How to set up a single family office

Setting up a single family office is not a technical exercise. It is a series of decisions about what the family wants to build — and in what order. The sequence matters more than most advisors will tell you.

Before reading this guide, it is worth being clear on what a single family office is and whether it is the right model for your family. If you are still at that stage, the prior guide — What is a family office, and which model fits yours? — covers the four main structural models and how to think about choosing between them.

This guide assumes you have reached a decision: a single family office is the right tool. The question now is how to build one that actually works — for the family as it is today, and for the family it intends to become.

Step one: define the mandate before anything else

The most common mistake we see is starting with the structure. Lawyers are engaged, jurisdictions are evaluated, legal entities are incorporated — and the question of what the office is actually for remains unanswered, or answered only vaguely. The structure then reflects what the advisors know how to build, not what the family actually needs.

The mandate comes first. It is the document — formal or not — that answers the following questions with precision: what does this family office exist to do? What decisions will it make, and which will remain with the family directly? What is the relationship between the office and the family's operating businesses, if any? How should the office handle the family's philanthropic activities? What does success look like in five years, and in twenty?

These questions do not have standard answers. A family that has just sold its business and is managing pure financial assets has a different mandate from a family that still owns an operating group and uses the office to govern the relationship between the family and its businesses. A first-generation founder has different priorities from a third-generation family navigating the expectations of a dozen shareholders who have never worked inside the business. The mandate must be specific to the family, not borrowed from a template.

One additional question that belongs at this stage is temporal: how do you expect this office to evolve? Structures that are designed only for current needs tend to be rebuilt every decade. A mandate that accounts for anticipated generational transitions, the potential entry of new family members, and the likely evolution of the asset base is more durable — and avoids the disruption of a major restructuring at precisely the moment a family is least well placed to manage one.

Step two: agree on governance — within the family first

Governance is the word that generates the most confusion in family office design. Advisors and consultants frequently propose corporate governance frameworks — boards, committees, reporting lines, voting mechanisms — imported from institutional or listed-company contexts. Most of this is wrong for a family. Not because governance is unimportant, but because the wrong kind of governance creates friction without producing the clarity it was supposed to deliver.

Family office governance has two distinct layers, and both must be designed deliberately.

The first layer is the family's own governance: how the family makes decisions collectively, how it communicates about the office and its affairs, how it handles disagreements between branches or generations, and how it transmits ownership expectations to those who will one day take over. This layer is not legal or operational — it is relational. It determines whether the family is capable of governing its office coherently, or whether the office will be pulled in conflicting directions by competing family interests. No amount of corporate governance machinery can substitute for clarity at this level.

The second layer is the office's operational governance: who has authority over which decisions, how investment decisions are made and reviewed, how the team is held accountable, and what oversight mechanisms ensure the family remains in control of an entity that is increasingly managed by professionals who are not family members. This layer benefits from formal frameworks — an investment policy statement, an investment committee with defined composition and authority, regular reporting against agreed metrics. But it should be designed once the first layer is stable, not before.

The sequence matters. Families that try to resolve relational tensions through formal governance structures are attempting to solve a human problem with a legal tool. It does not work.

Step three: choose the jurisdiction thoughtfully

The location of a single family office is a strategic decision, not an administrative one. It shapes the regulatory environment the office operates in, the talent it can access, the cost of running the structure, and the tax efficiency of both the office itself and the assets it holds.

There is no universally optimal jurisdiction. The choice depends on a combination of factors that are specific to each family: where key family members live and intend to live, where the family's assets are concentrated or likely to be concentrated, the professional services infrastructure available locally, the regulatory framework governing family office activities, and the long-term ambitions of the principal family members.

