Most people picture a family office as a marble lobby in Geneva. The one I would rather you picture is an office in Miami where, in October 2025, an 80-year-old retired engineer hired a chief executive. Mike Bezos, father of the Amazon founder, holds a fortune reported at around US$40 billion, and his family office, Aurora Borealis, brought in Valeria Alberola, who had previously run the affairs of two Walton heirs, to expand the office so it could serve his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The man did not need help buying shares. He needed a structure that would still make sense when he was no longer in the room.
That is the thing about family offices that the marble lobby hides. They are not, at bottom, an investment product. They are the answer to an organisational question — who runs a family’s affairs once those affairs have become too complicated for the family to run at the dinner table — and the answer is arriving more often. Deloitte counts 8,030 single-family offices in the world, up 31% from 6,130 in 2019, with 3,180 of them in North America, and expects 10,720 by 2030. The families behind them hold an estimated US$5.5 trillion, projected to reach US$9.5 trillion by the end of the decade. Two-thirds of these offices did not exist before the year 2000, and 41% serve a first-generation family: the founder is still alive, and is usually the one who picked up the phone.
What a family office actually does
Strip away the mystique and a family office is exactly that — a management company. Its client is one family (or a small group of them), and its job is everything that a family with a lot of moving parts would otherwise scatter across a dozen advisers who never speak to each other. In practice the work falls into five buckets: investing the liquid wealth; owning and overseeing the family’s operating businesses and real estate; tax, estate and trust administration; philanthropy; and the education and eventual succession of the next generation. Deloitte’s survey puts numbers on how the day divides: roughly half the office’s time goes to portfolio management (30%) and direct investing (22%), nearly a fifth (19%) to administration and compliance, and 7% each to next-generation training and philanthropy. In North America the compliance share is 27%, more than any other region, which tells you something about running one in this part of the world.
The office is also, quietly, a family’s chief of staff. It pays the bills, holds the insurance, renews the passports, manages the ski property, negotiates the aircraft lease, and keeps a single set of books that shows what the family owns and where. For a founder who has spent thirty years knowing every number by heart, the office is the first time anyone else has known them too — and if that founder is you, notice how you feel about that sentence. That is either a relief or a threat, depending on the founder.
Single, multi, or virtual: the three models compared
The word “family office” covers three quite different animals, and most of the confusion about who needs one comes from mixing them up.
| Model | What it is | Typical entry point | Typical annual cost | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single-family office (SFO) | A private company with its own staff serving one family only | Advisers most often cite US$100 million as the starting point; several put the comfortable figure at $250–500 million | Roughly $500,000 to $5 million, or more for a full team; Canadian advisers suggest no more than 2% of net worth | Families with multiple generations, multiple entities, an operating business plus liquid wealth, or cross-border holdings |
| Multi-family office (MFO) | A firm that serves several unrelated families, sharing staff, systems and cost | Roughly $25–250 million of investable assets | A fee, usually a percentage of assets plus fixed charges | Families who want the coordination without the payroll, or who are not yet large enough to justify their own |
| Virtual family office (VFO) | A designated coordinator (often a lawyer, accountant or adviser) who runs a network of outside specialists under one plan | From roughly $5–40 million of investable assets | Professional fees only; no fixed overhead | Business owners whose affairs are complex but whose wealth does not yet carry a staff |
| Embedded office | Family staff inside the operating company handling personal affairs alongside corporate ones | Any size | Hidden in the business’s overhead | Common in Canada, and the model most likely to cause trouble at a sale or a succession |
The entry points come from the people who run these things, not from me. When Canadian Family Offices asked ten Canadian advisers in October 2025 how much you need, the answers ran from a director at an Ottawa family office putting payroll alone at $2 to 3 million a year and $100 million as the starting threshold, to a Toronto portfolio manager saying $250 million is the minimum and $500 million more realistic, to a Vancouver consultant who has seen families under $5 million benefit from a family-office structure while families over $100 million found a formal office unnecessary. The line that stuck with me came from Family Enterprise Canada’s chief executive: start with the family, not a dollar figure. Complexity is the real threshold.
Who should consider setting up a family office
You are a candidate for some form of family office when the coordination cost of not having one has started to show, and the tells are remarkably consistent. You have more than one operating company, or a company and a holding company and a trust, and nobody holds the whole picture. Your accountant, your investment adviser and your lawyer have never been in the same room, and you have discovered that a decision one of them made cost you something the other could have prevented. Two or more generations now own something together, and the second generation has questions the first has not written down answers to. You have sold, or are about to sell, a business, and the proceeds are about to turn a founder who understood one thing deeply into an investor who understands many things shallowly. Or your assets, your children, or your business now straddle a border, which multiplies every one of the above.
