Structure, Strategy, & Staying Power!

Part Two: What Family Office CFOs Must Master Next

It’s not the markets that bring family offices undone. It’s the things they think they can deal with later – governance, structure, succession.

Left unchecked, these slow-burn issues can become generational landmines. But they’re also where smart CFOs can really make their mark.

More than finance: the strategy load

Compared to corporates, most family offices run lean. There are fewer layers, fewer departments, and often no COO or CIO.

These aren’t organisations built from corporate blueprints – they grow organically, often without formal structures or rigid reporting lines.

That creates a very different playing field for CFOs. Instead of just running systems, they often have to design them – stepping into roles well beyond traditional finance.

Because family offices exist to manage wealth – and wealth flows through financial structures – the CFO often becomes the organising spine. From investment structuring to tax, estate planning, cashflow strategy and even philanthropy, it all ends up in their domain.

“It’s all connected,” says Pedro Chauca, who has served as CFO of a private family office for over a decade. “I always say accounting is the backbone. At one moment or another, everything flows into it.”

That financial centrality gives the CFO visibility across the whole operation, from compliance and technology to HR and investor onboarding.

“The CFO becomes the person who knows everything,” Chauca notes. “That’s what makes the role so dynamic, and such an incredible learning experience.”

Governance doesn’t build itself

In most family offices, the early focus is on managing money and logistics, not designing a governance framework.

They also have a strong preference for informality, discretion, and agility, meaning governance, reporting structures, and accountability mechanisms tend to be reactive rather than planned – the assumption being ‘We’ll figure it out as we go.’

However, as a family office grows – and more assets, more entities, and more people get involved – that lack of structure starts causing tension.

Tamzin Weller, a fractional CFO who works with multiple family-run businesses, has seen this firsthand.

“One of my clients was fourth generation, and there was no cashflow forecasting, no budget, nothing,” she says. “That surprised me. But it’s more common than you’d think.”

She describes a slow process of rebuilding: introducing forecasting, then budgeting, then departmental reporting. Each step delivered at a pace the family could absorb.

“You have to show them what good looks like, in ways they can relate to,” Weller explains. “You can’t just impose corporate frameworks – it has to feel like a fit, or it won’t stick.”

Her mock-up reports and back-of-the-envelope metrics helped shift conversations from vague assumptions to more grounded, data-informed dialogue, giving family members clearer insights and helping to build trust in the process.

But the deeper issue is often about visibility.

“There’s this tension between transparency and control,” she says. “Long-term staff don’t always share the right info with the right people, and family members don’t always want accountability, especially when performance is patchy.”

Structure as leverage – and protection

After nearly a decade running a global family office with over $1 billion in assets, Ravi Underwood knows exactly what he’d do differently next time.

The first relates to governance.

“The way we had things set up could have been improved,” he says. “Looking back, I would have structured it differently.”

He points to another family office, Matsal, which was founded by Peter Mattick and Phil Salter of Salmat, and where governance was handled by a tight executive team, run like a corporate. The families had an intergenerational plan, received regular performance reports across their investments, and made the major decisions – but left the day-to-day operations to the professionals. This is now Underwood’s benchmark for how a family office should be run.

What else would he do differently?

“We tried to do a lot of the lower-level stuff in-house, and I found it very hard to hire and keep people,” Underwood says. “The family wanted to keep their information confidential. But when you bring people in, you’ve got to show them their bank accounts. You’ve got to show them the inner workings.”

The churn that happens at that level, he adds, created real risk.

“Team members in non-managerial, mainly administrative roles tend to come and go,” he says. “So, suddenly a whole lot of people know a whole lot of things.”

His takeaway is simple: for most offices, it’s smarter to outsource the routine work.

“There are firms that can do it a lot cheaper, with a lot less headache,” he says. “The amount of time I spent on HR issues or recruitment – I’d outsource that.”

Succession is never set-and-forget

Few CFOs understand the realities of succession planning better than Underwood. Years before the family patriarch passed away, he was already helping to lay the groundwork – managing cross-border structures, working with overseas trustees, and preparing the office for what came next.

“The family were very functional, and the planning started years in advance,” he recalls. “That made it smoother.”

But he believes that too many families treat succession like a one-off event, instead of an ongoing process. And he encourages families to revisit everything – from family agreements to the family charter – every 10 years. Because those structures must evolve as people’s lives and circumstances change.

“You need to build in the expectation that things will shift – and that’s not a failure of planning, it’s the nature of family,” he explains. “Even small changes – like a new spouse entering the picture or a family member stepping into a leadership role – can ripple through governance, reporting lines, and investment strategy.”

Luke Moon, who has spent most of his career inside family offices, agrees. In his view, succession planning is about resilience just as much as continuity.

“Families don’t operate on five-year investment horizons – they’re thinking in decades,” he says. “So the CFO has to design systems that are built for longevity, not just performance.”

That means always staying one step ahead – smoothing friction, managing distributions, and balancing emotional priorities with financial goals.

Strategic flexibility therefore becomes the defining skill. There is no playbook. There’s only what works for this family, right now, with room to evolve.

In that sense, the CFO is more than a custodian. They’re the architects of continuity, designing the systems and frameworks that carry the family forward for generations to come.

Read Part 1 of this series on the emotional and interpersonal dynamics of the family office CFO role here.