Family Office Club Deals: A Practical Guide to Co-Investing Well

Club deals are how many families actually put capital to work in private assets. The mechanism runs on trust. The discipline that makes it work is the same discipline a family owes any direct investment.

When a family invests directly in a private asset, the deal can be arranged among a few families who already know one another. The mechanism has a name that outsiders rarely hear: the club deal. We have written a short definition of the family office club deal before. This guide is for the family that wants to do one well.

In brief. A family office club deal is a co-investment in a single private asset by a small group of single family offices, with one family leading. It runs on trust and direct relationships, with no fund and no fee layer between the family and the asset. It works when every co-investor does its own due diligence and the terms are written down before money moves.

What a family office club deal is

A club deal is a co-investment in a single asset, made by a small group of single family offices. One family leads. It sources the opportunity, runs the first round of due diligence, and sets the structure. A few trusted families are invited to come in alongside, usually for their capital and sometimes for specific sector knowledge.

The assets are usually large: full acquisitions of private companies, take-privates, a meaningful stake in infrastructure or real estate. These are positions a single family might not want to, or simply cannot, hold alone, whether for concentration reasons or for the expertise a co-investor brings to the table.

Club deals move quietly, between families who already know one another. That is the norm, and it is a useful filter. A family approached by one it has never met should be wary; an unsolicited club deal from a stranger is usually one to decline. If a family does look closer, the first due diligence is on the family proposing the deal. The asset comes second. How they have behaved on past deals, and whether anyone trusted can vouch for them, tells you more than any spreadsheet. Some funds took the bad habit of wearing the family office label to borrow credibility, they are not what they claim, and they have no place in a club deal.

Why families are drawn to them

The pull comes from what a club deal gives a family that a fund cannot. The family keeps its governance rights and full sight of the asset. Capital goes straight into the deal rather than into a blind pool waiting to be called. And the co-investors are people whose judgement the family has already tested.

There is also the matter of fees. Fatigue with private equity costs is growing: in a 2025 BlackRock survey of single family offices, 72% named high fees as the leading challenge of the asset class, up from 40% two years earlier. What we see, more and more, is families forming co-investment groups among themselves, quietly, outside the traditional fund managers.

A club deal is conviction investing. It is a decision to own a specific thing for a specific reason, which is closer to how families built their wealth in the first place. We have made the wider case for conviction over diversification elsewhere. A club deal is that principle in practice.

How a club deal comes together

The lead family identifies the opportunity and carries the primary work. It then invites a short list of families it knows to participate. The group invests through a holding vehicle set up for the deal, and each family takes its agreed share.

The holding vehicle deserves more thought than it usually gets. Its jurisdiction, its reporting, and the rights it grants each family are the spine of the arrangement. A vehicle chosen for tax efficiency alone, with governance bolted on afterwards, tends to create the problems it was meant to avoid. The vehicle should reflect how the group intends to make decisions and how a family will one day leave, not just where the asset happens to sit.

The lead family earns its position by doing the heavy lifting first. The co-investors rely on that work, partly delegating to a judgement they have already validated. That does not remove their own obligation to run proper due diligence. A club deal is a real investment, and no investment decision should rest on trust alone. Each co-investor has to understand the asset and reach its own view before committing. This is in everyone's interest. A co-investor who has read the file is a better partner through a difficult year than one who simply wrote a cheque, which is why the strongest leads invite scrutiny rather than discourage it.

Where club deals go wrong

Sometimes the problem is the asset. More often it is the investors.

The most common failure is a weak lead. When no one truly owns the deal, due diligence gets assumed rather than done, and the gaps surface after completion rather than before. The second is mismatched horizons. A family that needs liquidity in three years and a family that intends to hold for fifteen want different things from the same asset, and the strain shows the moment one of them wants out.

Club deals run on trust, and the temptation is to let the paperwork stay light because everyone is a friend. Friends fall out over money when the terms were never written down. Illiquidity compounds all of this: there is no daily market for a private holding, so a co-investor who wants to leave can force an outcome that suits no one. The relationship cost of a club deal gone wrong is higher than the financial cost, because the same families will meet again on the next opportunity.

The due diligence a family still owes itself

Trust speeds a club deal up. It does not replace the work.

A family coming in alongside a respected lead still needs to understand the asset well enough to explain it to its own next generation. If no one in the family can describe in plain terms what the business does, how it makes money, and what would have to go wrong to lose the capital, the family is not ready to commit, however strong the lead. We hold to a simple rule here: never invest in what you do not understand.

In practice, that means confirming the lead's assumptions rather than accepting them, and reading the material risks for yourself. It also means being honest about concentration. A club deal is a large position by design. It belongs in the part of the portfolio a family can afford to hold through a bad decade.

Getting the terms right

The economics need to be explicit. Who pays for due diligence if the deal does not close. Whether the lead takes any carry or fee for the work, and if so, on what basis. How costs are shared across the group. None of this is awkward to raise before money moves. All of it becomes a dispute if it is raised after.

Control rights matter as much as economics. The group should agree, in writing, how decisions are made, what requires unanimity, and what the lead can decide alone. Reserved decisions, the few choices that need the whole group, should be named at the start.

Exit is the term families neglect most and regret most: set out how a family can sell its stake, who has the right to buy it first, and how the price is struck. An organised path to liquidity, agreed before anyone needs it, is what keeps a club deal from turning a good investment into a bad relationship.

What holds, and what breaks

The same factors decide both outcomes. A club deal holds when the lead does real work and is seen to do it, and when the terms are written down while everyone is still friendly: trust gets the group into the room, and the paperwork keeps it there when the asset or a family's circumstances change.

A club deal breaks on the absence of those things, and the cost of a break runs wider than the position. A forced exit at the wrong moment can crystallise a loss for every family, not only the one that wanted out, and it spends a relationship that took years to build. The financial damage is usually recoverable, the relationship often is not.

That is why families who are offered these deals treat each one with the care they would give an investment made entirely on their own.

Where Westwick comes in

Westwick structures club deals for the families involved. We put the same questions to every family at the table: what each one is committing, on what horizon, and what would make it want out. We confirm that everyone has read the file and that the group genuinely shares one time horizon before anyone signs. All of it goes into a single letter of engagement, common to every party, so the terms are identical for everyone and written down from the start.

We act as the neutral party in the room. At the outset, we make sure each family knows exactly what it is committing to. Later, if a disagreement arises, we are the ones who mediate it. The aim is simple: families aligned from the start, and someone impartial to turn to if a disagreement arises later.