Family Office Navigator

Family Office Navigator | 51

IN-HOUSE

OUTSOURCED

Managing services from within the family office

Outsourcing services to partners outside the family office

These strategic choices are designed to facilitate the conversations that are required to make informed, collective decisions about your family office. We recommend that you make time as a family and individually to reflect on each strategic choice before agreeing on a way forward. • Activities : As part of the preparation and self-exploration necessary to develop an effective and suitable family office, we have found that it is highly beneficial for families and individual family members to take part in specially designed activities. These simple and practical exercises offer meaningful and engaging ways to bring the family together to discuss and gain clarity on the fundamental topics, as well as providing individuals an opportunity to reflect on the big questions at the heart of any family office decision. Consider these activities as the acid test for your choices as you move through the Navigator . • Insights from the field : The strategic choices and activities that explore each building block of the Navigator will help you make clear decisions as a family. From time to time, however, you will also see “Insights from the field” boxes scattered across the chapters. We use these boxes to point out specific challenges, anecdotes from research or practice, and expert guidance that we feel is important to bear in mind. They do not require specific actions, but we recommend taking some time to reflect on each box before you make any decisions. • Case studies : Before settling on a way forward, it always helps to see how other families approach and manage challenges around the family office. We have distilled the learnings and insights from interviews conducted with families and their family office staff, to offer inspiration and examples of the way different kinds of families have approached either setting up their own family office or finetuning their existing model. One aspect that we have looked at is how family offices develop over time and how they are adapting to the changing circumstances of families and family enterprise ecosystems across generations. For privacy reasons we have agreed with the families we interviewed to keep their insights anonymous.