Three family offices, one right fit

Originally published by WealthBriefing in February 2025 and featured in the GPFO newsletter. Extended for this Knowledge Base in July 2026.

Succession is the one certainty a family office is built against. At some point the assets, and the authority over them, will change hands. Whether that moment strengthens the family or fractures it is largely decided years in advance, by choices of structure — and most families make those choices late: 86% of single family offices have no succession plan, although most expect to hand over within a decade.

For a principal, the family office is probably the best tool there is to plan and execute that transmission. It gives the family one structure in which assets are held, decisions are coordinated, and the legal, tax and strategic pieces move together. Done well, it also does something subtler: it gives family members transparency and a place to stay aligned, and misalignment is the single greatest threat to wealth in a transition.

The saying goes: when you have seen one family office, you have seen one family office. True. But after analysing the many frameworks in existence, we concluded that principals can, and must, choose between three main archetypes. The decision typically depends on family dynamics, and on what the principal expects to happen to the family's unity after their passing.

1. The asset manager

The first archetype grows the family's wealth for current and future generations, acting as a collective asset manager for one family. It runs diversified portfolios aligned with the family's long-term goals and risk appetite, recruits a professional team, and pools the family's resources to reach markets and alternative assets (private equity, real estate, art) that individual holdings could not reach as well or as cheaply.

The family sets the long-term strategy and remains the ultimate decision-maker on allocation; the specialised team executes. A family member sometimes takes an operational role inside the office. That can work, but it does not, and should not, carry a power-transfer component. In this archetype, the office manages money; it does not organise succession.

2. The wealth carrier

The second archetype exists to transmit assets that are meant, at least in part, to remain under the family's control or ownership: the historical company, perhaps one carrying the family's name, or assets that benefit from direct family involvement in their oversight.

Unlike the asset manager, the wealth carrier is not only about distributions to heirs. It is about keeping control across a generational transfer, and preserving the operational knowledge that makes the controlled assets worth holding. By giving the transmission a clear framework, the office separates the emotional side of succession from the technical management of the assets, which is precisely where transitions tend to fail. It is not designed to concentrate power in one heir; it is designed to carry the assets, and the family's grip on them, across the gap.

3. The dynastic succession

The third archetype emerges when the principal wants one heir, or a very small group of heirs, to retain full ownership of a family business, keeping the dynastic asset tightly held so that concentrated power protects a holding meant to be perpetual.

Heirs then divide naturally between those who stay and those who exit. The remaining heirs take on the oversight of the dynastic asset and the task of generating distributable wealth around it. The departing heirs are progressively bought out at a fair valuation, first under the principal's watch, later by the chosen heirs. In our experience the process takes ten to twenty years, because it requires wealth to be built up separately from the dynastic asset to fund the buy-outs. Mechanisms such as an organised internal market for family shares exist for exactly this purpose.

It is also the riskiest of the three, and it is worth being honest about why. It leans heavily on the chosen heir's skill and preparation, and on decisions that are very hard to revisit ten years in. It is rarely, if ever, a late-stage strategy: the more exiting heirs there are, the earlier the work must start.

Deciding early, on family grounds

The three models may not be exhaustive, but they cover the vast majority of what we see in practice. What matters most is when and how the choice is made: at inception, or very soon after, and primarily on family dynamics — the family's honest assessment of its own ability to stay united when the difficult conversations about succession arrive.

Choosing late, or trying to be all three archetypes at once, is how offices end up drifting. The archetype dictates the structure, the team, the cost base and the governance; it cannot be retrofitted cheaply. If your family has not yet had the conversation, a structured transmission workshop is often the cleanest way to open it, and our guides to setting up a family office and succession planning cover what follows. If the office has already drifted from its archetype, an audit of what is in place is the shorter route to knowing by how much.

The three models do not cost the same to run. Our family office cost calculator puts a figure on each perimeter.

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.