Westwick Partners

20 questions every owner should be able to answer

Twenty questions an owner answers alone, in an afternoon, from memory and without calling the office. That is the test: an owner does not need to know every number, but should never need permission to find one. Each question you cannot answer marks where your family office has drifted, and where to look first.

Download the two-page PDF The family office audit

01 · Structure

Can you draw your own structure on one page: every entity, and why it exists?If only the people who built it can explain it, it has stopped serving you.
Which three decisions are reserved to the family, in writing, and who steps in if the named person is unavailable tomorrow?If nothing is written, the answer is “whoever is in the room”.
If one member or branch wanted out next year, is there an agreed process (valuation, timeline, funding) or would you be improvising?The first exit sets the precedent for every one that follows. Improvised exits end in courtrooms.
Does anything in your structure exist only because it always has?Entities accumulate. Nobody decides to keep them, and nobody decides to close them.

02 · Staffing

If your most senior executive resigned this morning, what happens this afternoon?Rarely on any register, and usually the largest risk the office carries.
When did someone in your office last disagree with you, on the record, before a decision?Silence is not loyalty. An office that only says yes has stopped protecting you.
Are your people paid on salary and judgement, or on the size of your assets?A bonus tied to AUM pays your team to grow assets that may not need growing.
Who was your last senior hire chosen by, and on what: character and loyalty, or a CV that would fit any institution?Skills are a threshold, not a differentiator. Institutional habits are expensive to import.

03 · Cost

Do you know the true, all-in annual cost of your office (staff, advisers, custody, fund fees, structures) on one page?Most owners know the salaries and miss the layers. The all-in figure is routinely double.
When were your banks’ and managers’ fees last renegotiated?Fees that are never revisited drift towards multiples of market rate.
Which of your holdings consume the most attention, and are they worth it?Small, complex positions absorb senior time. Attention is a cost no ledger shows.
Do you own things it would be cheaper to rent: a house, a plane, a boat nobody uses?Idle lifestyle assets are a cost centre with sentimental camouflage.

04 · Asset allocation

Does your portfolio reflect the risk you have chosen or the risk that has accumulated?Exposure drifts with markets and with deals. Stated appetite and actual book diverge quietly.
Could you explain every significant holding to your family in two minutes each?If only the adviser who sold it can explain it, you are holding someone else’s conviction.
If you needed significant liquidity in thirty days, do you know what you would sell and what it would cost you?Owners should never discover their liquidity position under pressure.
Is your allocation a set of choices someone can defend, or an average nobody is responsible for?A family’s target is absolute, across generations. Defaulting to the index is not investing.

05 · Governance

In the last five significant decisions, who decided?Would the family answer as the office would? The gap is the drift.
Does your reporting let you challenge, or only ratify?Budget-versus-actual and variances make oversight possible. Updates without a reference point are reassurance.
Is there one person with full visibility on your office who has no incentive to tell you everything is fine?Trust is the foundation of a single family office. It is not a control environment.
If you stepped back for a year, would the office still be run for the family, or by then, for itself?The final test of every other answer here.

Mark each question as you go. The tally appears here.

Read about the audit Download the two-page PDF

Reading your answers

Most owners answer perhaps twelve cleanly. That is not failure — the point is to know which eight are open. Clustered in one area, you know where to look. Everywhere, or on question 17, is usually when families call us.

The same twenty questions come as a two-page PDF, with space to mark each one answered or open. What an outside review of the same five areas looks like is set out on the family office audit page. If cost is the area that stopped you, our family office cost calculator gives you a figure to test the office against, and our guide to the cost structure of a single family office explains where the layers hide.

Next step

Bring your open questions

A 30-minute conversation with a partner, not a business developer. Come with the questions you could not answer; they are the agenda. Aymeric will tell you frankly whether an audit is worth it for your office.

Talk to a partner The family office audit