Coordinating a Team of Values-Aligned Advisors Is One of the Hardest Parts of Leading Your Family’s Success

When families steward significant wealth, whether through a formal single-family office (SFO) or a looser, informal “family office” ecosystem, one of the hardest challenges isn’t investment strategy, legal structures, or tax planning. It’s people.

Finding advisors who can serve with skill and are aligned with your values - particularly in environments where personal dynamics and long-term family legacy are on the line - is a persistent struggle for families and their advisors alike.

The Human Capital Challenge

In traditional institutional settings, clients interact with clearly defined teams, processes, and performance expectations. In contrast, family offices (including those coordinated advisor teams who serve a small handful of clients with an informal but specialized approach) blur the line between their professional area of specialty and broader family office service.

This creates at least three structural challenges:

1. Highly Specialized Needs Across Many Areas
   A family office level of service requires expertise spanning financial management, tax planning, estate oversight, philanthropy, governance, next-gen engagement and more - combined with all the emotional intelligence required to guide the family members through the inevitable complexities that accompany this planning. Few professionals possess both the technical depth and the emotional intelligence to operate well in both arenas. A recent episode of The Mack Podcast highlights this challenge and the role of “Expert Generalist” as an important way to address this challenge.
2. Cultural Fit Mismatch
   Unlike institutional environments, family office clients require alignment with family values, communication rhythms, personality mesh, and long-term vision. A technically strong advisor who doesn’t “fit” with the family culture can erode trust and slow progress. For many families, their young adult family members in the next generation do not even know many of their family advisors, and those who do often admit that interactions with these advisors are not positive and leave them feeling like a kid at the adults’ table. Bottom line: your advisors are not a culture fit, if they only fit the culture of the leading generation. Our technical advisors (financial advisors, estate planning professionals, accountants) are often tasked with educating next generation family members or inviting them into early planning experiences. If the next generation doesn’t feel comfortable with these advisors, these early experiences can actually erode development and empowerment, rather than accelerating it. 
3. Centralizing Too Much Power Eventually Breaks the System 

While it can feel efficient to centralize decision-making in one trusted advisor or one capable family member, over time this model becomes unsustainable. It places an invisible burden on a single person to translate, prioritize, and relay complex planning decisions across advisors and family stakeholders, which slows progress and increases risk. In the most effective family office systems: 

• Responsibility and decision-making are strategically delegated
• Family members understand their roles and where they have a voice or vote, 
• Advisors understand how their expertise fits within the broader ecosystem and
• Everyone shares a common planning framework with clear communication

Another key component in these families is that they bring family stakeholders together with the full primary advisory team, ideally in person at least once a year, to review key planning themes, align on priorities, and surface tradeoffs collectively. With this approach, decisions move faster, accountability is clearer, conversations about key decisions are modeled to the next generation, and no single individual becomes the bottleneck or gatekeeper for the entire system. Gathering everyone together for this half or full day meeting can be costly up front in both time and financial capital, but in the end, will pay for itself in efficiency and coordination. 

Why Cohesive Advisor Collaboration Matters Even in Informal Offices

When advisors operate in silos - a wealth manager over here, tax counsel over there, original drafter of the estate plan retired and unavailable, a third party governance expert somewhere else, families can unintentionally create fragmentation and experience:

• Misaligned advice
• Redundant work
• Gaps in strategic vision

But when advisors coordinate - sharing insights, communicating clearly with one another, and aligning with the family’s overarching values - the difference can be transformative.

People Are the Infrastructure of Lasting Family Wealth

Ultimately, successful family wealth stewardship is not built on any single advisor, structure, or strategy; it is built on a well-coordinated ecosystem of people who understand both the technical and human dimensions of the work. Families who invest in aligning their advisors around shared values, clear roles, and a common planning framework create systems that are more resilient, and more empowering, across generations. In the end, the families who flourish are those who recognize that people - not only plans - are the true infrastructure of lasting success.