At 9:00 p.m. on the evening of July 4, Jim Ruddy received an emergency phone call from a Nevada hospital room. Ruddy, president of the private family office Keswick Management Inc., is used to fielding calls from family members about financial...

Many family offices are paying close attention to the Securities and Exchange Commission's efforts to register and regulate hedge fund advisors. That's because last year, the SEC declined to treat an investment entity created for a family office...

Recently, a wealthy art collector died, leaving a $20 million estate of paintings, drawings, sculptures and other pieces. The works belonged to a foundation established by the collector; the proceeds would go to the foundation. Other than that...

Benchmarking has long been standard operating practice in the manufacturing industry. In the last 20 years, it's gotten more attention in the service industry. And now family offices are beginning to think about how they too can measure...

Anyone who has ever watched a relay race or a football game knows that a lot can go wrong during a handoff. The same is true when control of a business is being passed from one person to the next. Indeed, the death, disability or retirement of a...

Advisors take note: Baby Boomers and their parents need to do some serious talking. According to a new study, Americans in their 70s are more at ease talking about estate-planning issues than people in their children's generation are. This is the...

I have not always been an advocate of corporate trustees. Quite the contrary. I used to give a standard speech when my clients were wondering whom to name as a trustee. You could appoint a corporate trustee, I'd tell them. But keep in mind that...

While modern corporations practice the art of risk management, this is not common among family enterprises, not even the most sophisticated. While wealth owners embrace formalized risk management, the focus of that endeavor tends to be on a single...

Many wealthy families are tempted to convert their single-family offices (SFOs) into a multi-family office (MFOs). The hope is that sharing their office services with other high-net-worth families will help defray costs and retain professional...

Management's highest priority is profitability1 and profits depend mostly on pricing2, according to two recent studies of the multi-family office industry. Good pricing is principally a function of the internal costs of labor, capital, and...