By Aidan Sowa, CEO and Founder, Frontier Industries | October 2026
The oldest family offices were founded on a single instruction: be rich quietly. That instruction is getting harder to obey. Deloitte counted 8,030 single family offices worldwide in its 2024 global study, overseeing an estimated 3.1 trillion dollars, and the average principal is now 68 years old, which means thousands of successions are queued inside one decade. Successors live in public. Deals arrive through networks. Staff are recruited in the open. This guide is about choosing an agency whose first skill is not publicity. It is control over exactly who knows what.
8,030: single family offices worldwide (Deloitte Family Office Insights, 2024) 3.1 trillion dollars: estimated assets under management across those offices (Deloitte, 2024) 68: average age of the family office principal (Deloitte, 2024)
I Silentium
Your product is privacy, so your PR is a precision instrument
Begin with the distinction that separates this category from every other in finance. A fund markets to strangers. A family office protects a household. Publicity is not an asset here; calibrated visibility is, aimed at perhaps two hundred people on earth: deal sponsors, co investors, bankers, future recruits and the occasional regulator.
An agency that opens with a media list has failed the interview. The first question a serious candidate asks is what must never be known, and only later what might usefully be known, and by whom.
The loudest family office in the room is rarely the one that gets shown the best deals. Discretion is a sorting mechanism, and the best counterparties use it.
II Domus
The household is becoming an institution in public view, whether it votes for that or not
Deloitte's 2024 survey of 354 single family offices found professionalization everywhere: offices hiring from financial services, building boards, outsourcing functions and formalising governance. Seventy three percent of offices in the regions surveyed reported having a board of directors.
Institutions leave records. Boards, philanthropic foundations, property purchases, direct investments and senior hires all generate searchable traces, and journalists who cover wealth now assemble those traces professionally. The office that has never planned its public outline discovers that outline exists anyway, drawn by others.
That is the mechanism your agency manages. Not fame. The outline. Families who ignore it are not invisible; they are merely described by strangers.
Some of the outline is compulsory, which offices forget at their cost. A private foundation files a public Form 990 PF, listing grants, assets and trustees for anyone in the world to read, and property records, corporate registries and court files add their own pages every year. Skilled advisors treat those filings as publications, because journalists and counterparties treat them that way: consistent, accurate and deliberately dull, filed on time, telling one coherent story across decades. The agency worth hiring audits the compulsory outline before proposing a single voluntary word in public. For a sense of how institutions in adjacent categories handle the same problem, work through the industry resources library and count how many of your peer households appear in it on their own terms.
III Exemplum
The direct investment announcement is where discipline shows
Consider a composite drawn from the pattern Deloitte describes: an office of average size runs about 386 million dollars, with direct investment named a core priority by 22 percent of offices surveyed. When such an office buys a company, four audiences read the announcement. Sellers of the next company judge whether this buyer is serious and discreet. The acquired management team judges whether to stay. Local press judges whether jobs are safe. The family's own next generation judges whether the office looks like a place to build a life.
One announcement, four verdicts. The agency that drafts it must know which audience is primary and write to that verdict, in that order, every time.
Offices that treat deal announcements as trophies write them for the first audience and offend the other three. Offices that treat them as governance write less, say it once, and get called first on the next deal.
Philanthropy is the second genre where the discipline shows, and it is the one place the family name is meant to travel. A grant announcement is read by the grantee's other funders, by the community receiving the money and by other families calibrating their own giving. Written with the recipient at the centre and the family in a supporting clause, it builds the kind of public meaning a family can be proud to be found by. Written as a celebration of the donor, it produces the particular embarrassment this category exists to prevent. The drafting rule is simple enough to tape to a wall: the family is never the hero of its own generosity.
IV Posteritas
Succession is the story you cannot schedule and cannot afford to improvise
With the average principal at 68, succession is the largest reputational event on the family office calendar, and Deloitte found confidence in the next generation is a live concern, with training and preparation now a stated focus across the sector. After succession, its data suggests leadership splits almost evenly between next generation family members and non family professionals.
Each path carries a different public meaning. A family successor needs a record built patiently in advance: operating roles, philanthropic leadership, quoted judgment. A professional chief executive needs the family visibly united behind the appointment, because counterparties price internal doubt instantly.
An agency engaged only after the announcement is doing archaeology. The ones worth hiring raise succession communications two years early, in the first meeting, and are comfortable being told it is none of their business until it is.
Plan also for the unplanned version, because principals are mortal and markets are impatient. A sudden death or incapacity compresses every decision in this section into one week, in public, while the family grieves and counterparties quietly test the office's continuity. The deliverable is unglamorous: pre drafted statements for the two or three scenarios, a named interim voice, an order of notification that runs from family to staff to banks to portfolio companies to press, and a rule that no one improvises condolences on social media. Offices that hold this file are not being morbid. They are being governed, and the file's existence is itself a message to anyone who ever learns of it.
