Single family office feasibility assessment and business model

The situation

A high-net-worth European family engaged Strategy& to define the optimal business and operating models for its single family office (SFO), detail its mandate and service offerings, and benchmark the SFO against international best practices.

How we helped

With the existing family office entity facing challenges in performing both family and corporate activities, and with younger generations of the family coming of age, the Strategy& team examined the need to institutionalize family and business activities. Given that the family objective is wealth preservation while the business objective is focused on growth and value creation, the team recommended independent family and business entities. Taking lessons learned and best practices from international benchmarks, the team defined service offerings for the family and advised which services to deliver in-house and which to outsource.

They developed the SFO’s organization structure, encompassing legal, financial, investment, operations, and real estate functions, as well as philanthropic activities. They designed a cost allocation system, choosing a model that accommodates the growing number of family members who will be using the various services, while ensuring that it does not introduce extra costs through superfluous complexity. Finally, the team recommended key success factors for the setup of the SFO such as the need to institutionalize succession planning, and designed an implementation road map for the transition to the target model.

Results

The family agreed to the proposed SFO mandate, service offering, operating model, and business model and began implementing the recommendations immediately.

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