By Jay L. Rogers
The average single-family office now spends a little over $3 million a year to run itself, according to J.P. Morgan Private Bank’s 2026 Global Family Office Report. Offices north of $1 billion in assets spent closer to $6.6 million. That money buys investment committees, performance measurement systems, tax counsel, and increasingly sophisticated reporting platforms that would look at home inside an institutional asset manager. Family offices, in other words, have gotten serious about running like businesses.
Almost none of them have a plan for what happens to the business itself.
UBS’s 2026 Global Family Office Report puts a number on this. 58% of family offices have a
formal budgeting process. 60% have an investment committee. 57% have a wealth succession plan for the family members. But ask how many have a documented succession plan for the family office as an institution, meaning a written plan for continuity of staff and services when the person running it leaves, and the number drops to 35%. Ask how many have an organized process to prepare the next generation for their future role, and it drops again, to 27%.
I have walked into more than a few offices after a founding CIO retired, got sick, or simply
moved on, and the pattern is depressingly consistent. The investment policy statement is airtight. The tax structuring is elegant. Nobody wrote down who signed the wires.
Part of this is a staffing problem hiding as a governance problem. UBS finds that non-investment professionals, meaning operations, accounting, legal support, and lifestyle staff, make up 40% of total family office headcount. That is not a rounding error. It means the majority of what keeps a family office running day to day has nothing to do with picking stocks or sourcing private deals, and everything to do with people whose roles rarely get the same institutional rigor applied to the portfolio.
J.P. Morgan’s data shows where families draw the outsourcing line, and it is telling. Family
office staffing and compensation itself is wholly insourced 72% of the time, more than any other function they track. Families keep hiring decisions close, which makes sense given how much discretion and trust the role requires. But the same offices that insist on handling staffing internally are, per UBS, the least likely to have documented job descriptions, a formal performance review process, or a plan for what happens when a key staffer leaves. Keeping something in-house is not the same as managing it well.
There is a legal wrinkle here too, and it is one I see trip up families who assume more staff
automatically means more capability. The SEC’s family office exemption under Dodd-Frank,
finalized back in 2011, is not simply a headcount test. It turns on ownership, control, and who the office serves. An office that grows its staff and starts managing money for people outside the family bloodline, even informally, even for a trusted advisor’s own account, can find itself accidentally outside the exemption and suddenly looking like an unregistered investment adviser. Staffing decisions that seem purely operational are, more often than families realize, also legal ones. Bring counsel into headcount planning before you bring in the recruiter, not after.
None of this requires a consulting engagement to fix. It requires three things most families keep postponing.
First, write the continuity memo. One page. Who runs the office if the current head is
unavailable tomorrow, not eventually. Who has signing authority, who holds the passwords, who calls the family. This is not an estate plan. It is closer to a fire drill, and most offices have never run one.
Second, name a deputy, even informally, and give that person real visibility into decisions rather than just administrative tasks. The families that handle a leadership transition well are almost never the ones who got lucky. They are the ones who have already let a second person see how the sausage gets made.
Third, replace the assumption that the next generation will absorb governance by osmosis with an actual curriculum. Only 27% of offices have one. That leaves a lot of heirs who will learn how the family office works for the first time on the day they are handed the keys, which is roughly the worst possible day to start learning.
Family offices are, at bottom, an exercise in stewardship. The families running them have gotten very good at stewarding the balance sheet. It is worth asking, honestly, whether the same discipline has been applied to the institution that manages it. For most offices, based on the numbers, the answer is not yet.
Author Bio: Jay L. Rogers is Chief Investment Officer of Alpha Strategies Investment Consulting and Managing Partner of Global Rock Family Office Group. He has spent more than thirty years in institutional and family office investment management, including senior roles at Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo, and serves as a testifying expert witness in fiduciary duty and family office litigation.
