INSIGHT

Is It Time to Open a Family Office? What Every High-Net-Worth Individual Should Consider First

Kris Marney • June 17, 2026

Services: Family Office Services

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There’s a moment that many high-net-worth individuals know well. Your financial life has grown significantly, your investments span multiple entities, your properties require constant attention, your business and personal affairs are deeply intertwined, and the people managing it all are starting to show the strain. You’ve probably asked yourself: do I need a family office?

It’s a fair question, but it is really two questions in one. The first is whether your wealth has reached a level of complexity that calls for more coordinated, dedicated oversight. The second, is whether that oversight should come from an internal team you build and run yourself, or whether an outsourced or hybrid model might serve you better. In many cases, the answer to the first question is yes and the answer to the second is more nuanced than you’d expect.

Before you commit to a structure that could cost millions to build and maintain, it’s worth stepping back to understand what you really need, the full range of ways to get there, and the questions to answer when building a family office.

Complexity, Not Just Assets, Drives the Decision

The most common misconception about family offices is that the trigger is a specific number: once you cross a certain asset threshold, a family office becomes necessary. In practice, that’s not how it works.

The real question is complexity. Do you have multiple investment vehicles, operating businesses, properties, and trusts that require coordinated management? Are you dealing with multi-jurisdictional tax obligations, estate planning across generations, or significant alternative investments? Do you have personal assets that need managing like private aircraft, art, or vacation homes, that require active oversight? If the answer to several of those questions is yes, you may have outgrown your current approach, regardless of where your AUM sits.

Complexity is the variable that matters, and it shows up in some predictable ways:

• Your advisors, attorneys, accountants, and investment managers are not talking to each other
• Tax planning is reactive rather than strategic
• You or your staff are spending significant time on administrative and operational tasks that pull focus from your core priorities
• Governance and reporting across your financial ecosystem are inconsistent, informal or entirely missing
• You’re not entirely sure who holds access to what

That last point matters more than people realize. As personal financial lives grow, it’s common for a trusted staff member or right-hand person to become the de facto quarterback for everything, holding the logins, managing the calls, and carrying institutional knowledge that exists in no formal documentation anywhere. That’s not a family office. That’s a risk.

The Real Cost of Building Your Own Team

Many families that decide to establish a single-family office underestimate the investment required to do it properly. A lean internal operation, what might be called a skeleton crew, typically carries an annual cost in the range of $2 million to $3 million when you account for salaries, benefits, technology infrastructure, compliance, and professional fees.

And that’s before you factor in the challenge of staffing it.

Attracting and retaining talent for a family office is genuinely difficult. The roles are specialized and often without upward mobility, the candidate pool is narrow, and turnover in this space can be disruptive in ways that extend well beyond the operational. When a key person leaves, they take knowledge, relationships, and access with them. Recruiting replacements takes time, and in the interim, gaps in coverage can create real risk.

There’s also a structural problem that’s easy to overlook: even a well-staffed internal team will have limits. The breadth of functions a family office is expected to cover, from tax strategy and investment oversight to HR, cybersecurity, estate planning, and lifestyle management, is simply too wide for any small team to handle with the depth and controls that your situation demands. Often there is also a lack of segregation of duties and internal controls leading to an exposure to risk. Outsourcing some of those functions isn’t a compromise. It’s the responsible approach.

“Each family we work with is different. Different goals and aspirations, different investments, different dynamics. What they share is a level of complexity that their existing setup can no longer absorb. Our job is to figure out which structure is appropriate for that family, whether that means supplementing an internal team, acting as the family office ourselves, or building a comprehensive solution in between. The goal is always the same: get the right team coordinating around the full picture of your financial life so nothing falls through the cracks.” — Kris Marney, Partner, Advisory, BPM

Why Going All-In on an Internal Office May Not Be the Right Answer

Family offices are undeniably having a moment. Interest in establishing them has increased sharply among high-net-worth families, and the market for family office services has grown accordingly. That momentum is real, but it can make it harder to think clearly about what best serves your needs.

The appeal of a fully internal team is understandable. You want control, confidentiality, and people who are exclusively focused on your family. Those are legitimate priorities. But a purely internal operation, especially one that’s understaffed relative to your actual complexity, creates a specific set of risks:

• Insufficient separation of duties and internal controls
• Over-reliance on individuals who become single points of failure
• Limited access to specialized knowledge in areas like tax law, estate planning, and investment strategy
• Difficulty staying current with regulatory changes across multiple jurisdictions
• Cybersecurity and data privacy vulnerabilities that a lean team simply can’t address at scale

The most sophisticated families aren’t choosing between an internal team and outside advisors. They’re designing structures that combine the right elements of both.

How an Outsourced or Hybrid Model Changes the Equation

Rather than asking whether you should build a family office, a more useful question is: which functions genuinely need to be internal, and which are better served by a trusted external partner?

BPM’s Family Office Services are built around helping families determine the right family office structure before committing to one. Whether you need a single-family office structure, a multi-family office arrangement that provides access to shared resources across a select group of families, or a hybrid model that combines dedicated internal support with outside professional services, BPM can help you design and operate the structure that fits your life. In some cases, BPM can serve as the family office itself, providing the full range of coordination and oversight functions without requiring you to recruit, manage, and retain a dedicated internal team. 

As a central hub for your financial ecosystem, BPM coordinates across your entire advisor team, including estate planning attorneys, investment managers, tax strategists, trust administrators, insurance specialists, and IT and cybersecurity advisors. That coordination function alone is often where families see the most immediate value. When your advisors are aligned around a single, integrated picture of your financial life, strategy becomes more coherent and decisions happen faster. 

What BPM’s Family Office Services Cover

BPM brings together a comprehensive range of services under one roof:

• Tax and estate planning, including multi-jurisdictional tax strategy, trust administration, and business succession planning
• Personal asset management, including oversight of real estate, private aviation, art and collectibles, and payroll
• Investment oversight, including portfolio monitoring, alternative investment capital call and due diligence, and performance reporting
• Financial reporting, with real-time visibility across your full financial picture through BPM’s secure Sage Intacct platform
• Family office philanthropy planning, including charitable giving strategy and family foundation support
• Family governance and legacy planning, including multi-generational wealth transfer strategy and next-generation education

Getting the Structure Right From the Start

If your wealth has reached the point where you’re seriously considering a family office, the most valuable step you can take right now is an clear conversation about your complexity, your goals, and your appetite for building and managing an internal operation.

At BPM, every engagement starts with that conversation. The goal is never to prescribe a structure. It’s to understand your family’s specific situation and design something that works, with the right mix of internal coordination, outside counsel, and technology to support it. 

Your financial life is personal. The way you manage it should be, too.

Ready to explore what the right family office structure could look like for you? Contact BPM’s family office services team today to start the conversation.