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The Single Family Office Mistake Wealthy Families Make
In this short video, TFOA founder Marc Sharpe explains the most common mistake wealthy families make when setting up a single family office — and how to avoid it.
It’s a companion to TFOA’s whitepaper on creating a single family office.
Transcript
If you run your family’s wealth out of your operating business, stop.
It feels efficient. The accounting team is already there. The CFO is already on payroll. The bills get paid. But your business creates wealth. Your family office preserves it. Those are opposite jobs. The same staff cannot do both well. I have watched this play out for twenty years. Corporate accountants do not understand trust accounting. Priorities collide every time there is an emergency. Mistakes happen at the worst possible moment.
If your family has serious wealth, give it its own office. Separate mission. Separate staff. Separate focus. Privacy improves. Talent improves. Family members outside the business finally get a seat at the table. Separating early is cheap. Separating later, after something has gone wrong, is not.
Building a Family Office Community You Can Trust
In this short video, TFOA founder Marc Sharpe shares the story behind The Family Office Association and why a trusted community matters for single family offices.
It’s a companion to TFOA’s whitepaper on the story of TFOA.
Transcript
As your family office grows, every conversation starts to feel like a pitch.
Every advisor has an angle. Every fund manager has a product. Every service provider wants in. The wealth itself becomes a magnet for people who need something from you. That is not paranoia. It is just a fact of life. When every interaction is compromised by a sales motivation, the hardest thing to find isn’t capital or expertise. It’s an unbiased opinion. The cost of getting that wrong shows up later, in the fund you wish you hadn’t backed, the advisor you wish you hadn’t trusted.
The fix is finding a forum where nobody is selling. Peer conversations between family office principals are the most valuable hours you’ll spend. Everyone is asking the same questions. But nobody has anything to gain.
Family Office Consolidated Reporting: Can AI Finally Solve It?
In this short video, TFOA founder Marc Sharpe looks at why consolidated reporting is so hard for family offices, and whether AI can finally solve it.
It’s a companion to TFOA’s whitepaper on family office consolidated reporting.
Transcript
Consolidated reporting has been the impossible problem for family offices for decades. AI might finally change that.
Here’s why it has been so hard. Your wealth doesn’t sit in one custodian. It sits across private equity GPs, oil and gas operators, real estate managers, art appraisers, family trusts. Each sends data in its own format. PDFs. Spreadsheets. Quarterly letters. No two look alike. That’s the wall every consolidated reporting platform has hit.
What’s different now is AI’s ability to handle unstructured data. The same models that read contracts and summarize emails can ingest a fund’s quarterly letter and extract the line items. Read a K-1 and pull the relevant numbers. Normalize formats your old platform would have rejected.
This isn’t a magic fix. The data still needs to be checked. But the bottleneck is shifting from human bandwidth to model accuracy. That’s a different problem to solve, and the trajectory is exciting.
