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Quick Answer
A family office does not need a large team to be effective. The right structure depends on the family's complexity, investment strategy, number of entities and generations, and which functions are kept in-house versus outsourced.
A typical family office may include leadership, finance, investments, operations and administrative roles, supported by external tax, legal, accounting, investment and security specialists.
Increasingly, technology allows family offices to operate with leaner internal teams. MyFO connects entities, ownership structures, assets and liabilities, transactions, documents, reporting, forecasting and workflows in one operating environment.
But MyFO isn't designed only for the professionals running the family office. It is designed for the entire family. Every family member can have a tailored view of their own financial world, while the family-office team works from the same underlying source of truth.
Key Takeaways
- There is no standard family-office org chart.
- Family-office structure should follow the family's needs rather than AUM alone.
- CEO/Managing Director, CFO, CIO and operations roles have very different responsibilities.
- Not every function needs to be performed internally.
- Family offices increasingly combine internal teams with outsourced specialists.
- Technology can reduce administrative workload across virtually every family-office role.
- Transaction data collected in MyFO can be extracted and incorporated into the accounting system a family office chooses to use.
- Every family member can have a tailored view of their ownership, assets, performance and documents.
- Family members can include personal assets outside the family office to create a more complete view of their wealth.
- The best structure minimizes duplicated work while maintaining clear accountability and visibility.
What Does the Research Show?
Family offices are becoming increasingly professionalized.
Deloitte's global family-office research found that family offices spend approximately 30% of their time on portfolio management, 22% on direct investing and 19% on administration and compliance. In North America, administration and compliance account for approximately 27% of family-office time.
That administrative burden helps explain why operating structure matters.
Deloitte has also found that family offices are increasingly hiring professional talent and using third-party providers. In its research, 40% of family offices planned to hire additional staff, while roughly one-third were increasingly relying on third parties to improve service levels and expand capabilities.
Campden Wealth's 2025 Operational Excellence Report similarly emphasizes that modern family offices must make deliberate decisions about which services to provide internally, which to outsource and where technology should be deployed. Its study covered 146 family offices across North America, Europe and Asia.
What Does a Typical Family Office Structure Look Like?
A mature family office may broadly be organized into five functions:
Family / Principals
↓
CEO / Managing Director
↓
Investments | Finance | Operations | Administration
↓
External Tax | Legal | Accounting | Investment | Cybersecurity Specialists
But the exact structure can vary enormously.
A lean family office may have only two or three internal employees.
A billion-dollar institutional family office may employ dozens.
The objective isn't necessarily to build the largest team. It is to determine which capabilities need to exist and then decide whether each should be handled by an employee, an external specialist or technology.
1. CEO / Managing Director
Primary Responsibility
The CEO or Managing Director is responsible for the family office as an organization.
Typical responsibilities include:
- Translating family objectives into strategy
- Coordinating advisors
- Managing staff
- Overseeing major decisions
- Managing risk
- Implementing family decisions
- Monitoring the office's performance
- Communicating with family leadership
Deloitte notes that family-office leaders often need a combination of trust, knowledge of family-office operations, service-delivery experience and the ability to communicate effectively with the family.
How MyFO Helps the CEO
The CEO should not have to ask five employees for five different reports to understand what is happening.
MyFO gives leadership a consolidated view across:
- Net worth
- Entities and ownership
- Investments
- Liabilities
- Documents
- Stakeholders
- Reporting
- Forecasts
- Transactions
- Tasks
This gives the CEO an operating view of the family office rather than simply an investment report.
2. Chief Investment Officer
Primary Responsibility
The CIO oversees investment strategy.
Responsibilities may include:
- Asset allocation
- Manager selection
- Direct investments
- Portfolio construction
- Risk
- Liquidity
- Investment committee materials
- Performance monitoring
UBS's 2025 Global Family Office Report surveyed 317 SFOs with average family wealth of $2.7 billion and average family-office AUM of $1.1 billion, illustrating the scale and complexity of investment oversight within sophisticated offices.
How MyFO Helps the CIO
MyFO allows the investment team to see wealth across both public and private assets.
The CIO can use MyFO for:
- Consolidated asset allocation
- Public and private investment visibility
- Look-through ownership
- Capital commitments
- Cash-flow forecasting
- Scenario modeling
- Exposure analysis
- Performance reporting
- Investment documents
This matters because an investment decision cannot be evaluated properly without understanding the family's complete balance sheet.
For example, before making another $20 million private-market commitment, the CIO should be able to see existing commitments, upcoming capital calls, available liquidity and future cash requirements.
3. Chief Financial Officer
Primary Responsibility
The CFO oversees the financial integrity of the family office.