You are probably not a candidate for a single-family office, whatever your net worth, if the wealth is one liquid portfolio and one house. A good adviser and a good accountant will do that job for a fraction of the cost. The entertainment business is the clearest illustration. When TheWrap looked at Hollywood’s family offices in August 2026, the founder of Tri Star, a firm that manages money for some of the best-known names in music and sport, put it plainly: an actor earning $3 million a year is better served by a business-management firm, and a single-family office does not begin to make sense until net worth passes US$100 million. That rules out most of Hollywood. It has not ruled out Oprah Winfrey, Serena Williams, Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, George Lucas, or Beyoncé and Jay-Z, all of whom TheWrap reports use family offices, and it has not stopped family offices themselves from putting US$22.2 billion directly into media and entertainment over the past two years, including a US$10 billion investment in the Los Angeles Lakers by the family office of Mark Walter. Forbes now counts 22 celebrity billionaires worth a combined US$48.1 billion, up from 18 a year earlier; four of the newest are Beyoncé, Roger Federer, Dr. Dre and James Cameron. Fame is a business with lumpy income, decades-long royalty tails, and a brand that can be worth a great deal today and nothing tomorrow. That is precisely the kind of complexity a family office exists to manage.
The prominent Canadian offices tell the same story in a quieter register. Woodbridge, the Thomson family’s office, has run the family’s holdings for generations from Ontario with a professional executive at the top. Wittington Investments does the same for the Weston family. Claridge, in Montreal, was set up by Stephen Bronfman in 1987. And Chip Wilson, who founded Lululemon with one store in Vancouver in 2000, now runs Hold It All, a holding company for himself, his wife and their five sons that invests in apparel, real estate and private equity. Each one exists because a family reached the point where the founder’s desk could no longer be the filing system. If your desk is still the filing system, that is the point being described.
Why set one up: what a family office is for
People give three reasons, and only one of them is actually the real one. The first is investment returns, and it is the weakest: a family office does not, by itself, make you a better investor, and Deloitte’s respondents expect their offices to become more institutionalised precisely because so many started as one founder’s instincts with a staff attached. The second is cost and control, which is genuinely real. A family paying a bank 1% on a large portfolio can often hire the people directly for less, keep the information in-house, and stop paying for advice it is not using.
The third reason, and the one every founder eventually names if you ask enough times, is continuity. The office is the institution that holds the family’s affairs together after the founder cannot. Deloitte found that only one family office in ten serves a family in its fourth generation or beyond, which is the same “third-generation” pattern I wrote about in family business governance structures, and the same explanation applies. The families who make it are not the ones who picked better stocks. They are the ones who wrote down the rules while the founder was still alive and everyone still liked each other. That is what Mike Bezos was buying when he hired a chief executive at 80. And it is what his son bought twenty years earlier: Bezos Expeditions, Jeff Bezos’s office, was founded in 2005 and in June 2026 alone backed five AI startups, including a US$12 billion round for a company he co-founded. One office invests for a founder who is still building. The other is being rebuilt for grandchildren. Both are governance decisions before they are investment ones.
How to set up a family office in Canada
The legal architecture is simpler than the industry makes it sound, and the mistakes are consistent — so here is the sequence I use with your family in mind.
Start with the mandate, in writing. Before a single share is issued, the family should agree on what the office does and does not do, whom it serves, and how it will be paid for. A Calgary family-office leader quoted by Canadian Family Offices said it best: if the family lacks clear goals or governance, the office will not fix that, it will only burn money faster. A one-page mandate settles more arguments than a fifty-page shareholder agreement — and it tells you which of the three models you actually need.
Incorporate a management company. The standard Canadian structure is a federal or Ontario corporation, owned by the family (often through the existing family trust or holding company), that employs the staff and provides services under written agreements to the family’s holding companies, trusts and individuals. The service agreements matter: management fees between related entities have to be reasonable and documented to be deductible, HST applies to most of the services, and the Canada Revenue Agency looks closely at fees that shift income between family members. This is also where the family trust and any estate freeze already in place have to be reconciled with the new company, because an office set up without regard to the existing structure can undo tax planning that took years to build.
Check the securities line before you cross it. A family office that manages only the family’s own money is generally not in the business of advising others, and so is not registered as an adviser or dealer. The moment it manages money for a second family, charges an unrelated party a fee, or markets itself, it may be, and registration under National Instrument 31-103 is not a formality. Get an opinion on where your office sits before it starts — not after a friend of the family asks it to run their money too.
Separate the office from the operating business. Most Canadian family offices begin embedded inside the company, with the controller doing the founder’s personal tax and the company paying for the cottage. That works until the company is sold, the buyer’s due diligence finds personal expenses in the accounts, and every year of the financials has to be re-explained. If a sale is anywhere on your horizon, pull your personal affairs into their own entity now. I have written about the succession options that make that separation urgent.
