INSIGHT

Building a Family Office After a Liquidity Event

Kris Marney • August 20, 2026

Services: Family Office

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Most business owners and equity holders spend years building toward this moment, but few spend any time preparing for what happens once the deal closes. By the time the wire hits, it is too late to build the team, structures, and plans that should have been in place months earlier.

The best outcomes belong to families who start this work before the liquidity event. Getting ahead of it means fewer scrambled decisions, lower tax exposure, and a smoother transition into managing significant wealth. This article walks through how to prepare your financial infrastructure before a liquidity event, so you are ready when the moment it happens.

What A Family Office Actually Is

A family office is a private structure, sometimes a formal entity, sometimes a coordinated team of advisors, that manages the financial, legal, tax, and administrative needs of a high-net-worth family.It is not a product you buy. It is an operating model you build.

There are three primary versions:

• A single-family office (SFO) serves one family exclusively and typically employs its own staff: investment officers, accountants, legal counsel, and administrators. The fixed costs involved usually only make sense at $100M+ in investable assets.
• A multi-family office (MFO) serves multiple families under one roof, sharing infrastructure and overhead. For families in the $50-$100M range, this often means institutional-quality management at a lower cost than building a private organization, not just a lower asset threshold.
• Outsourcing the family office function is a third path, viable at almost any asset level. A firm can supplement an existing family office or serve as one outright, giving you flexibility to bring in specific expertise as needed, without the overhead of full-time staff.

The right family office structure depends on your asset level, your appetite for complexity, and how much control and involvement you want in day-to-day oversight.

Assembling Your Team Before You Need It

The single most important piece of pre-liquidity planning is assembling the right team, and this needs to happen before the deal closes, not after. That means interviewing wealth advisors, tax professionals, and estate attorneys while you still have the bandwidth to evaluate them carefully.

Once the transaction closes, your attention shifts to managing new wealth immediately. There is little time left to interview advisors or build relationships from scratch. Founders, executives, and long-tenured employees who assemble their team early walk into the post-liquidity period with people who already understand their goals and their business.

The Core Components of Your Financial Infrastructure

A family office is only as strong as the structures and systems underneath it. Here are the core components that make up that foundation.

Investment Management

Once your team is in place, investment planning can begin in earnest. Before selecting a strategy, your advisors need a clear picture of your liquidity needs, tax situation, and risk tolerance, all of which look different before a liquidity event than after one.

Planning ahead also means thinking through how proceeds will be structured. A stock deal, an earnout, or rollover equity each creates different tax and liquidity outcomes, and mapping those out before the transaction closes gives your team time to plan around them instead of reacting to them.

Tax Planning & Coordination

The year of a liquidity event is often the highest-tax year of a business owner’s or equity holder’s life, and the window to plan around that is narrow. Waiting until after the liquidity event to loop in a tax advisor usually means missing opportunities that only existed beforehand.

This is especially true for founders, executives, and early employees sitting on significant equity ahead of an IPO. IPO tax planning for employees requires a longer runway than most expect, and decisions made a year or more in advance, around entity structure, equity compensation, and timing, can meaningfully change the tax outcome. Coordinating your CPA, wealth advisor, and estate attorney well before the event gives you options that disappear once the transaction is complete.

Entity Structure & Titling

For business owners and founders, entity structures can get messy right up until the day of the liquidity event, and cleaning that up beforehand makes the transaction smoother and the post-event balance sheet clearer. Accounts held in personal names that should sit in a trust and real estate titled incorrectly all create friction at closing.

Revocable trusts are a common tool here, giving families a way to hold assets ahead of a liquidity event while retaining full control and flexibility. Setting these structures up in advance, rather than scrambling to retitle assets after the liquidity event, keeps the transaction cleaner and the ownership picture accurate from day one. Revocable trusts also integrate with your estate plan by avoiding probate and providing anonymity upon death.

Estate Planning Integration

An estate plan built years before a liquidity event usually will not hold up once significant wealth arrives. Preparing in advance gives you room to think through future wealth transfer strategies, including gifting plans, trust structures, and generational transfer tools, while the federal estate tax exemption remains historically high.

Waiting until after the liquidity event to revisit your estate plan often means missing planning windows that only exist before the transaction closes.

When Does a Formal Family Office Make Sense?

The decision to build a formal family office depends on complexity, not assets under management. A family with a straightforward balance sheet and few moving parts may not need one regardless of its size, while a family with multiple businesses or a concentrated equity position, real estate holdings, and several generations involved may need one well before reaching a high asset threshold.

The right question is not how much wealth you have. It is how much coordination your circumstances require.

Working with BPM

Preparing for a liquidity event takes more than a single advisor working alone. BPM’s family office services bring tax, accounting, and advisory professionals together well before your transaction closes, so you walk into the liquidity event with a plan already in place instead of piecing one together afterward.

If a liquidity event is on your horizon, now is the time to start building your team and your structure. Contact BPM LLP to start planning ahead of your transaction.