Family office services, function by function.

1. The six core functions
2. The extended services, and the scope-creep trap
3. What to keep in-house and what to buy
4. When a provider says "family office services"
5. Sizing the services to the family
6. Where to start

Ask ten providers what family office services are and you will get ten brochures. Ask someone who has run a family office and you will get a shorter answer: the services are whatever this family needs done, organised so the family stays in control of it. A family office has no fixed form, and its service list has none either.

That said, the needs of wealthy families are not infinitely varied. Across the offices our partners have run and rebuilt, the same core functions come up every time, whatever the size of the office. This guide maps them: the six functions at the core, then the extended services around them. The last section covers the decision that matters more than any list — what the office does itself, and what it buys in.

The six core functions

1. Consolidated oversight. One place where the family can see everything it owns: operating businesses, portfolios, property, art, structures, and what each costs and returns. This is the least visible service and the most valuable. Most families have never seen their whole position on one page, and many expensive mistakes we are called in to fix began in that blind spot.

2. Investment coordination. Setting the allocation the family actually wants, selecting and monitoring external managers (making sure neither costs nor performance drift), and executing what the family holds directly. Note the word: coordination, not necessarily management. An office does not need to run money in-house to do this well. It needs to hold the judgement in-house: what the family owns, why, and who is accountable for each piece.

3. Coordination of advisers. The lawyers, bankers, accountants and specialists around a family each see their own slice. The office holds the whole picture, briefs them, challenges their fees and their advice, and makes sure the sum of it serves the family rather than the advisers. Done properly, this function alone usually pays for the office.

4. Administration and reporting. The unglamorous foundation: accounts, payments, records, valuations, filings, the paperwork of structures. It never appears in a brochure and it decides whether everything else works. It is also a function we advise families to keep in-house, whatever else they delegate: a loyal accountant is often the office's gatekeeper, not a back-office commodity. When an office drifts, the drift shows here first: in the cost base, in fees that have never been challenged, in structures nobody can explain.

5. Governance support. Preparing the decisions that belong to the family, recording them, and making sure they are applied. The office serves the family's governance; it must never become it. The tools this requires — reserved decisions, a family council of some form, an exit process — are the subject of our white paper, Governing Families, Not Corporations.

6. Transmission. Preparing the next generation and preparing the office itself to serve a generation it was not built around. This is the function most often missing from service lists, and the one with the highest cost when it is missing: 86% of single family offices have no succession plan, yet most expect to hand over within a decade.

The extended services, and the scope-creep trap

Around the core, families add what fits their life: philanthropy, education of heirs, property management, art administration, travel and household staff, personal security, the family archive. All of these are legitimate. None of them is free.

The trap is not any single service; it is accumulation. Every service added is headcount, systems and management attention. Lifestyle services in particular consume attention out of all proportion to their financial weight. A household payroll problem will happily eat the week in which an investment decision needed preparing. Several of the strongest offices we know keep lifestyle deliberately outside the office, handled by a separate, smaller structure, precisely to protect the core functions.

A useful test for any proposed addition: does this belong to the office's purpose (keeping the family in control of what it owns), or is it simply convenient to park here? Convenience compounds. Offices that say yes to everything end up with a cost base that no longer matches what the family actually uses, and a team too busy administering to advise.

What to keep in-house and what to buy

No family office should deliver all of its services itself. The design question is where to draw the line, and the answer is more stable than the industry pretends.

What can be bought: execution. Investment execution, custody, tax compliance and high-stakes legal work, IT and cybersecurity. These are technical functions with competitive markets; buying them is usually cheaper and better than staffing them, especially below the scale at which a full team pays for itself (somewhere between $250 and $500 million in assets, depending on their complexity).

What should never be externalised: judgement. Strategic asset allocation and the investment committee, governance, the oversight of the advisers themselves, and the relationship with the family. To that list we add one function outsiders rarely expect: accounting and finance. It looks like back office; it is in fact the family's gatekeeper, the function that catches fee leakage and provider scope creep. A solid, quiet accountant is often the most loyal servant a family has. Outsource those and you have not outsourced a function; you have outsourced the stewardship of the family's affairs, and the office no longer serves the family in any meaningful sense. We have set out the full reasoning, function by function, in our guide to what to keep and what to delegate.

The line moves with scale, but it never disappears. A lean office of two people buys almost everything and keeps only oversight and judgement. A forty-person office builds more in-house. Both can be excellent; what they have in common is that the family's judgement never left the building.

When a provider says "family office services"

The phrase does double duty in the market, and families should read it carefully. When a family builds an office, services are functions organised around that family. When a provider advertises "family office services", it is a product line, and increasingly a wealth manager's product line under a warmer name. Some providers are excellent. But the brochure test is simple: how is the provider paid, and whose interest is the service built around? A provider paid on assets will, over time, organise the services around the assets. A real family office is organised around the family.

Sizing the services to the family

There is no minimum service list, because there is no minimum family office. A principal with one trusted employee covers the six core functions at small scale: oversight on a spreadsheet, advisers coordinated by phone, governance around a kitchen table. A large office covers them with departments. The functions are the same; only the machinery changes.

What should decide the scope is the family's actual situation, not the industry's standard offer. A family whose wealth sits in one operating business needs deep adviser coordination and transmission work, and very little investment machinery. A family after a liquidity event needs the opposite. This is why we are sceptical of ideal family office templates: the right service list falls out of the family's needs, and it changes as the family changes. Scope, far more than portfolio size, is what drives the cost.

Each function added moves the cost base; our family office cost calculator shows by how much.

Where to start

If you are designing or reviewing an office, list what it currently does — all of it — and put each item in one of three columns: core function, extension the family truly uses, or accumulation. Then ask who holds the judgement for each core function. If the answer for any of them is an external provider, that is the first thing to fix.

Families call us at two moments in this story. The first is when the office's services have drifted from what the family needs: too much machinery, too little judgement, a cost base built for the family of ten years ago. Resetting the service map is usually where that work begins.

The second is when a family decides to create an office and wants a neutral opinion before the market offers it a hundred interested ones: which services this family actually needs, in what spirit to hire the internal team, and which external provider is genuinely the best at each function the family chooses to delegate. We sell no products and take no commissions from providers, so that answer has only one client: the family.

This article is part of our series on setting up a family office. The reference piece for the series: How to Set Up a Family Office.