Training for managing a single family office

I have ~10 years professional experience in tech and am now an investor at a venture capital firm. My partner (married) through accident of birth and an unexpected succession cycle is now relocating home (different continent) to take on a multi-generational family business (100% family controlled).

Most family assets have typically lived on the company balance sheet and there hasn't been a separate "family office" entity, which is not optimal for beneficiaries who do not wish to live in the homeland or join the family firm, or to preserve wealth by hedging against a business that is largely exposed to boom-bust cycles (construction).

As such the "next generation" is looking to establish a separate single family office vehicle, and I've been asked to step in to help this process (with professional advisors) with a view that I could take a management role on in the near-term, possibly aided by a hired CIO and small team.

It would be excellent if anyone with experience in asset management/wealth management who has had exposure to family offices could advise on whether it would be a sensible path to join a European wealth management company for 24-36 months to get exposure to endowment-style asset management strategies in preparation to take on such an enterprise?

This is a question of investment/operational skillset rather than governance. 

It's an unlikely set of circumstances and I'm keen to build a better-informed view. It does matter to me that the skills I develop are transferrable to an adjacent career in case life takes a dramatic turn should this be an enterprise I involve myself in. 

Thanks in advance. 

4 Comments
 

This is heavily dependent on the pwm shop, but alot of PWM do not even know much about investing (they are there to sell and make money, not to invest) about investing, even from an OCIO perspective, much less about direct investing. Granted, there are some wealth managers that do have much more sound investment strategies (they usually come from an AM background) and a lot of times run very similar asset allocation strategies to OCIOs. Those shops would be a good learning experience, but you have to vet the shop. If you want to learn about how pensions and endowments manage money through professional work experience, it would be better to work a large institution’s investment management team, or at an OCIO, or OCIO side of an asset manager/banks AM arm on the pension and endowment side.

 

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