Updated June 1, 2025
When prospective clients contact us, they sometimes ask why people choose to join family offices over traditional brokerages like Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. Most recently, someone who sold her business asked us this question with a twist – “Why should I entrust my money with a firm like yours rather than investing the assets as I always have — a mix of cash, bonds, individual stocks and ETFs/stock funds?
Twist or no twist, our response to this question is the same. We explained to her that family offices usually take a holistic approach, which includes you as the asset investor – not simply your assets. They do this because they want to help their clients understand that it’s not just about wealth or investing your money. In many cases, it’s about how your needs and those of your family may change in response to newly found wealth.
More often than not, money changes a family’s dynamics. Should you put it into a trust? Should you invest it in another venture? Should you give some of it away? Should you use some of it to fulfill your lifelong dream of sailing around the world? Or maybe you don’t want to change your life in any way, regardless of your sizable assets.
It’s actually very hard to make these big decisions on your own. After all, you usually aren’t the only one affected by them. Your children, grandchildren and community will all be affected. The perspectives of those who have experience addressing these questions can prove invaluable as you deal with this transition.
A good family office will help you realize that this money has the potential to enable and support multiple generations and that it needs to be managed astutely to maximize the longevity and impact. Not only does this suggest a longer investment horizon, it also has implications in how you structure your assets. You will need to shield your assets from taxable events, decide when and how you will give it to your children/grandchildren and define the kind of a legacy you want to leave behind.
LNW is unique relative to its family office peers in that our founders (the Laird and Norton families) are on their eighth generation as business owners. Even more, each of those generations has added to the wealth pool over the years. Through this experience, they gained many insights regarding the effective management of money over several generations. Put simply, we have learned over the decades what works and what doesn’t. LNW really leverages this institutional knowledge to help our clients make the best possible decisions, especially during transitions, for themselves and the people they care about most.
