Ideas

 —New Book Release —

Building a Sustainable Family Office

An Insider’s Perspective on What Works- and What Doesn’t

Release Date: July 9th, 2024

Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group

Family offices are the business entities that are created to primarily support a family’s wealth. For reasons explored in the book, family offices often are not successfully passed on from one generation to another, creating a lot of disruption for the family members, the ecosystem of providers, and the broader society which benefits from family office investing and philanthropy.

This book is authored by a family office principal who has experienced the building- and rebuilding- of his family office many times- from an embedded office, to a multi-family office, to a single family office. The book also includes the expertise and perspectives of dozens of other principals and expert service.

Written for both the new and experienced family office principal, Building a Sustainable Family Office provides an “insider’s view” of the opportunities and challenges of building a family office to last.

More From the Author

  • Six Tips for Bringing Family Office Capital to Impact Funds and Enterprises

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  • Do Impact Venture Capital Funds Outperform Traditional VC? Yes, No and Maybe

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  • The Promise and Reality of Family Offices and Sustainable Investing

    Read More

Sustainable Family Office Benchmarking Study

Sustainable Family Offices is a new benchmarking study that examines how family offices (FOs) of various sizes, structures, and operating in a variety of geographies, view and act on two critical forms of sustainability:

  1. Resilience and endurance, in terms of how well positioned FOs are to be passed from one generation to the next

  2. Resource and capital deployment, understanding the sustainability of FO investments, including sustainable investing in public markets as well as impact investing in private markets

Below are some top line findings:

  • Who is participating in this research and how are the offices structured? 

    • Over 65% are family principals

    • Size of family office $AUM- 1/3 under $100M; 1/3 between $100M and $1B; 1/3 over $1B

    • 35% outsource almost all the staff

    • 60% have already undergone at least 1 generational transition of the FO; 25% have seen their office passed through 2 generations or more

  • Family Office Sustainability is important, yet many offices are not embracing practices that help with sustainability.

    • The vast majority of respondents believe family office sustainability is important, and that their office will transition

    • The majority reported that all family members do not have FT or PT roles; spouses of family principals are more often not involved

    • The majority do not know who will be the successor to the current generation; most report that succession process is not transparent nor given enough time at meetings; majority are not regularly benchmarking other practices

  • Sustainable investing is growing in select pockets, market rate results are being achieved, additional capital to be deployed in the coming years.

    • The clear majority understand what sustainable investing is, and believe it is not concessionary to market rate to traditional benchmarks

    • The majority report that sustainable investments have performed as well as traditional investments, yet 43% don’t seem to know how performance has been (may be up or down)

    • While the majority of respondents have less than 25% committed to sustainable investments, there are another ~20% that have greater than 75% of total capital in sustainable investing; 60% of the total believe they will deploy more into sustainable investments in the next 3-5 years