Definition: the Family Office “Club deal”

Sixty percent of direct single family office investments are made through a mechanism most outsiders have never heard of. It is not a fund structure, not a platform, and not a syndicate. It is a club deal — and it runs entirely on trust.

According to PwC's Global Family Office Deals Study 2024, approximately 60% of direct SFO investments take the form of a club deal. That is a remarkable number for something that operates in near-total silence.

What a club deal is — and what it is not

A club deal is a co-investment arrangement between a small number of single family offices. One family leads: it identifies the opportunity, conducts primary due diligence, and structures the transaction. A handful of trusted co-investors participate alongside — often on the basis of a single conversation, because the relationship has been built over years.

The types of deal that take this form are almost always large: full acquisitions of private businesses, public-to-private transactions, and significant infrastructure or real estate positions. These are deals where a single family office might not want to take the full position alone — whether for concentration reasons, for the additional expertise a co-investor brings, or simply because sharing the position reduces the cost of due diligence.

A club deal it is not a fund raise. There is no prospectus, no investor presentation, no placement agent, no marketing of any kind. The investor pool is never announced. Everything happens quietly, within a circle built over years of shared transactions and shared trust.

Why families use them

The structural advantages of a club deal over a fund are significant. Families retain full governance rights. There is no fee layer between the investor and the asset. The J-curve is eliminated: capital goes directly into the deal, not into a fund waiting to be called. And the co-investors are people the lead family has already tested — people who understand the long-term logic of the transaction, will not force a premature exit, and bring complementary expertise to bear.

The "if it is good enough for you, it is good enough for me" dynamic that governs co-investment decisions is not naïve — it is rational. When you have watched a co-investor operate over ten years, you do not need a full second due diligence. You are effectively delegating to someone whose judgment you have already validated.

The access problem — and why it matters

None of this is available to a family that has not done the work of building the right relationships. Club deals do not circulate. They are not listed on any platform. A family that has been in the room for twenty years — present at the dinners, known for following through, trusted to hold a position and not create complications — will see a consistent pipeline. A family that has not will not.

This is one of the less discussed structural advantages of the single family office: the capacity, over time, to build the kind of network that generates proprietary deal flow. It is also one of the arguments against outsourcing too much, too early. Trust, in this context, is genuinely the real currency. It is not a metaphor.