The term “family office” is meaningless

I believe resources deployment, particularly of time and money into your people and their relationships, is the key to building meaningful long-term family wealth. Family offices manage wealth. And therefore I believe family offices have an enormous responsibility in maintaining this perspective as they evolve to best serve their families through time.

An effective family office is so much more than an investment house.

Family offices are currently something of a buzz term. The significant increase in wealth, combined with our common desire to control our own capital, there are many more SFOs being created than ever before.

Most believe, like me, that there are too many of them. But the focus of these offices is relevant for everyone.

Every family determines how to spend their time and money. Once a family has sufficient financial resources, their affairs become more complicated. Regardless of the size of the wealth, wealthy families deal with a significant number of complex matters.

You know what I mean; to list these complexities would be to illicit some sort of pang of frustration out of each and every one of you wonderful readers.

So you all deal with similar matters as compared to those running SFOs.

I believe resources deployment, particularly of time and money into your people and their relationships, is the key to building meaningful long-term family wealth. Family offices manage wealth. And therefore I believe family offices have an enormous responsibility in maintaining this perspective as they evolve to best serve their families through time.

Family Office Ecosystem (“FOE”); the web of wealth

An effective family office is so much more than an investment house.

Family offices are currently something of a buzz term. The significant increase in wealth, combined with our common desire to control our own capital, there are many more SFOs being created than ever before.

Most believe, like me, that there are too many of them. But the focus of these offices is relevant for everyone.

Every family determines how to spend their time and money. Once a family has sufficient financial resources, their affairs become more complicated. Regardless of the size of the wealth, wealthy families deal with a significant number of complex matters.

You know what I mean; to list these complexities would be to illicit some sort of pang of frustration out of each and every one of you wonderful readers.

So you all deal with similar matters as compared to those running SFOs.

Ok, so we know the term “family office” is useless without modifiers (I discuss the various uses of the term “family office” here) and we know that all wealthy families have a lot of complexity to manage. My new term is “family office ecosystem” and I use it to collect the entirety of a wealthy family’s wealth strategy. All of the internal and external elements of the system.

Families wrestle with the pros and cons of insourcing and outsourcing various aspects of their wealth management. Yet even the largest of the SFOs utilize outside advisors. There is always a web between the family and the inside and outside elements. There is always an interplay between the players.

There is always an ecosystem.

Whether healthy or wanting, the interplay of the components of the ecosystem all matter. The family office ecosystem (or “FOE”) is the focus of much scrutiny these days as it is a key aspect of both the Family Enterprise Advisor designation here in Canada as well as a key aspect of the burgeoning focus on integrated wealth management.

My Second Newsletter: FO Ecosystems

The health of your family office ecosystem is the key analysis in how effective your resource deployment is, and as I mention at the outset of this month’s Newsletter, resource deployment is the key to strong family wealth.

And so with this, I have found my second newsletter perspective! I’m calling it “FO Ecosystems”. I will be launching it this month, and it will land on the second Wednesday of every month. This will be a paid Newsletter shortly so sign up now (and definitely before year’s end).

I have developed a system to effectively health check each family’s Family Office Ecosystem and given the range of topics to cover in assessing an effective Family Office Ecosystem, I will certainly have enough to cover within this second monthly newsletter.

Your Family Office Ecosystem is each family’s interplay between their resources, risks and opportunities. While I don’t have an elegant equation to reduce the topic to, I do have a very handy infographic, and I am launching this infographic into the world of wealth management for the first time in the video contained in the FO Ecosystem’s inaugural Newsletter.

If you would like to receive the FOE Newsletter, a monthly perspective on the importance of managing your resources strategically, you can sign up here.