The question is often raised once a fortune crosses a certain threshold of complexity: do we need a family office of our own — or is a high-quality concierge service enough? The answer depends less on the value of the assets than on the nature of the requirements: is this primarily about operational relief in daily life, or about the structured administration of complex mandates across generations?
A family office is not a concierge service with a larger budget — and a concierge service is not a simplified family office. Both models solve real problems, but fundamentally different ones.
What a family office actually does
A single family office (SFO) is an institution in its own right, working exclusively for one family or one principal. Its core service lies in overarching coordination: asset management, tax and legal structuring, succession planning, philanthropy and — depending on its orientation — operational aspects of daily life as well. An SFO ties up considerable resources: staff costs, compliance effort, infrastructure. As a rule of thumb, an economic minimum threshold of 100 to 150 million euros of invested assets applies, below which an SFO is structurally difficult to justify.
Multi family offices (MFOs) share this infrastructure across several families and thereby lower the entry threshold — at the cost of a certain degree of exclusivity and individual adaptability. For families with ten to fifty million euros in assets and complex structural requirements, the MFO model is often the most pragmatic compromise.
What a private concierge does — and what it does not
A high-quality concierge service or a private network such as the various concierge membership models concentrates on operational requests: travel, dining, discreet procurement, access to exclusive events, the coordination of specialised service providers. Its strength lies in the speed of response, the breadth of the network and the personal relationship with the relationship manager.
What a concierge service structurally cannot provide: advice on the law of property and assets, tax optimisation, governance structures for family wealth, or planning across generations. It is an instrument for operational excellence — not a strategic partner for the wealth as a whole.
Three questions for orientation
Anyone wishing to identify the appropriate model should answer three questions honestly:
1. Which decisions are to be delegated? Is this about booking a private jet or about structuring a property holding company? Operational relief is a concierge task. Structural decisions are a family office task. Mixing the two risks gaps on both sides.
2. How complex are the mandates? Several jurisdictions, international property portfolios, family foundations, entrepreneurial holdings — this complexity calls for institutional coordination, not a single individual with a network. Anyone seeking to solve it with a concierge service is overreaching the model.
3. What does inefficiency cost? A family office creates efficiency through integration — all relevant mandates are coordinated from one place. A concierge service creates efficiency through access. Anyone whose primary difficulty is operational time pressure benefits immediately from a good concierge. Anyone whose difficulty is structural uncertainty on complex questions of wealth requires a different solution.
The hybrid model: a family office with an external network
In practice the two models are not mutually exclusive — quite the opposite. Many well-structured family offices make deliberate use of external networks and curated services for operational requests that would be too granular in-house. The family office remains the strategic coordinator; the external service takes on operational execution.
The precondition for this model is structured vetting of the external service providers, which ensures that operational requests are delegated to genuinely vetted providers — and not to the nearest provider with the most attractive brochure.
When there is no family office yet
For principals in a phase of growth — assets in the tens of millions, growing operational complexity, but no institutional setup as yet — a high-quality network is often the most pragmatically sensible first step. It creates operational relief and access to vetted service providers without the effort of a complete family office infrastructure.
What is decisive here is that this network is independently curated: not as a sales channel for particular providers, but as structured access to service providers that withstand a serious review of discretion and quality.
Anyone looking for such a network is welcome to request an invitation — access to The Allocation1 is not public, but it is possible discreetly.