The jurisdictions most actively used by single family offices today reflect different profiles. Switzerland — particularly Geneva and Zurich — offers political stability, a mature professional services industry, a deep talent pool with genuine family office expertise, and a regulatory environment that gives family offices significant operational flexibility. It is the natural location for families with European and international asset bases looking for a neutral, well-connected hub. The United Kingdom, primarily London, combines financial depth, legal infrastructure, and access to specialist advisors with a regulatory regime that has been progressively clarified for family office structures. Luxembourg is favoured for families with complex fund structures and multi-jurisdictional asset bases, where the legal and tax architecture of the Grand Duchy provides significant flexibility. The UAE — Dubai and Abu Dhabi — has become a serious location for family offices whose principals are based in the Gulf or who want a hub connecting European, Asian, and Middle Eastern interests; DIFC and ADGM both offer purpose-built family office regimes. Singapore performs a similar role for Asia-Pacific families and increasingly for European and American families managing assets in the region.

Portugal — particularly Lisbon — has attracted family offices from principal families whose members want European residency in a jurisdiction with a favourable tax environment and improving professional infrastructure. France, Germany, and the Netherlands each have established family office markets with strong local professional services ecosystems.

The jurisdiction question should be approached in two stages. The first is identifying which locations are operationally viable given the family's specific circumstances. The second — often collapsed into the first, with damaging results — is optimising within that viable set for tax and regulatory efficiency. Tax optimisation is a legitimate objective; it should not be the primary driver of a decision that will shape the family's institutional life for decades.

Step four: design the legal structure

Once the mandate is clear, the governance framework is agreed, and the jurisdiction is chosen, the legal structure can be designed with precision. At this point the lawyers and tax advisors earn their fees — because the questions they are being asked to answer are specific, and the structure they are designing serves a purpose that has already been defined.

The holding structure of a single family office typically combines several elements: a primary holding entity (the family office itself, usually a company or foundation depending on jurisdiction), one or more investment vehicles for different asset classes or geographies, and in many cases a trust structure for succession planning and asset protection. The exact combination depends on the family's asset base, the jurisdictions involved, and the family's intentions around transmission.

A few principles apply regardless of the specific structure chosen. Simplicity is a virtue: complex structures are expensive to maintain, difficult to explain to the next generation, and prone to becoming incoherent over time as circumstances change and the original architects of the structure are no longer available to explain it. Flexibility matters: the structure should be designed to accommodate evolution — new family members, changes in asset composition, generational transitions — without requiring fundamental reconstruction. And separation between the family office and operating businesses, where both exist, is almost always worth maintaining: the governance of a family office and the governance of a business are genuinely different disciplines, and conflating them creates problems in both directions.

Step five: build the team around the mandate

The team of a single family office is its most important asset and its most significant ongoing cost. Getting it right requires clarity about what the office actually needs — not what a complete family office theoretically contains.

Most single family offices do not need, and cannot effectively use, a full complement of in-house specialists across investment, legal, tax, compliance, accounting, IT, and administration simultaneously from day one. What they need is a small core team capable of managing the family's affairs directly and coordinating a network of external specialists for the functions that do not justify permanent in-house employment. The core team typically includes a CEO or chief of staff with genuine family office experience, an investment function appropriate to the complexity of the portfolio, and administrative support capable of managing the operational demands of the office.

The selection criteria for this core team are well-established and frequently ignored. Skills matter — but they are entry-level requirements, not differentiators. What distinguishes the people who work well inside family offices over the long term is a combination of loyalty, genuine ownership of their responsibilities, and the capacity to absorb the particular pressures of working in an environment where the principals are not anonymous shareholders but people you know and whose confidence you hold. Family offices hire for the long term. The cost of a wrong hire — in disruption, in loss of institutional knowledge, in the damage that departure does to the family's trust in the structure — is high. The investment in getting the hire right is justified many times over.

External specialists — legal, tax, compliance, investment advisors, technology providers — should be selected with the same rigour applied to in-house hires. In large transactions or complex legal situations, the reputational weight of the advisors the family office brings to the table matters: top-tier firms signal seriousness and provide a credibility that protects the family's interests in negotiations where counterparties will make assumptions about the sophistication of the entity they are dealing with.

Step six: decide what to keep in-house and what to delegate

The question of which services to manage in-house and which to outsource is one the family office will revisit continuously. The principle that should govern the answer at each stage is straightforward: keep in-house the functions that are most sensitive to family values, most dependent on institutional knowledge of the family's affairs, and most critical to the family's sense of control over its own situation. Outsource the functions that require specialist expertise the office cannot cost-effectively maintain in-house, that are regulated in ways that require specific licences, or that are genuinely commoditised.

