Family Office Navigator

Get ready for your fami ly off ice journey | 44 The Hybrid Family Office

The family-office-as-a-service, or “uberization” of the family office, is a recent phenomenon that draws on the flexibility and benefits of the global, digital economy to develop a network-style approach to serving the needs of families. This involves a small team determining what services are core to the family, and deciding what the family will manage in-house and what services and talents can be outsourced or “rented” as required. The hybrid approach requires centralized management, oversight, and integration of the internal and external service providers. We see a clear trend in the direction of hybrid family offices today. This shift is fundamentally reshaping the landscape of family offices. The hybrid family office overcomes some of the key challenges that single family offices face today, which we will be elaborating on in more detail in the organization chapter. We believe this form of family office will continue to gain popularity. However, it requires the family to have a close grip over the network of service providers to ensure that everything is working towards the same goal. Oftentimes, families conserve a smaller core team in-house that ensures that the family purpose is clear and that all partners and services are aligned with it. The evolution of the family office No matter what model you start from or what direction you set off in, your family office will evolve over time. This is, in part, because you will go through a learn-by-doing process that leads to finetuning or even a pivot and, in part, because the needs of your family and your environment will change over time. For many families, the family office starts in a rather informal way. Oftentimes when we speak with families and ask them if they have a family office, they answer “kind of” or “in some way, yes”, which is indicative of the fluid nature of the family office. Perhaps, at one point in time, the patriarch / matriarch of the family asks the chief financial officer of the company to take on the management of some financial affairs of the family. This may have led to the need for more family responsibilities to be managed in a professional way, leading to a more formal structure and the creation of an embedded single family office. As we saw with the Rockefellers, this single family might even expand over time into a multi family office serving the needs of many families.