Family office advisory

A family office is the operating company of a family's wealth. It is the entity, or cluster of entities, that holds the assets, employs the people, signs the contracts, and makes the decisions that turn a large fortune into a coordinated, governable enterprise. For some families it is a single trusted professional with a laptop and a mandate; for others it is a thirty-person firm with its own investment committee, CIO and concierge desk. What unites them is purpose: to bring institutional discipline to capital that would otherwise be managed informally, reactively, and across too many disconnected advisers.

Most families do not decide to build a family office. They back into the question. Wealth that was once concentrated in one operating business becomes diffuse after a sale or a generational transfer, and suddenly there are six banks, three lawyers, two accountants in different countries, a property portfolio, a private-equity commitment nobody is tracking, and no single person who can answer "what do we actually own, and what is it costing us?" The family office exists to answer that question, and to keep answering it for decades.

The question we hear most often is not "should we have a family office?" but "how much office do we actually need?" That is the right question, and the honest answer for a great many families is: less than they think, at least to start. Building too much infrastructure too early is one of the most expensive mistakes in this field.

Single-Family, Multi-Family, or Embedded: Choosing the Model

The first real decision is structural, and it is genuinely consequential.

A single-family office (SFO) serves one family exclusively. It offers full control, confidentiality, and a team whose only client is you. It is also expensive to run well, typically you need meaningful assets, often in the higher eight figures and above, before the fixed cost of competent staff, technology, compliance and premises is justified by what the office saves and earns. Below that threshold, an SFO frequently becomes an underpowered, overpaid version of what a shared platform would have done better.

A multi-family office (MFO) spreads that fixed cost across several families. You get institutional-grade reporting, investment access and administration without carrying the whole payroll yourself. The trade-offs are real: less control over priorities, shared key people, and the constant question of whether your interests and another client's ever diverge. MFOs vary enormously in quality and independence: some are genuinely client-aligned; others are distribution arms for in-house products. Telling the two apart is most of the diligence.

An embedded or "virtual" office keeps a small in-house team, often one principal-trusted executive, and outsources investment management, administration, tax and reporting to specialist providers under tight oversight. For the majority of families in the £50m–£250m range, this is the sweet spot: it captures most of the coordination benefit of an SFO at a fraction of the cost and complexity.

Jurisdiction matters here too, because the office has to live somewhere. Singapore has built a deliberate, well-regarded regime for family offices, with attractive incentives for substance-backed structures and a deep professional ecosystem, though the bar for genuine local activity has risen, as at 2026. Dubai (DIFC and ADGM) offers a fast-growing, English-law common-law environment, zero personal tax, and a dedicated family-office framework that has drawn significant capital. Switzerland offers banking depth and political stability, but is costly and increasingly substance-conscious. Luxembourg suits families whose centre of gravity is European investment and fund activity. Hong Kong offers a re-energised regime and a gateway into Asian markets and deal flow. The right answer follows the family, where it lives, where its assets sit, and where its next generation will be.

How a Family Office Is Actually Built

Done properly, this is a sequenced project, not an event.

• Inventory first. Before a single structure is created, we map what exists: every entity, account, property, holding, liability and adviser, and the cash flows between them. Families are routinely surprised by what surfaces.
• Define the mandate. What is the office for: capital preservation, growth, philanthropy, succession, lifestyle administration, or some weighted blend? This drives everything that follows.
• Write the governance. A family charter or constitution sets out who decides what, how disputes are handled, how the next generation is brought in, and what happens on death, divorce or disagreement. This is the document families most regret not having.
• Choose the model and jurisdiction. SFO, MFO or embedded; and where it is domiciled and staffed.
• Appoint people and providers. Hire or contract for investment oversight, accounting, tax, legal and administration, with clear reporting lines and clear separation between those who advise and those who are checked.
• Install reporting. Consolidated, multi-currency, multi-asset reporting that tells the family the truth about performance and cost, on a fixed cadence.

What Goes Wrong

• Key-person dependency. A single brilliant, indispensable executive who holds all the relationships and all the knowledge is a single point of failure. When they leave, retire or fall out with the family, the office can seize up entirely.
• Conflicts dressed as service. Providers who earn from the products they recommend, or MFOs steering clients into proprietary funds. The cost is rarely visible on any invoice.
• Governance built too late. Families that postpone the charter until a crisis discover that grief, divorce or a sale is the worst possible moment to agree the rules.
• Over-building. A full SFO erected for assets that did not need one, burning seven figures a year on infrastructure an embedded model would have delivered for a fraction.
• The next generation as an afterthought. Heirs who are handed control with no preparation, no involvement and no shared language of stewardship. The structure survives; the family's cohesion does not.

How HPT Helps

We are adviser-led, and a senior adviser owns your file from the first conversation. We do not run discretionary money and we do not sell investment products. Fees are agreed in writing before work begins. Where a bank or provider pays us for an introduction, we tell you before the introduction is made.

Our typical engagement begins with a written family-office options paper: an honest assessment of whether you need an office at all, which model fits, where it should sit, and what it will realistically cost to run. Where the answer is "embedded, not full SFO," we say so, even though a larger build would mean a larger fee.

From there we deliver the architecture (the governance charter, the structural map, the jurisdiction and substance plan, the provider shortlist with our diligence on each) and we coordinate the licensed trustees, banks, administrators and tax counsel who execute it. We remain as your standing point of coordination, the party whose only loyalty is to the family, for as long as that is useful. And when a family is plainly better served by an existing multi-family platform than by anything we would build, we will tell you that too.