In practice, family offices almost universally manage in-house: communication and engagement with the family, philanthropy and family foundation activity, governance documentation, and the direct oversight of the family's primary relationships with major advisors and service providers. They are more likely to outsource: tax compliance and planning, legal work, IT infrastructure, investment execution (as distinct from investment decision-making), and where scale does not justify in-house expertise, certain aspects of compliance and regulatory reporting.

The IMD Global Family Office Report finds that as family offices grow in asset size, they progressively bring more functions in-house — not because outsourcing stops working, but because the cost of in-house expertise becomes justified and the family's desire for control over functions closely tied to its identity increases. Smaller offices should not feel obliged to replicate this immediately. The OSFO model — a dedicated external provider managing day-to-day operations — is a legitimate approach for families whose scale does not yet justify the overhead of a full in-house team, provided the family maintains genuine strategic oversight and does not treat delegation as disengagement.

Step seven: invest in reporting and technology as infrastructure

The technology and reporting infrastructure of a single family office is frequently treated as an afterthought. It should not be. A family office that cannot produce consolidated reporting across its asset base — across asset classes, jurisdictions, currencies, and structures — cannot be governed effectively. Decisions made without complete information are decisions made badly.

The family's principal family members should be able to understand the state of their affairs — the composition of the portfolio, performance against objectives, liquidity, exposure, significant transactions — at any moment, without having to reassemble information from multiple sources. The investment in technology that makes this possible is justified not only by the quality of investment decision-making it enables, but by the governance it supports: a family that can see its affairs clearly is a family that can hold its office accountable.

The technology market for family offices has matured significantly over the past decade. Consolidated reporting platforms, portfolio management systems, and document management solutions designed specifically for the family office context now exist at price points accessible to offices well below the scale at which they were previously viable. The right technology is not the most complex or the most expensive. It is the one that delivers the information the family actually needs, in a form the family can actually use, with sufficient integration to eliminate the manual reconciliation work that consumes disproportionate amounts of family office staff time.

Optimisation comes last — not first

The sequencing described in this guide places tax and structural optimisation after mandate, governance, jurisdiction selection, legal structure, team, and technology. That is deliberate, and it runs counter to the order in which many advisors approach the process.

Tax planning is important. In a well-designed single family office, the tax implications of the structure, the asset allocation strategy, and the transmission mechanisms are carefully considered and actively managed. We are not suggesting that tax should be ignored — that would be a failure of stewardship.

What we are saying is that a family office built primarily around tax optimisation — one where the structure was chosen for tax reasons, the jurisdiction selected for tax reasons, and the investment strategy constrained by tax reasons — is a family office built for the wrong client. Tax law changes. Regulatory environments evolve. A structure that is optimised for today's tax regime and nothing else will need to be rebuilt when the regime changes, and the disruption of that rebuild will be felt by a family whose affairs were organised around a premise that no longer holds.

The family office should be built around what the family wants to accomplish — the preservation and transmission of its wealth, the management of its affairs, the cohesion of its members, and the continuity of its values across generations. Once that foundation is in place, it can and should be optimised within it. But the foundation is not tax. The foundation is the family.

Working with Westwick

Setting up a single family office is not a project with a clear beginning, a defined set of deliverables, and a clean end date. It is the beginning of an institutional life that the family will govern for generations. The decisions made at the outset — about mandate, governance, location, structure, team — tend to persist. They should be made with care.

Westwick works with families at exactly this moment: when the decision to build a family office has been made and the question is how to do it well. We do not provide a blueprint. We do not have a standard model. We sit alongside the family, ask the questions that need to be asked before the lawyers and bankers are engaged, and help translate the family's intentions into a structure that is genuinely built for them.

Our partners have set up family offices from scratch, restructured offices that had outgrown their original design, and stepped in as interim management during transitions where the office needed experienced leadership before a permanent team was in place. That experience — inside the room, not advising from outside it — is what we bring to the families we work with.

If you are at the start of this process, or if you are questioning whether the office you have today is still the one you need, get in touch.