V Fiducia
The controlling variable is who else gets read into the room
Every advisor a family office hires becomes a potential source: bankers, lawyers, recruiters, and yes, communications firms. In a category built on confidentiality, the agency's own information discipline is the product. Ask how files are stored, who inside the firm sees the account, whether staff are named and stable, and what happens to records when the engagement ends.
There is a second variable: regulatory perimeter. Single family offices sit outside investment adviser registration under the family office exclusion in the Advisers Act, which is one reason the sector guards its privacy so carefully. Public activity that blurs the line, marketing investment services to outsiders, for instance, is not a PR error. It is a legal event. Your agency must know where that line sits and refuse briefs that cross it, out loud, in the meeting. The scope discipline you should expect is modelled on this services page; compare it with the promises candidates make you.
VI Segmenta
A single family office, a multi family office and a private trust company buy opposite things
| Structure | Visibility problem | Coverage that serves it | Coverage that endangers it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single family office, direct investor | Deal flow without fame | Private briefings, one or two trade titles in its sectors, sponsor relationships | Wealth rankings and rich list journalism |
| Single family office, portfolio only | Recruiting and banking confidence | Quiet institutional presence, philanthropy reporting | Lifestyle coverage of the family itself |
| Multi family office | It must market, carefully, to a tiny audience | Invitation only events, referral source education, white papers under embargo | Anything resembling retail advertising |
| Family foundation | Public benefit reporting and grant making reputation | Annual reporting done beautifully, grantee storytelling with consent | Announcements that read as self congratulation |
| Family owned operating business office | Two reputations, company and family, to keep separate | Trade press for the business, silence for the household | Coverage that merges the family name into product marketing |
VII Occasio
Professionalization has created a speaking circuit with empty chairs
Deloitte found offices racing to professionalise: hiring, outsourcing, building technology strategy, with 43 percent developing or rolling out a technology plan in the year surveyed, and nearly three quarters admitting they are underinvested in the operational technology a modern office needs.
Conferences and private networks for chief investment officers, chief operating officers and family principals have multiplied to serve that shift. Their stages are not yet crowded. An office willing to send a senior non family executive to explain, on the record, how it rebuilt reporting or governance will be quoted in the rooms where deals and recruits circulate.
Visibility inside the fence, invisibility outside it. That is the whole strategy in one sentence, and it is currently underpriced.
VIII Aequitas
A small office with clean governance outranks a famous fortune with a messy outline
Counterparties do not diligence families the way journalists do. They look for coherence: does the foundation's reporting match the office's claims, does the executive's public record match the family's values statement, does anything embarrassing surface in the first hour of searching.
A modest office with a coherent, current, boring public outline passes that test faster than a celebrated fortune trailing contradictory coverage across twenty years. Boring is a strategy. It is also achievable at any size, which makes it the great equaliser of this category.
Hire the agency that promises you a cleaner search result, not a louder one. In this market, the absence of noise is the loudest signal of competence there is.
IX Consilium
Select for discretion infrastructure first, craft second, contacts third
| Agency type | What you gain | What you give up | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Private client and reputation firm | Confidentiality culture, crisis experience with wealthy families | Sector deal fluency | Offices whose main risk is exposure |
| Financial communications boutique | Deal announcement craft, sponsor and banker literacy | Family governance sensitivity | Direct investing offices |
| Family office specialist consultancy | Peer knowledge, network access, succession experience | Scale and out of hours cover | Offices in transition between generations |
| Large firm private client practice | Global reach, legal media depth | Partner attention, staff continuity | Families with interests in several countries |
| Criterion | Weight | What good looks like | Red flag |
|---|---|---|---|
| Confidentiality systems | 25 percent | Named team, restricted files, references from private clients given discreetly | Case studies naming family clients |
| Perimeter judgment | 20 percent | Raises the adviser registration line and rich list risk unprompted | Proposes a profile to raise the family's profile |
| Deal craft | 20 percent | Announcements written for four audiences in the right order | Trophy language in sample releases |
| Succession experience | 15 percent | Has managed a generational transition on either path | Treats succession as a press release |
| Network quality | 10 percent | Opens doors to sponsors and peer offices, verifiably | Promises media volume |
| Crisis conduct | 10 percent | A rehearsed plan for a leak, a lawsuit and a death | Reassurance that crises are manageable |
Design the engagement to be boring. A sensible structure is a small retainer against a defined maintenance load: quarterly review of the public outline, monitoring of the family name across news and filings, pre drafted positions for the five foreseeable events, and a surge protocol with named humans for the day something breaks. Review the arrangement annually with the same question a trustee would ask: what did not happen this year because this existed. Agencies accustomed to consumer work find the quiet intolerable and will try to manufacture activity. Resist them. In this category the invoice is for the silence, and the silence is verifiable.
X Quaesita
Questions principals and chief executives ask us
If we want no publicity at all, why hire an agency?
