morgan Stanley's work with Botoff puts the median base for a chief operating officer at about $195k for the same size band.
Against portfolio size, my own sums. On $30m, $195k is 0.65% a year. On $50m, 0.39%. On $100m, 0.2%.
Compare that with buying the whole thing. Cerulli asked advisers what they expect to charge by 2026, and for clients over $10m the average advisory fee came out around 0.66%. So at $30m you'd pay roughly what a firm charges to do all of it, for one person.
And that's base pay. Bonus, employer costs, the desk and the software all sit on top. Add those and the number goes up.
Many founders at $30m can afford this, and that shouldn't decide it.
Why family office hires fail
Money doesn't fix this one. Bill Ackman is the obvious example. He wrote a long post on X in April about his own family office, Table Management, set up to look after a mostly passive portfolio and the household admin. Over about 15 years, the headcount and the costs grew well past that. Spear's went through it: he saw the warning signs and stayed out of it. It ended with a restructuring, about 30% of the staff gone, and a public argument over severance.
He's rebuilding it as a small in-house team with outside specialists around it. Which is roughly where he could have started.
Key-person risk when you run your own family office
Keeping the job costs you something too. Dentons asked family offices what worried them most internally, and key-person turnover came out on top, ahead of cyber. That's 2024 data.
If you're the one coordinating everything, you're the key person. The obvious question: what happens if something happens to you? Be ill for 3 months, or take your eye off it for a year, and nothing moves. That's the problem to sort out before you hire, not after.
Write the job description before you hire
This is where you write the setup down. Every job in it, who does it, on what schedule, and what good looks like. Key-person risk drops, because someone else can pick up a written system. And when you do hire, you're handing over a real job rather than a vague one.
So the practical step this week: write the job description for the person you'd hire. You're not advertising anything, it's an exercise.
- What they own outright, by name: reporting, cash management, tax coordination, custody.
- What they can decide without asking you, and what has to come to you first.
- Who they coordinate, by name: the accountant, the lawyer, the tax adviser, the portfolio manager.
- How you'd know, 12 months in, whether it went well. Write down the measures, not the intention.
It takes an hour, maybe two, and it's useful either way. If you can fill it, you've got a standard to hold yourself to until you hire. If you get stuck halfway, that's the part of the setup to fix first.
Above $50m or so, the money stops being the objection. What decides it then is whether there's a job written down for someone to walk into, and that's much easier to write now than in the middle of hiring.
What would have to be true before I hired someone?
I ask myself the same question. Three things would have to be true before I hired anyone, and none of them is about affording it.
First, the jobs would have to be written down. Mine mostly aren't. I know what needs doing and when, but it lives in my head, and you can't hand that over. Hire someone into a job that isn't defined, and they'll define it themselves. Then it's their job, not yours.
Second, I'd have to know good work when I saw it. I can judge people well in businesses I know properly. Coordinating tax, structuring, custody and reporting isn't work I do every day, so I'd be guessing. That's mine to fix before anyone starts.
Third, the decisions would have to stay with me. I want the work done by people better at it than I am, and I have no problem paying properly for quality service. What I don't want is signing off on something I can't follow myself.
I boxed for 6 years. Almost all of that was training for 4 rounds in the ring. You can't train once the bell goes. Same here. Build the systems now, while there's no hire to brief and no decision pending.
So until those three are clear, I'd rather keep the job and spend the time making it into one someone else could take.
On the Radar
Tax trade being sold to anyone who just sold.
Assets in tax-aware long-short strategies have gone from $2bn in 2022 to over $170bn, on Tax Alpha Insider's numbers via CNBC. They track an index while borrowed long and short positions harvest losses against capital gains, and they're pitched hardest at founders sitting on a year of realised gains. The pitch rarely covers the exit. Unwinding realises the gain in one go, and all-in costs run 1% to 3% of the whole portfolio once you count financing. Worth asking any manager who brings it what the unwind looks like. Read more →
Line between AI that runs your office and AI that runs your money.
Christopher Nelson at Managing Tech Millions argues that first-generation wealth holders spend their runway building an AI to pick investments instead of running the office. His rule: AI is your operations manager, not your decision maker. It handles reconciliation, reporting, and a first pass at documents. The direction stays with the owner. Useful test for any tool you're shown. If it's sold on what it decides rather than what it does, you're buying judgment you can't check. He puts a conventional single family office at $2m to $3m a year across 4 to 7 staff, without a source, and he sells the alternative. Read more →
Greece joins the pre-budget shortlist.
Chris Rokos, listed by the Sunday Times as Britain's third-highest taxpayer at £330m last year, is reportedly moving his residence to Greece, with Millennium Management also said to be opening in Athens, on Spear's reporting. Greece has run a €100k flat annual charge on foreign income for up to 15 years since 2020, against €500k invested in Greek real estate, businesses or securities, completed within 3 years. Miles Dean of Andersen expects people to leave before the 28 October budget, because tax rules are rarely retrospective. The timing is the part worth noting. Read more →
Biggest family office in the deal data is not a family office.
Across the 4 months to August, FINTRX tracked 457 family office deals, reported by Mr Family Office. One name, a16z Perennial, appears in 81 of them, more than the next eleven offices combined. It isn't a family office. Its own SEC filing describes a registered investment adviser serving outside clients, and FINTRX's own directory lists it as an RIA with $2.8bn under management. Strip it out, and the rest looks ordinary. Worth remembering next time someone tells you what family offices are doing. Read more →
New on the Site
Last week was about the number. This week it's about who helps you get there. Hard to brief anyone on your capital until you've written down what it's for and how much of it is yours.
Read it: How Much Is Enough for a Founder?
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