Most families who ask me about setting up a family office don’t actually need one — not their own, anyway. They need the function of a family office: coordinated investment oversight, tax and succession planning, reporting they can trust, someone accountable for the whole picture. A single-family office (SFO) is one way to get that.

For most families, it’s not the most efficient way. A multi-family office (MFO) — where several families share one platform, one team, one governance structure — usually gets you there faster, cheaper, and with qualified people involved.

What a single-family office actually costs — not just in monetary terms

Setting up an SFO isn’t just a budget line. It’s:

• Hiring a full team — CIO, controller, legal counsel, often before you know exactly what you need them to do
• Building governance from scratch — investment committees, reporting frameworks, risk controls that took the rest of the industry decades to refine
• Carrying that overhead in good years and bad — the team doesn’t shrink when performance does

The numbers back this up:

• Average SFO operating cost — around $3.2 million a year, per J.P. Morgan’s Global Family Office Report, before any external investment management fees
• Smaller offices ($50–500 million AUM) — average roughly $1.5 million annually just to keep the lights on; personnel alone typically accounts for 60–70% of that budget
• Minimum AUM to justify a standalone SFO — $250–500 million, per Campden Wealth — a threshold most wealthy families, even very wealthy ones, don’t clear

In most of the situations I’ve come across, the honest math only works at a scale well above what families assume when they start. The office ends up costing more to run than it saves — or protects — in a given year.

Governance: the part people underestimate

An SFO answers to one family. That sounds like control. In practice, it often means no external check on decisions, no benchmark for whether the team is actually performing, and succession risk concentrated in two or three people.

A multi-family office runs under governance built for multiple families at once — independent oversight, standardized reporting, investment decisions that get tested against more than one family’s blind spots. For families with cross-border holdings, multiple generations involved, or succession still being worked out, that outside structure tends to matter more, not less.

Talent access

A single family, on its own, is rarely able to attract or retain top-tier investment and tax talent — that talent goes where the platform and the deal flow are. A shared platform can support specialists an SFO of comparable size couldn’t justify hiring full-time: tax structuring across jurisdictions, alternative investments due diligence, dedicated succession planning.

What a professional multi-family office actually does

It’s worth being specific, because “family office services” is a phrase that gets used loosely. At One Family Wealth, the work our clients rely on us for breaks down into a few concrete areas:

• Investment oversight and reporting — consolidated reporting across banks, custodians, and asset managers, so a family sees one true picture instead of reconciling statements from half a dozen institutions themselves
• Tax and structuring advice — coordinating across jurisdictions where a family holds assets, does business, or has family members resident
• Succession and governance planning — putting a framework in place before the next generation needs it, not after
• Access to vetted managers and opportunities — deal flow and manager relationships that come from managing multiple families’ capital, not one
• A single point of accountability — one team who knows the full picture, rather than a family coordinating lawyers, bankers, and accountants who don’t talk to each other

This is the same scope of work an SFO is built to cover. The difference is that a multi-family office already has the infrastructure and the people in place — a family joins a platform instead of building one.

It’s also why the model has grown into a serious part of the wealth management industry rather than a lesser alternative to going it alone.

Why this model fits global, cross-border families

The families who benefit most from this structure share a pattern, regardless of where they’re based or what industry built their wealth:

• Assets and entities spread across multiple jurisdictions
• Family members resident in different countries
• A business that has to be managed alongside the family’s wealth
• Succession that needs to account for both

That pattern shows up constantly in shipping and other businesses; it’s one of the clearest examples of where this model earns its keep, and it’s a core part of what we do. But it isn’t unique to any one industry or region. We work with families wherever that same cross-border complexity exists.

Cyprus is our base, not the boundary of who we serve. The EU access, treaty network, and corporate and trust structuring options here make it a practical hub for coordinating wealth that spans multiple countries — useful whether a family is based in Greece, elsewhere in Europe, or further afield.

What I tell families before they build their own office

Before you build something, ask what you’re actually trying to solve for. Almost nobody says it’s privacy or control when we dig into it — it’s trust.

Trust that the people managing the wealth understand the family, take the calls, get the reporting right the first time. You can get all of that from a platform that already has the team, the track record, and the governance in place. Building your own office doesn’t buy you more of that trust — it just adds a payroll to manage on top of it.

FAQ

What’s the difference between a single-family office and a multi-family office?

An SFO serves one family exclusively and is fully owned and staffed by that family. An MFO serves several families on a shared platform, with shared governance, infrastructure, and often shared cost.

At what net worth does a family office make sense?

This depends more on complexity than net worth alone. Industry benchmarks put the minimum AUM to justify a standalone single-family office at roughly $250–500 million — but the number of jurisdictions involved, how many generations are part of the decision-making, and the range of asset types typically matter just as much as a wealth threshold.

Is a multi-family office less private than a single-family office?

No — reputable MFOs operate under strict confidentiality and segregation between client families, similar to how a private bank handles multiple clients without cross-exposure.

Can a family move from an SFO to an MFO, or vice versa?

Yes — this transition is common as family needs, generational structure, or complexity change over time.

What makes One Family Wealth different from other multi-family offices?

Three things.

Our team is led by George Papastylianou, Managing Director, who brings 20 years of experience advising high–net–worth and business-owning families on wealth, tax, and succession matters.

We keep our client base deliberately small, so families work directly with senior members of the team rather than being handed off to junior staff or a rotating point of contact.

And as a Cyprus–based multi–family office, we operate within the regulatory framework that governs wealth management and fiduciary services in Cyprus – giving families the same standard of oversight and accountability they’d expect from a much larger institution, without the overhead of building it themselves.

Let’s Talk

If you’re considering whether to build your own office or join a platform that already has the team, the governance, and the track record in place — that’s exactly the conversation we have with families every week. Get in touch with One Family Wealth to talk it through.

Sources

J.P. Morgan Private Bank, Global Family Office Report (2026 edition). Campden Wealth, European Family Office Report. With Intelligence / S&P Global, Multi-Family Office Asset Pools Report (2026). UBS, Global Family Office Report.