Build the governance before you hire the staff. Deloitte found that 73% of family offices have a board, averaging four members, of whom 58% are family and the rest outside professionals with backgrounds in strategy, finance and law. The families who skip this step get an office that answers to one person — fine until that person is unavailable. At minimum the office needs a shareholder agreement among the family owners that says how decisions are made and how a family member gets out; a board or advisory board with at least one outsider; an investment policy statement that the staff can point to when a family member wants to buy a restaurant; and a written family constitution covering who can work in the office, how the next generation is brought in, and how disputes are resolved before they reach a lawyer. All of these are described in the governance structures article, and every one of them is easier to write in year one than in year ten.
Then hire, in the right order. Your first employee is almost always a chief financial officer or controller, not a chief investment officer, because the first job is knowing exactly what you own. Investment staff come later, and many Canadian offices never hire them at all, outsourcing the portfolio while keeping oversight, tax and administration in-house. Payroll for a real office runs to seven figures, which is why the $100 million threshold exists: below it, the same team can be assembled as a virtual office at a tenth of the cost.
Plan for the founder’s absence on day one. Powers of attorney, wills that work for a business owner, a succession plan for the office’s own leadership, and a documented process for what happens to the office if the family decides to wind it up. An office designed around one irreplaceable person is a company with a single point of failure, and the failure is scheduled.
Why governance is the part that decides whether it works
The industry sells family offices as an investment capability, so it is worth being blunt about what actually goes wrong with them — they do not usually fail because the portfolio underperformed. They fail because the founder ran the office like a personal assistant and the children inherited a staff with no mandate; because two siblings each assumed the office worked for them; because a brother-in-law was hired as chief executive and nobody had written down how to remove him; because the office paid for one branch of the family’s lifestyle out of assets all branches owned; or because the founder died and the office, which had never made a decision without him, could not make one.
Every one of those is a governance failure, and every one has a governance answer. Your office needs its own board, with someone on it who does not owe your family anything. Your family needs a forum — a council, or at least an annual meeting — separate from the office, where expectations about distributions and employment get settled before they reach the staff. And the ownership of the office and of the assets it manages needs a shareholder agreement with real exit terms, because the alternative in Ontario is the oppression remedy, which is slow, public and permanent. And the constitution needs to be written while the founder can still sign it. The offices that last are small, professional and rule-bound; the ones that do not are large, personal and improvised — and the difference is rarely visible from the lobby.
A family office, in the end, is a decision to run the family’s affairs like a business. Most founders spent their lives insisting the business be run properly — the office is where you find out whether you meant it.
Common questions
What is a family office?
A family office is a private organisation that manages the affairs of one wealthy family (a single-family office) or several families (a multi-family office): investments, tax and estate planning, oversight of family companies and real estate, philanthropy, administration, and preparing the next generation. Deloitte counts about 8,030 single-family offices worldwide, 3,180 of them in North America.
How much money do you need to set up a family office?
Most advisers cite roughly US$100 million of net worth as the point where a single-family office with its own staff becomes economic, and several Canadian advisers put the comfortable figure at $250 to $500 million. A multi-family office is typically available from about $25 million of investable assets, and a virtual family office from around $5 million. Complexity, not the dollar figure, is what actually drives the need.
How much does a family office cost to run?
Industry estimates for a single-family office run from about $500,000 to $5 million a year, and higher for a full team; one Ottawa family-office director puts payroll alone at $2 to $3 million. A common Canadian rule of thumb is that the office should cost no more than 2% of the family’s net worth per year.
What is the difference between a single-family office and a multi-family office?
A single-family office is a private company owned by one family that employs its own staff and serves only that family. By contrast, a multi-family office is a firm that serves several unrelated families for a fee, sharing staff, systems and cost. The virtual family office is a third model: a designated adviser coordinates outside specialists under one plan, with no fixed overhead.
Who should consider setting up a family office?
Families whose affairs have outgrown their existing advisers: several companies, trusts or properties with nobody holding the whole picture; two or more generations owning assets together; a recent or upcoming business sale; or holdings, family members or businesses in more than one country. A family with one liquid portfolio and one house usually does not need one, whatever its net worth.
Do celebrities have family offices?
Many do. TheWrap reports that Oprah Winfrey, Serena Williams, Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, George Lucas, and Beyoncé and Jay-Z use family offices, alongside executives such as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Michael Dell. Most entertainers do not: one prominent business manager notes that a single-family office rarely makes sense below US$100 million of net worth.
How do you set up a family office in Canada?
Agree the mandate in writing; incorporate a management company owned by the family that provides services to the family’s holding companies, trusts and individuals under documented agreements; reconcile it with any existing family trust or estate freeze; confirm it is not carrying on business as an adviser under National Instrument 31-103; separate it from the operating business; put governance in place (shareholder agreement, board with an outsider, investment policy, family constitution); then hire, starting with a CFO or controller.
Why does a family office need governance?
Because family offices rarely fail on investment returns; they fail on decisions nobody wrote down. Deloitte reports that 73% of family offices have a board, averaging four members with 58% family and the rest outside professionals. A board with an independent member, a shareholder agreement with exit terms, an investment policy statement, and a family constitution are what let the office keep working after the founder is gone.