Taking back control of your family office assets and governance.
When something the family owns has stopped answering to it.
Family wealth multiplies through structure: trusts, holdings, board seats, direct investments, joint ventures, external mandates. Over time, structures develop their own gravitational pull. A board that was meant to serve the family starts serving itself. A direct investment whose governance was thin becomes opaque. An external manager keeps charging fees long after it stopped delivering value.
The asset still belongs to the family, but the family no longer steers it. That is when we are called.
When this happens
- A board or committee is taking directions that no longer serve the sole interest of the family.
- A direct investment has gone quiet on reporting, on governance, or on cash distribution.
- An external manager is making decisions the family thought it had retained.
- A trust or holding company is being run by trustees who have stopped consulting the family.
What we do
- Map the situation honestly: who has what authority, who is supposed to, where the gap is.
- Identify the right intervention: replacement of a board member, renegotiation of a mandate, reset of a governance framework.
- Lead the difficult conversations (with directors, trustees, managers, and counterparties) on the family's behalf.
- Restore decision rights to the family, in writing, in a way that holds for the future.
How we engage
These mandates run three to nine months only, with a clear before-and-after. We come in with full authority from the family, do the work, and step out once the lines are reset.
Who calls us, and why
The families who come to us in this situation rarely arrive with a complete diagnosis. They arrive with a sense that something is wrong. A board that stopped reporting clearly. A direct investment whose management has grown distant. An adviser relationship that was loyal for years but now seems to be serving interests that are not the family's own.
The first thing we do is map what is actually happening, not what the documents say should be happening. There is almost always a gap. The question is whether that gap is the result of negligence, genuine misalignment of interests, or something more deliberate. Each answer leads to a different intervention. A governance structure that has become too complex to police is a different problem from a trustee who has stopped consulting the family, and both are different from an adviser who has stopped saying what the family needs to hear.
What Westwick brings to this kind of mandate is the willingness to have the difficult conversations (with directors, trustees, managers, and counterparties) that the family cannot easily have itself. Families are constrained by existing relationships: they have worked with the same advisers for twenty years, or the person at issue is a long-standing employee, or the counterparty is also a family friend. We are not constrained by those relationships. We represent the family's interests exclusively. The people around a family should be chosen for their competence and their alignment, not retained out of habit.
These mandates are deliberately short and focused. We do not create dependencies. We come in with a clear brief, restore the decision rights the family is entitled to hold, and step out. Serving the family means leaving when the work is done, not finding reasons to stay.
If this is your moment.
Conversations with Westwick are strictly confidential. They commit the family to nothing, and us to discretion.