Because no publicity is an outcome that must be engineered, not a default. Someone must monitor what surfaces, correct the record when a deal leaks, prepare the family for the announcement that will eventually be forced, and keep the outline coherent. Invisibility is a maintained condition. Unmaintained, it decays into mystery, and mystery invites investigation.
Can an agency keep us off rich lists and rankings?
It can reduce the surface: correct stale figures through the proper channels, decline participation professionally, and avoid feeding the inputs rankings use. It cannot erase public filings. An honest candidate tells you which lists are methodology driven and which are negotiable, and the difference is a good test of the field. The people behind this guide describe their approach on the industries team page.
How should a multi family office market without looking like it is marketing?
By educating referral sources in closed rooms: accountants, estate lawyers and bankers who advise the families you want. White papers under embargo, small dinners, an annual letter worth forwarding. The audience is perhaps three hundred professionals. Everything public should look like a by product of that programme, never the programme itself.
When should succession communications begin?
Roughly two years before the expected transition, and quietly: building the successor's own record in operating or philanthropic roles, aligning the foundation's reporting, and preparing the announcement architecture for both the planned path and the sudden one. Families that begin at the announcement discover that the audience has already formed its view.
What belongs in a family office crisis plan?
A leak of wealth figures, litigation involving a family member, a portfolio company scandal, a death, and a data breach at the office itself. Deloitte's offices rank cyber threats among their core concerns, and an office breach is a family breach. Each scenario needs a holding statement, a decision maker and a rule about who in the family is informed in what order.
Should the family name be on the office at all?
Sometimes. A name aids deal flow where the family's business record is respected, and burdens everything where it is merely famous. Many offices now operate under neutral names precisely to separate the household from the institution. Your agency should be able to argue both sides with evidence from your sector, not with a preference of its own.
Should the office have a website at all?
Usually a minimal one, and the minimalism is the craft. A single page that confirms the office exists, names the professional leadership, gives a contact route for counterparties and says nothing about the family performs real work: it occupies the search result that would otherwise be filled by wealth speculation sites and data scrapers. Offices that refuse any presence do not get privacy in return. They get a vacuum, and the internet fills vacuums with estimates, old addresses and photographs of the wrong house. Control the thinnest possible version of the truth, and let everything else be silence.
How do we judge the first year?
By absences and by arrivals. Absences: no surprises in search, no leaks traced to your own side, no ranking you did not choose. Arrivals: better deal introductions, recruits who cite the office's professionalism unprompted, counterparties who describe you as straightforward. Families in the next chair of complexity will recognise the same standard in the guide to choosing a PR agency for alternative investment firms.
XI Methodus
How this guide was built, and its blind spots
The market frame comes from Deloitte Private's Family Office Insights Series, 2024 global edition, built on a survey of 354 single family offices and forty executive interviews, supplemented by the series companion research on technology adoption. Structural points about adviser registration reflect the family office exclusion under the United States Investment Advisers Act.
Blind spots, declared. Survey respondents are offices willing to answer surveys, which skews toward the professionalised end of the sector. The very largest and most secretive households do not appear in any dataset, including this one. Figures are global, and the media environment described is the American and European one; offices centred in Asia or the Middle East face different press dynamics.
XII Incipe
Where Frontier Industries fits
Frontier Industries maintains a private client protocol for family offices: a named two person team, restricted files, and a first engagement that is an audit of your existing public outline rather than a pitch for coverage. If the outline strangers can already assemble about your household surprises you, that audit is the place to start.
Call 401-219-4207 or use the campaign page and mark the message private. Nothing about the enquiry is shared, logged for marketing or acknowledged publicly.
Sources
1. Deloitte Private, Family Office Insights Series, Global Edition, The Top 10 Family Office Trends, 2024. https://www.deloitte.com/global/en/services/deloitte-private/research/family-office-insights-series.html 2. Deloitte Family Office Insights Report 2024, data summary by Caproasia. https://www.caproasia.com/2024/09/13/deloitte-family-office-insights-report-2024-8030-family-offices-with-average-386-million-aum-684-million-wealth-source-of-wealth-inherited-18-inherited-self-made-51-self-made-30-top-5-indu/ 3. Deloitte Private, Family Office Insights Series, Digital Transformation of Family Office Operations, 2024. https://www.deloitte.com/global/en/services/deloitte-private/research/family-office-insights-series-global-edition.html 4. Campden Wealth, family office research and networks. https://www.campdenwealth.com/ 5. FINTRX, family office data and research platform. https://www.fintrx.com/ 6. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, investment adviser regulation and the family office exclusion. https://www.sec.gov/ 7. Institute for Private Investors, private investor education and community. https://www.instituteforprivateinvestors.com/ 8. Wealth X, wealth intelligence research. https://www.wealthx.com/ 9. EY, family office services and research. https://www.ey.com/en_gl/family-office 10. Family Wealth Report, family office and wealth management news. https://www.familywealthreport.com/