4 ms·

On one hand > There are now around 10,000 family offices On the other hand > And yet with so much extraordinary client discretion, it can almost feel like th

On one hand > There are now around 10,000 family offices On the other hand > And yet with so much extraordinary client discretion, it can almost feel like this $6 trillion industry doesn’t exist at all. 10,000 family offices x 10 staff on average (made up number, the article mentions 100 people in one of them) = 100,000 people, which is not a small number of people. How does an industry that is at once so discreet and employs so many people find staff? How could I work for a family office if I had experience in business/management/finance/real estate/etc.? Honest question, where do I find these jobs? Connections, you might say, but I find it hard to believe that 100,000 people could all have personal connections. Surely some of these people must be cold hires, people with no previous connections to the owners.

voisin 4y ago
> How does an industry that is at once so discreet and employs so many people find staff? How could I work for a family office if I had experience in business/management/finance/real estate/etc.? Honest question, where do I find these jobs? Like any other hedge fund or private equity fund. There are recruiters and job boards. Many of the aforementioned fund types actually source the majority of their funds from individuals or families, and would actually be considered family offices.
Galanwe 4y ago
I work in finance since ~15 years, essentially in quant hedge funds. I have some friends that work or worked in family offices, and I was proposed to work at some. The term is very vague and encompass very different entities. At its core, a family office is a kind of "prop shop" (a company trading with its own money, not client's money) where the original funds are from a single very high net worth person, or family. There's a lot of them in Asia, as VHNW families/individuals are common (especially in mainland China). It's a little bit less common in US/EU, where people usually employ "wealth managers". > How could I work for a family office if I had experience in business/management/finance/real estate/etc.? It really depends on the kind of office. I would say most of the time it would go through connections and networking, but some people will be recruited directly on the job market for rank & file positions. In the case of the proposition I had, it was a guy whose family is VHNW. The guy was a professor of econometrics at a top US university, so he convinced his family to let him start a shop to manage their money. I was presented to him through connections. I ended up declining, and he ended up hiring 3/4 people through a mix of friend connections & recommendations, and a student he supervised the PhD of. > Honest question, where do I find these jobs? In all honesty, family offices are rarely the most interesting jobs. It can pay really well, but you often end up in some small microcosm of politics subject to the desires of the King owner. Would not recommend 90% of them.

voisin 4y ago

> How does an industry that is at once so discreet and employs so many people find staff? How could I work for a family office if I had experience in business/management/finance/real estate/etc.? Honest question, where do I find these jobs? Like any other hedge fund or private equity fund. There are recruiters and job boards. Many of the aforementioned fund types actually source the majority of their funds from individuals or families, and would actually be considered family offices.

Galanwe 4y ago

I work in finance since ~15 years, essentially in quant hedge funds. I have some friends that work or worked in family offices, and I was proposed to work at some. The term is very vague and encompass very different entities. At its core, a family office is a kind of "prop shop" (a company trading with its own money, not client's money) where the original funds are from a single very high net worth person, or family. There's a lot of them in Asia, as VHNW families/individuals are common (especially in mainland China). It's a little bit less common in US/EU, where people usually employ "wealth managers". > How could I work for a family office if I had experience in business/management/finance/real estate/etc.? It really depends on the kind of office. I would say most of the time it would go through connections and networking, but some people will be recruited directly on the job market for rank & file positions. In the case of the proposition I had, it was a guy whose family is VHNW. The guy was a professor of econometrics at a top US university, so he convinced his family to let him start a shop to manage their money. I was presented to him through connections. I ended up declining, and he ended up hiring 3/4 people through a mix of friend connections & recommendations, and a student he supervised the PhD of. > Honest question, where do I find these jobs? In all honesty, family offices are rarely the most interesting jobs. It can pay really well, but you often end up in some small microcosm of politics subject to the desires of the King owner. Would not recommend 90% of them.