Responsibilities may include:
- Financial reporting
- Liquidity management
- Accounting oversight
- Tax coordination
- Debt management
- Entity reporting
- Cash forecasting
- Controls
- External accountants
How MyFO Helps the CFO
MyFO provides a consolidated financial and operating layer across the family office.
The CFO can see:
- Assets and liabilities
- Entity ownership
- Account balances
- Debt
- Capital calls
- Distributions
- Cash-flow forecasts
- Transactions
- Documents
- Consolidated reporting
Importantly, MyFO does not require the family office to replace its accounting system.
Transaction data can be extracted from MyFO and incorporated into the accounting or general-ledger system the family office chooses to use. MyFO can therefore act as the broader aggregation and operating layer while the accounting platform remains the system of record for formal accounting.
This is particularly useful for CFOs, controllers, accountants and outsourced accounting providers because they can work from centralized transaction and investment data without requiring the family office to change its preferred accounting system.
4. Controller / Accounting Team
Primary Responsibility
Controllers and accountants may handle:
- Books and records
- Reconciliations
- Financial statements
- Entity accounting
- Transaction classification
- Tax packages
- Intercompany activity
How MyFO Helps the Accounting Team
Accounting teams frequently spend substantial time collecting and organizing information before accounting can even begin.
MyFO centralizes:
- Transaction data
- Statements
- Entity information
- Investment records
- Capital-call documents
- Distribution notices
- Supporting documents
Transaction data can then be extracted from MyFO and incorporated into the accounting system or workflow the family office uses.
This means MyFO can support an internal controller, a full accounting department or an outsourced accounting firm without requiring the family office to adopt a specific general ledger.
MyFO's AI document ingestion can also extract structured information from financial documents and surface it for human review before it enters downstream workflows.
That reduces re-keying and gives accounting professionals cleaner source information.
5. Chief Operating Officer / Operations Lead
Primary Responsibility
Operations connects everything.
Responsibilities may include:
- Processes
- Technology
- Vendors
- Workflows
- Data
- Security coordination
- Reporting processes
- Staff productivity
How MyFO Helps Operations
This is one of MyFO's strongest use cases.
MyFO connects operational records that traditionally live in different systems.
For example, a capital call can connect:
Document → Investment → Entity → Cash-Flow Forecast → Task → Reporting
Instead of information being copied between spreadsheets, inboxes, folders and different applications, the underlying objects are connected.
That reduces manual handoffs between employees and gives operations a clearer picture of what needs to happen across the family office.
6. Investment Analyst
Primary Responsibility
Investment analysts may handle:
- Performance
- Manager research
- Portfolio analysis
- Private-market monitoring
- Investment committee materials
- Capital-call tracking
How MyFO Helps the Analyst
Instead of assembling information manually, analysts can work from centralized investment and entity data.
Public and private assets can be viewed together, while private-market documents can be linked directly to the appropriate investment and entity.
Analysts can see performance, ownership, commitments, transactions and supporting documents without rebuilding the family's investment picture for every analysis.
That allows analysts to spend more time interpreting information rather than collecting it.
7. Family Office Associate
Primary Responsibility
Associates frequently become the connective tissue of a family office.
They may:
- Update records
- Collect documents
- Prepare reports
- Coordinate advisors
- Track deadlines
- Manage capital calls
- Maintain entity information
How MyFO Helps the Associate
Many of these are exactly the tasks technology can reduce.
MyFO centralizes the records that associates otherwise maintain across spreadsheets, folders, email and separate systems.
Documents can be connected to the assets, investments and entities they relate to. Tasks can be associated with the work that needs to happen. Information can be updated once rather than repeatedly recreated for different people.
This can shift the associate's role from:
information maintenance
toward:
information oversight.
8. Chief of Staff
Primary Responsibility
A Chief of Staff often sits between the family and the office.
Responsibilities can include:
- Family coordination
- Strategic projects
- Meeting preparation
- Advisor coordination
- Governance
- Administration
- Family requests
How MyFO Helps the Chief of Staff
MyFO's stakeholder directory, documents, tasks and financial information give the Chief of Staff a central operating environment.
Role-based access means family members and advisors can be given access to the information relevant to them rather than relying on repeated email requests.
This becomes particularly valuable in larger or multigenerational families where different family members have different ownership interests, documents and information needs.
9. Tax, Legal and External Advisors
These roles are commonly outsourced.
How MyFO Helps
A family office may work with multiple accountants, tax professionals, lawyers, estate planners and other external specialists.
Instead of repeatedly assembling information for each advisor, the family office can maintain structured information centrally and provide controlled access where appropriate.
