FO Pro, The Family Office Professional launches into a sometimes ambiguous space. Even family members who have family offices have told us they are not certain what, exactly, qualifies as a family office.
Can a family office focus solely on investing and offer no other services to family members? Can it help family members receive money from family trusts, even if the family members do not invest together? Can a family office be part of the family business? Our answer is yes, yes and yes. A family office can take any structure that serves the needs of the family.
The main purpose of a family office is to support the generational transfer of wealth, according to the “Global Family Office Report 2023” from UBS. Yet only 63% of survey respondents chose that option — meaning that for more than one-third, the main goal is something else.
FO Pro will cover families’ varying goals and all the ways family offices support them, as well as the challenges they face in doing so. We will look at a wide variety of services, including investment strategy, cybersecurity and estate planning — always focusing on that place where the family office and the family connect. So we will not be offering generic investment advice that any brokerage firm would give; instead, we will talk about how families agree on their investment strategies together. We will offer advice, from experts and from family members who have lived through the trial and error needed to get here, on challenging topics like communication strategies and compensation for family office professionals.
We will look at the complex, often emotional decisions families make around wealth: How much should they give away? How much should they pass on to their children, and under what conditions? How much money is the family willing to spend on services for family members, such as legal help and travel arrangements?
Below, you can read about how establishing family goals and values can help set the stage for later decisions about investments. If you want to take a step back from your own family office and look at the big picture, we have a set of videos that outlines the different types of family offices. And we pass on a few interesting articles, reports or other resources for you to check out.
FO Pro is new offering from Family Business Magazine, which for 34 years has served the needs of multi-generational family businesses. We begin with this weekly newsletter but will soon add a number of offerings on our website (www.thefopro.com) designed to help family offices create and maintain alignment with the families they serve, and to help families better understand how to make the family office effective for all owners.
We hope you enjoy FO Pro — and we want to hear from you. Send us your feedback and ideas to Margaret Steen, editor, FO Pro at msteen@thefopro.com.
