The call
One Monday morning the phone rang. A lawyer (a long-time contact) was calling on behalf of a family whose single family office CEO had walked out the previous night, burnt out and unreachable. The family was in the middle of a complex negotiation. They had lawyers and bankers. What they did not have was a pair of hands in the driver's seat.
This is the moment Westwick was built for.
The mandate
Four days after the call, one of our Partners was running the office on an interim basis. The brief was meant to last three months. It lasted eight, and the extra time was the point.
A clean interim CEO mandate, in a family office, is rarely just about keeping the chair warm. It is about three things, in sequence: holding the live business, fixing what broke, and leaving the office in a better state than we found it.
What we did
Held the live negotiation.
The transaction the family was in the middle of could not wait. We picked it up where the previous CEO had left it, reshaped it where it needed reshaping, and closed it.
Diagnosed why the CEO had burnt out.
Family offices very rarely lose a CEO without a reason hidden in the structure. With the family's mandate, we did from the inside what the family had not had the bandwidth to do: we looked under the hood. The office was carrying dysfunctions the family had not seen. Operational rigour had slipped. One person on the team had become toxic and was quietly corroding everyone around them. The channel between the family and the office had narrowed to a single voice: the very voice that had just walked out.
Reset the basics. With the family's support, we re-established processes, replaced the person who had to be replaced, and rebuilt how the family and the office would communicate from that point forward.
Handed over to a permanent CEO. Once the office was restablised, we called in the family's trusted headhunter and briefed them properly. Hiring a new CEO into a broken office is the quickest way to lose two CEOs in a year. Hiring one into a working office is a fundamentally different exercise.
When we left
Eight months in, with the negotiation closed, the team rebuilt, and the new CEO in the seat, we stepped out. The family was back to running its own next chapter, with an office that worked.
When this kind of mandate makes sense
When a CEO leaves overnight, and especially when they leave burnt out, the departure itself is rarely the real problem. It is the symptom. Underneath, there is almost always something deeper: a misalignment between the CEO and the family, performance that had been quietly slipping, a team dynamic that had become unworkable, an unspoken disagreement about strategy, or a governance setup that asked the CEO to carry weight nobody had agreed to share. A family office that loses its CEO without warning is, in our experience, an office that has been signalling discomfort for months, sometimes years.
The interim mandate is the moment to listen to those signals, name them, and address them. Replacing the CEO without doing that work simply restarts the same clock with a new face.
This is the work we do at three moments in the life of a family office:
- Setting one up.
- Carrying one through a generational transition.
- Stepping in when something breaks: fast, cleanly, and without leaving footprints.
Lawyers and headhunters are usually the first people a family calls when an office breaks overnight. Both can do their part, but neither can take the seat. The combination that matters is a third party who can run the office on day one, diagnose what went wrong, and brief the headhunter properly when the time comes to hire a successor.
We take the seat. We do the work. We hand the office back, running.
Frequently asked questions
What happens when a family office CEO leaves suddenly?
An unplanned departure of a family office CEO creates an immediate governance vacuum. Decisions stop, staff become uncertain, and external parties (bankers, lawyers, counterparties) lose their point of contact. The family needs someone to step into the role quickly, hold the organisation together, and either lead a transition or serve as a bridge to a permanent appointment. Westwick has done this.
What is an interim family office CEO?
An interim family office CEO is a senior professional who steps into the chief executive role of a family office on a temporary mandate, typically following an unplanned departure, a period of instability, or while a permanent hire is being identified. The interim's job is to stabilise the organisation, maintain continuity with the family, and if required, help define what the permanent role should look like.