loader image
CRE Insights Blog

Three Phases of Setting Up a new Single Family Office

In this video Richard C. Wilson, founder of the Family Office Club, discusses the three most important phases required to start a new single family office. To learn more about single family offices, visit http://SingleFamilyOffices.com Hello, this is Richard Wilson coming to you from Key West, Florida today. You can see one of the main islands off the City of Key West, right here, behind me. I wanted to record a short video on the phases of setting up a Single Family Office. The first phase is really deciding who you are and where you’re trying to go. If you don’t know that, then nothing a consultant tells you, or an advisor tells you to do, will makes sense, and I wouldn’t advise spending any money until you know exactly who you are, and where you’re trying to go, in terms of objectives, missions, goals, et cetera. The second step is to figure out who is going to be on the team. So are you going to have a virtual Family Office with one or two central people and everything else outsourced? Or are you going to build a 100-person Single Family Office team? That’s very important before you do anything else. The next step is the how. Using the expertise that you’ve retained to manage your Single Family Office, and grow and invest to keep the operations moving forward. They’re going to help figure out the actual roadmap or the strategy to go from where you are now to where you’re trying to go, which would be from point A to point B. You don’t need to worry about the how until you figured out who you really are and then who is going to help you go there. The how will naturally evolve, if you have the right people helping you drive your Single Family Office. Those of you who are at Jim Collin fans, he refers to this as getting the right people on the bus, and then figuring out exactly where the bus is going to go. The next step is really the allocation phase, and that is when you’ve got the full team built and you’re starting to allocate the capital. This is unique to starting a Single Family Office, because many times a Single Family Office is needed, or created, because of an allocation or a liquidity event I mean. So they might take a company public, they might sell a business, maybe they’re taking some of the money back from a private bank to do more direct investing. And allocating can be a very intensive process. You might need different people on the team during this allocation phase then during the management phase when there’s just some investments rolling in and out of the portfolio. And that is the final phase, which is the management phase. Unless you’re winding down the Single Family Office, really the management phase is making sure that you’re doing a holistic job in managing the full balance sheet of the family, including philanthropic concerns, budget, next generation concerns, structuring and protecting the family from risks that may come up. Whether it’s the government targeting families for taxation, or employees targeting the family for some sort of extortion or blackmail because of some family secret they found out, or competitors, or users of their operating business’ products that might want to litigate against them to take some of their wealth away, that management phase is important on playing a strong defense. But also making sure that everything you do in managing this Single Family Office is aligned with that very first step of who you are and what are your objectives, and missions, and values, and making sure you’re always coming back to that in every phase of setting up your Single Family Office. So I hope this short video, on setting up Single Family Office, was helpful to you. This is Richard Wilson come from Key West, Florida. And if you’d like to learn more, please visit our website, singlefamilyoffices.com. Take care.

About the author

Richard Wilson