Single-Family Office or Multi-Family Office?

In earlier chapters we have seen how challenging it can be to employ both cutting-edge design and efficient administration in a single family office. The difficulty in achieving the goals of a family office can be either eased or accentuated by joining a multi-family office (MFO), depending on your family’s situation. As we noted in Chapter 5, an MFO often forms when a family that already has an SFO seeks ways to reduce costs or to retain staff by asking other families to join it. The example of the Bessemer Trust later in this chapter shows that, with a clear mission and good governance principles, many of the benefits of an SFO can indeed be maintained in an MFO, provided that the participating families share the same objectives. However, MFOs do not always gradually evolve from SFOs; some are MFOs from the outset, for example Stanhope Capital (discussed in more detail later in this chapter).