Documents can be connected directly to the relevant:
- Entity
- Asset
- Liability
- Investment
Transaction data can also be extracted for accountants and tax professionals and incorporated into the systems they use.
This allows the family office to outsource specialized expertise while maintaining greater control over its underlying information.
10. Family Members and Principals
Family members are not simply "users."
They are the reason the family office exists.
And different members of the same family may have completely different financial lives.
One family member may own interests in several family entities, private investments and trusts. Another may have different ownership interests as well as personal investments or assets held entirely outside the family office.
That means a family-office system shouldn't be designed around only one principal or one consolidated family view.
How MyFO Helps Every Family Member
This is an important part of why the platform is called My Family Office.
Each family member can have a tailored view based on what they own and what is relevant to them.
Depending on their permissions and ownership, a family member can see:
- Their assets and liabilities
- Their interests in family entities
- How those entities and assets are owned
- Their ownership structure
- Public and private investments
- Investment performance
- Relevant documents
- Capital commitments and distributions
- Other information they need to understand and manage their financial life
Family members can also bring personal assets held outside the family office into their own view.
For example, a family member may have investments, real estate or other assets that are not administered by the central family office. Those assets can still form part of their personal MyFO view.
This gives each family member a more complete picture of their wealth, not simply the portion managed by the family office.
At any given time, a family member should be able to answer:
What do I own?
How do I own it?
What is it worth?
How has it performed?
What documents are associated with it?
Instead of calling the family office every time they need an answer, family members can have direct access to the information relevant to them.
At the same time, permissions allow the family office to control which information is visible to each stakeholder.
MyFO therefore isn't a product designed around a single principal user. It creates a shared family-office infrastructure while giving each family member their own personalized family-office experience.
What Should You Outsource?
Not every capability needs to sit inside the family office.
Commonly outsourced functions include:
- Tax
- Legal
- Cybersecurity
- Specialized accounting
- Investment management
- Estate planning
- Insurance
- Specialized due diligence
The family office can retain oversight and data ownership without employing every specialist.
Technology makes this model easier because information does not need to leave with the function being outsourced.
For example, accounting can be outsourced while transaction and financial information remains centralized in MyFO and is extracted into the accounting systems used by the external provider.
A Lean Family Office Structure
A modern lean family office might consist of:
Managing Director
CFO / Finance Lead
Operations / Family Office Associate
supported by external investment, tax, legal, accounting and cybersecurity specialists.
Technology provides much of the connective infrastructure.
The objective isn't to eliminate professional expertise. It is to reduce the amount of professional time spent collecting information, moving data between systems and manually maintaining records.
A Larger Family Office Structure
A more institutional office might include:
CEO
→ CIO → Investment Team
→ CFO → Controller → Accounting Team
→ COO → Operations / Technology
→ Chief of Staff → Family Services
with external specialists supporting each group.
Technology remains important even when the family office has a larger team because it gives those professionals a common source of truth and reduces duplicated work between departments.
How MyFO Connects the Entire Family Office
The advantage of a shared family-office operating system is not simply that every employee works from the same underlying information.
The family, the family-office team and outside professionals can all interact with the same financial infrastructure in different ways.
The CEO can see the entire family office.
The CIO can focus on investments, performance, exposures and liquidity.
The CFO can oversee the family's financial position and extract transaction data into the accounting systems used by the office.
The accounting team can access the records and source information it needs.
External tax, legal and accounting professionals can be given controlled access to relevant information.
And each family member can have a tailored view showing their ownership, assets, performance and documents, including personal assets that may sit outside the family office.
The underlying information is connected, but the experience is tailored to the person using it.
The Bottom Line
There is no ideal family-office headcount.
The objective is to build the smallest capable organization that gives the family the expertise, control and continuity it needs.
Technology changes that equation.
When every role works from a common source of truth, fewer people need to spend their time collecting, copying and reconciling information. Transaction data can flow into the accounting systems the family office already uses. External specialists can perform their roles without forcing the family to fragment its information across providers.
That allows family-office professionals to spend more time doing the work they were actually hired to do.
But the ultimate purpose of that infrastructure is the family.
Every family member can have a tailored view of their financial world: what they own, how they own it, what it is worth, how it has performed and the documents associated with it. They can even incorporate assets outside the family office to create a more complete picture of their personal wealth.
That is the idea behind My Family Office: one connected family-office infrastructure, with a personalized view for every member of the family.
Research & Sources
- Family Office Exchange, 2025 Family Office Benchmarking Study
- Campden Wealth & AlTi Tiedemann Global, Family Office Operational Excellence Report 2025
- Deloitte Private, Family Office Insights Series
- UBS, Global Family Office Report 2025
- Deloitte, The Art of Forming Your Family Office
- MyFO product and workflow documentation
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