If you ask ten people in Miami what a family office is you will get ten answers, most of them shaped by whoever is selling. So let us start with the only definition that matters operationally: a family office is the entity that owns the whole picture.
Not the liquid portfolio. Not the tax return. Not the property. The interaction between all of them, plus the people, plus the next generation, plus the two or three legal systems the family now lives across.
What it owns that nobody else does
A family with a successful operating business usually has excellent advisors. It has a lawyer who knows the company inside out. It has an accountant who has filed for fifteen years. It has a private banker who is genuinely good at the mandate the bank gave them.
What it does not have is anyone whose job description includes the sentence: "understand how the company, the personal portfolio, the Miami apartment, the children's residency and the succession plan interact — across two tax systems."
That sentence is the family office's job. Everything else it does is downstream of it.
The practical test. Ask each of your current advisors a question that spans two of their domains — "if we move the holding to a Florida LLC, what happens to my son's residency timeline and to the dividend treatment at home?" If every answer starts with "you'd need to ask someone else about that part", you have found the gap a family office fills.
Single-family versus multi-family
A single-family office serves one family and is staffed by that family. It is the purest form and the most expensive: you are hiring a chief investment officer, a controller, a general counsel and an administrator, and paying for all of them out of one balance sheet. Practitioners generally put the threshold where that starts to make sense somewhere above US$100–250 million in investable assets, and the honest range is wider than that because it depends entirely on complexity.
A multi-family office — what Insignia is — serves several unrelated families from one shared team. Each family gets access to a level of expertise it could not justify hiring alone, and the fixed cost is spread. The trade-off is real: you are not the only client, and the office's attention is finite.
A wealth manager or private bank is a different animal entirely, however it is branded. Its economics depend on assets under management or on product. That is not a moral failing; it is a structural fact, and it is why a bank will rarely tell you that the best thing for your family is to put more capital into your own operating business and less on its platform.
What a family office actually does, week to week
- Consolidated reporting. One view across entities, currencies, countries and custodians. Sounds trivial. Is not. Most families genuinely cannot answer "what do we own" in under a week.
- Allocation across the whole balance sheet — including the operating company, which is usually the largest and most concentrated position and the one nobody is advising on.
- Screening direct opportunities and, more importantly, declining most of them.
- Structuring — entities, holdings, succession — coordinated so that what is correct in one jurisdiction is not a disaster in the other.
- Governance. Who decides, how, and what happens when the founder is not in the room. This is the part families postpone and later pay for.
- Administration and concierge. Unglamorous, and consistently the thing principals say bought back the most time.
What it does not do
A family office should not be a product distributor with better manners. Specifically, ours does not custody assets, does not practise law, and does not earn undisclosed commissions on things it recommends. Real estate transactions run through a licensed brokerage — Insignia International Realty LLC — precisely so that the regulated activity sits in the regulated entity.
It also should not replace the advisors who are working. A family office that arrives and fires your lawyer of twenty years is optimising for its own fee base, not your outcome.
What it costs
Three models exist in practice. A retainer — a fixed fee for a defined scope, which is the cleanest because it does not move with your asset base. A percentage of assets, which is common and creates a mild but real incentive to keep capital on the platform. Or project fees for discrete work such as a structuring mandate.
What matters more than the model is disclosure. Ask directly: does anyone in this arrangement receive a payment from a third party as a result of what you recommend to me? A straight no, in writing, is worth more than a headline fee that looks low.
The four-question test
You probably need a family office if you can answer yes to most of these:
- Do your assets and your people sit in more than one country?
- Is a concentrated operating business the majority of family wealth, with nobody advising on that concentration?
- Is there a generational transition within ten years that has not been documented?
- Do you spend meaningful personal time as the integration layer between advisors who do not talk to each other?
If you answered no to most of them, you probably do not need one — and a good local advisor is better value. We would rather tell you that on the first call than three months in.