John Benevides is president and CEO of Briar Hall LLC, a full-service single-family office providing services to four generations of one of Chicago’s founding families. He talks about family office staffing and trends in the current hiring market:
How is family office staffing changing?
Family offices have traditionally approached their professional staffing by hiring a trusted confidant: their CPA, their attorney, the CFO of their business, or perhaps their investment advisor. This is changing, though.
Today, there is a realization that a dedicated family office — and, more specifically, an established family office — is a true business. It requires someone who has a leadership profile more than purely a technical profile. On the leadership side, this is about the core aspects of leadership: vision, strategy, inspiration, change management, people, communications and the like. The technical side can involve taxes, estate planning, investments and risk. But the nontechnical side is arguably more important: family dynamics, family education, family engagement. So, today’s professional staff requires leaders and leadership. Today is much more of an environment of hiring a business leader than purely a technical professional.
On the candidate side, the good news is that there is much more common understanding of the family office industry today. The industry is larger and more mainstream. The challenge is the amount of talent needed vastly exceeds the demand in the market.
How is your family office approaching hiring?
We employ roughly 60 professionals. When we hire for the mid and senior ranks of our team, we look for leadership, domain expertise and technical skill – in that order.
We’re looking to set culture. Leadership is the ability to manage, to drive successful change and to develop people. We would also like individuals to have domain expertise, meaning that they have experience operating at this level of wealth and have an understanding of the family dynamics and other issues and considerations that come up. Third is technical expertise in tax, estate, investment, risk, education, philanthropy, etc. This orientation is reflected by who we’ve recently hired.
We recently hired a chief relationship officer to oversee all our advisory activities and the client experience for the family, as well as to lead the full team of advisors. We also hired a chief learning officer to lead our education and family engagement. These are two roles which were not often seen in family offices, yet are becoming more and more common in the industry.
How hard is it to find the right talent today?
It’s hard. The bar is — and our bar requires — a rare combination of skills at this level. Not to mention that everyone is looking for similar talent.
Your own writing highlighted Deloitte Private’s projections of tremendous growth in family offices, so you see more and more demand for advisors and investment professionals with similar profiles. What’s new is that we are competing not only with other family offices, but also with other financial firms that are realizing that the addressable market is trillions of dollars. All of it needs advice. So, everyone is looking for much of the same talent.
Is it getting easier to hire?
The environment is different than it was two years ago. Right now, I think the labor market is loosening a bit. The employer/employee relationship seems to be returning to a more balanced position. So, in that sense, there is more interest in having conversations and that makes it a bit easier.
One advantage we have in a family office is that we are not hiring for sales-driven roles, generally. We all have to prove value to our families, yet we are not hiring for individuals whose main skill and focus is bringing in new customers, new assets or new revenue dollars. That creates an opportunity for professionals who orient more toward deep service and advice and want to concentrate and truly get to know and engage their clients holistically, technically and non-technically.
Are some positions easier to hire for than others?
I think entry-level positions are a bit easier. We see a lot of interest in getting into the family office space from professionals who have been with a financial services provider for two to five years. I think that is when they realize they will likely need to focus on sales as much as service and think about what matters more to them.
What have you learned about assembling the right family office staff?
It’s all about chemistry and culture. Your most critical hiring decision is around fit — the human and cultural dimension that AI can’t solve, at least not yet. Most family offices are three, four, five, maybe seven people. Even our office at 60 is still a small company. Fit is critical the smaller your organization is, because one person can really propel your culture. Fit will determine the success of a person more than any other single characteristic. And it remains the hardest thing to interview for.
How do you determine if someone is going to be a fit before hiring them?
We do a lot of reference checking. We ask for references, and we call all of them. We also rely on and incent our existing staff to refer people that they know in the marketplace. If we have a professional on staff who works well at Briar Hall and is a good fit, we believe they will know more than anyone who in their network will be a good fit for us.
Do you usually hire people who have experience in other family offices?
No. Not necessarily. We’re generally looking for someone who has domain expertise, but that does not mean they have to have worked in a family office. And if you have worked in another family office, it may not be very similar to ours. So, family office experience is a ‘nice-to-have,’ not a ‘need-to-have.’
What do you think the hiring environment is going to be like in the next year?
I think demand will remain as high as it ever has been. I don’t see any drop-off. There are so many family offices out there looking to hire and so many new family offices forming.
One thing we haven’t touched on is the generational transition in established offices. That evolution is big. You have a number of offices that were formed after the leveraged buyouts of the 1980s. Many of those offices are now 30 years old, and their seasoned leaders and professionals are retiring. That adds even more pressure and intensity, and further fuels demand in the space.
How do you think AI will be deployed in family offices?
We’re looking at it right now. In many general employment environments, the view is that a lot of lower-level tasks will be done by AI. I think it’s a little too early to tell exactly, but I think in two to four years from now, you will see more use of AI within family offices. AI will impact the kinds of staffing and probably the level of staffing as well.
Think about some of the basic things AI could do. For example, most family offices typically create a diagram or flowchart that shows, in visual terms, what a given trust document says. Creating this diagram or flowchart usually involves several hours of work by a highly skilled, highly compensated professional. If you put the trust document into a private AI tool and say, ‘Summarize this and draw a simple diagram or flowchart of how the provisions will work,’ within seconds you’ll get something that is really useful.
