Setting up or resetting your family office: from first principles.
Whether the office is being built or rebuilt, the work begins on the family's side.
There is no one-size-fits-all for a family office. Some families come to us before the office even exists: a liquidity event has just happened, and no template fits the family in front of us. Others come to us after years of running an office in which the family's grip has slowly loosened, sometimes deliberately, often without anyone meaning for it to happen. Either way, the work begins by going back to first principles.
Setting up a family office and resetting one are a similar exercise, run from the same starting point: a clean look at what the family wants the office to do, how much the family wants to be involved, and how it wants to interact with it.
When this happens
- A liquidity event has just made a family office an option.
- The cost base has grown beyond what the family understands, or sponsors.
- A new generation is taking over and finds an office it did not design.
- The family has the feeling that decisions are being made without them, and not always in their interests.
What we do
- Vision first: we sit with the family and articulate the vision the office must live by.
- Then structure: decision rights, jurisdictions, governance, vehicles, cost structure.
- Then people: who stays, who leaves, who is hired.
- Then operations: advisory bench, interactions with the family, investment policy, the office's routine.
How we engage
These mandates typically run nine to eighteen months. One partner leads, the rest of the partnership reviews each milestone. We sit on the family's side throughout, work with the family to take the decisions they have been postponing, then execute the changes alongside them, and only then hand the office back, operating the way the family chose.
Who calls us, and why
The families who call us for a reset fall into three types. The first are first-generation wealth creators: a business has just been sold, a liquidity event has occurred, and the family is holding a sum it was not structured to manage before. No template fits them because no template was designed for them. The second are principals who have inherited an accumulated structure (layers of holdings, mandates, and relationships built over decades) that costs more than anyone can justify and which nobody in the family can fully explain. The third are families whose office was well designed at launch but has since drifted: the market changed, the family changed, the team changed, but the structure did not.
In all three cases, the error Westwick is most often correcting is the same: the office was designed around a legal or tax structure rather than around the family's intent. There is no single right architecture for a family office. What matters is whether the one you have actually serves the family in front of it.
From the vision, we work outward: governance and decision rights, staffing and advisory bench, jurisdictions, cost structure. The sequence is deliberate. Getting the right people in place is as consequential as getting the structure right, and the two decisions interact. Similarly, the question of what to keep in-house and what to delegate is one of the first strategic choices a family must make, and one of the easiest to get wrong under pressure.
Westwick stays until the office runs as the family chose, not until the documents are signed.
If this is your moment.
Conversations with Westwick are strictly confidential. They commit the family to nothing, and us to discretion.