Family Office Operational Audit
A precise reading of your family office: structure, staffing, cost, allocation, governance. Done by people who have run family offices, not by people who write reports about them. A few weeks of work, and the findings stay yours.
Owning the office is not the same as knowing it. We help families do both.
What does it actually do?
What does it really cost?
Who really decides?
Answering them is operational work, not theory. Westwick partners have spent years inside family offices, resetting them and handing them back. That experience is what turns three uncomfortable questions into a clear picture of the office you own.
Does one of these sound like you?
The families we sit with usually recognise themselves in at least one of these.
Not there yet? Start with the white paper, Governing families, not corporations — what families do to stay in control of what they own.
Five areas decide whether the office still fits the family it serves
Structure
Your entities, holding companies and jurisdictions — and the plain question of whether that complexity still earns its keep.
- Entities kept alive out of habit, each carrying its own fees and filings.
- A structure built for a tax position that no longer applies.
Every entity earns its place, and you can say in a sentence why it exists.
Staffing
Who does what, what it costs, and where the office quietly depends on a single person.
- Functions kept in-house or outsourced by habit, with a cost or a loss of control the family never chose.
- Roles and team size that grew by accident rather than by design.
Each function sits where it serves the family best: in-house where control matters, outsourced where it does not, at a cost the family understands.
Cost
The true all-in number — including the fee layers that never appear together on a single page.
- Fees spread across mandates that no one ever totals in one place.
- Fees that have crept up year after year, because renegotiating them was never anyone's job.
One all-in figure, understood by the family and benchmarked against comparable offices.
Asset allocation
What you are actually exposed to, measured against the risk you say you want — not an industry average that describes no real family.
- Exposure that has drifted far from the family's stated appetite for risk.
- Concentration that nobody chose deliberately.
An allocation that matches the risk the family actually wants to carry.
Governance
Who decides, how, and whether the people deciding are the people who should be. Often the quietest finding, and the one that matters most.
- Decisions taken by whoever is nearest, rather than whoever should be.
- No clear line between the family's role and the office's.
The right people decide, by an agreed process, and everyone knows who they are.
We manage no money, so the audit is not a pitch. There is nothing to sell you at the end of it.
We install no permanent monitoring layer. We report, we hand over, and we leave.
We add no complexity for its own sake. The recommendation is always the simplest office that meets the family's needs, and nothing more.
How the audit runs
Scope
A conversation with the family to agree what the audit covers, and who we should speak to.
Review 4–8 weeks
Interviews with family and team, the documents, the numbers. The constraint is diary access, not the analysis.
Report
A written report you can read without a translator, and a working session to walk it through. What you do next is yours to decide.
“A $1.5bn office was spending close to 0.9% of assets a year to run itself. It now runs at 0.4% — the other 0.5% went back to performance.”
Read the use caseCan you answer these about your own office?
A short sample from the twenty-question self-audit. The full checklist is yours to run in an afternoon.
Talk to a partner
A 30-minute conversation with a partner — not a business developer. Nothing to prepare, and no obligation on either side.
Your conversation will be with Isabelle, who leads our work with families and their offices.
Questions families ask us
A fixed fee, agreed before we start, that depends on the office's size and complexity. No percentage of assets, and no open-ended billing.
Four to eight weeks for most offices. The constraint is usually diary access to family members and key staff, not the analysis itself.
Yes. An audit run behind the team's back poisons the relationship it is meant to protect. We work openly, and in our experience good teams welcome it.
No. Your accountants audit the numbers and regulators audit regulated entities. We review whether the office — structure, people, cost, allocation and governance — still serves the family that owns it.
That is the family's call. Some act on it internally, some ask their existing advisers, some engage us for the fixes. The report is written to be usable without us.
The relationship there is a different one: you are the client of a provider, not the owner of an office. What we can do is assess the services and the fees — whether the family receives what it actually needs, at a price in line with the market.
Book a 30-minute conversation
With a partner, not a business developer. We come back to you with a time.
Thank you. A partner will come back to you shortly to fix a time.