How Successful Do You Need to Be to Start a Family Office?

As your company—and net worth—grows, here’s when to think about creating a family office to manage your wealth.

- BY EMILY McCRARY-RUIZ-ESPARZA

When Josh Ploch moved to Oklahoma in 2010, it was to help friends start a church. But with his background in human resources and operations, he also began helping them with their businesses. Over the next decade, the Tulsa-based entrepreneur took equity stakes in these companies, then majority stakes, and then started a company of his own, building and rehabbing affordable housing. He took the company public via a reverse merger in 2023, and exited the following year. Now liquid, he needed to get organized.

“We started to look at where we were going from here,” said Ploch, 48, whose three children range in age from 6 to 24. “You start that legacy conversation.”

To preserve wealth over generations, more business owners are turning to family offices, which let successful entrepreneurs manage their net worth like a business. Many can provide succession and estate planning, accounting, philanthropy services, and legal services, depending on your family’s needs.

According to a 2024 report from J.P. Morgan Private Bank, the number of people with tens of millions of dollars in assets has skyrocketed over the past couple of decades—and the number of family offices has, by some estimates, more than doubled.

For entrepreneurs, the need for a family office often becomes apparent after a liquidity event, says Mark R. Tepsich, a family office design and governance strategist at UBS. Generally, if your wealth exceeds $50 million to $100 million, it may be time to consider a family office. According to J.P. Morgan Private Bank, 3 percent of family offices in the U.S. represent families with a net worth of $50 million to $100 million, while 16 percent have a net worth of $101 million to $250 million.