A family with significant wealth eventually reaches a moment where the tools they have used for years stop being enough. The spreadsheets get unwieldy. The advisors multiply. The children grow up and start asking questions of their own. Someone in the family, often a founder or a next-generation member with a strong point of view, says the phrase everyone has been circling: maybe it is time we set up a family office.
There is nothing wrong with that instinct. A family office, done well, is a beautiful thing. It gathers the fragments of a family's financial life into one coordinated whole, professionalizes what used to be improvised, and gives the family a structure to grow into. For many families, it is the right decision.
But it is almost always the second decision, not the first. The first decision, the one families sometimes move past too quickly on the way to structure, is a harder one: what is the wealth for?
Structure feels safer than meaning. That is why families reach for it. A family office is a project you can hire people to run. Legal counsel, accountants, investment consultants, governance advisors, and search firms can be brought in to help you build it. There are conferences, benchmarks, and peer families to compare notes with. All of that is real, useful, and necessary. And all of it is downstream of the question no consultant can answer for you.
What is this wealth for? What do we, as a family, believe it should make possible? What should it protect, and what should it never become? What do we owe, and to whom? What kind of family do we want to be, five and fifty years from now, in relationship to what we have built?
When a family office is built before those questions are held, it becomes an expensive container for unresolved things. The office runs, the investments perform, the reports arrive on schedule, and underneath it all the family carries the same avoidances, power imbalances, generational disagreements, and unspoken assumptions it carried before. The structure does not resolve them. It just gives them a more organized place to live.
I have watched this pattern play out in different forms over many years, and one thing I have come to believe is that philanthropy is often the best place for a family to begin. Not because giving is more important than investing or governance, but because giving surfaces things the other conversations do not. When a family sits down to talk about what they want to support, and why, and who should decide, the conversation stops being about money and starts being about values. Power shows up. Trust shows up. Control shows up. Different generations disclose different priorities. What one family member assumed everyone believed turns out to be one person's view. What another assumed was off the table turns out to be exactly what someone else has been waiting to say.
These conversations are not always comfortable. They are almost always clarifying. And once a family has done some version of that work together, the structural questions get easier. Governance decisions have a reference point. Investment choices have a filter. Hiring choices reflect what the family wants the office to protect and express. The family office stops being a structure the family fits into and becomes a structure that fits the family.
Starting with values is not a delay. It is a form of protection against much more expensive misalignment later.
A few questions worth holding, together, before or while a family office takes shape:
What do we want this wealth to make possible?
What responsibilities come with it?
What do we want to practice together, as a family?
How do we want to make decisions, and who has voice in which decisions?
How will giving, investing, governance, and family learning relate to one another?
What should never be outsourced?
That last question is often the most useful one. Most of what a family office does can and should be delegated to skilled professionals. Some things, though, are the family's to carry: the values conversation, the intergenerational relationships, the sense of what the wealth is ultimately in service of. If those get outsourced by accident, the office quietly becomes the family's center of gravity, and the family orbits the structure it was supposed to serve.
The families I have watched build family offices well tend to do one thing in common. They treat the formation of the office as a family practice, not just a financial project. They give themselves time to hold the harder questions before, or alongside, the structural ones. They involve the next generation early, not as observers but as participants. And they use philanthropy, often, as the space where the family learns how to think together about what it values.
For families forming a family office, or rethinking one already in motion, that work is worth doing. It does not have to be handled alone. Philanthropic facilitation and values-alignment work, offered by an outside partner, can help a family move through those conversations with structure and care, so the family office you build ends up serving the family it was built for.
Build the office. Build it well. Just build it from the right center.
Shanon Solava is a Certified Impact Philanthropy Advisor and the author of Giving Without Grasping. She advises families, family offices, and foundations on the human side of philanthropy: purpose, values, family dynamics, and long-term stewardship. She holds two facilitation certifications from the Interaction Institute for Social Change and works with clients across the country from her home in Pennsylvania. Reach her at [email protected].