Resetting the family office
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.
If this is your moment.
Conversations with Westwick are strictly confidential. They commit the family to nothing — and us to discretion.