Bill Ackman recently shared the story of his family office, TABLE, publicly. He hired a trusted friend — his former personal accountant — to run it, stepped back, and for years reviewed the financials quickly in a single annual meeting. Over time, headcount grew and expenses ballooned. It took a decade before he looked closely enough to understand the scale of what had happened.
I do not think this was a story of bad faith. His president may simply have had no framework for what “appropriate” looked like at that scale. When you manage a portfolio north of a billion dollars, large expenses go unnoticed without benchmarks to anchor them. Good intentions filled the space where a governance framework should have been.
That instinct — to hire someone trusted and step back — is understandable. Running a major investment firm and staying close to every family office decision at the same time is not realistic. Delegation is right.
But trust is not a control environment.
What TABLE lacked was not loyalty. It was structure. And structure, in a single family office, begins long before the first committee convenes.
Purpose before everything else
The first layer of family office governance has nothing to do with committees or documents. It is about what the office is actually for.
Before any governance body meets, before any investment policy is written, the family needs a clear and shared answer to a simple question: what is this office supposed to protect, build, and ultimately hand on? That answer — the mission, the values, the guiding principles — is not a formality. It is the reference point against which every subsequent decision about staffing, spending, and investment gets measured.
Without it, the family office has no internal compass. Each person in the organisation fills the vacuum with their own assumptions about what “appropriate” looks like. That is precisely how the TABLE situation unfolds — not in a moment of bad judgment, but gradually, over years, in the absence of a shared definition of good.
One point worth adding here, and one I hear more often in practitioner circles: governance documents — constitutions, charters, investment policies — are not a one-time project. A document that gets signed but never revisited is not a governance tool. It is an archive.
Governance requires ongoing ownership: families need to rechallenge and relive the framework as circumstances and generations change. The question to ask is not whether a document exists, but whether every family member can articulate its intent unprompted — and when it was last reviewed.
The bodies that create accountability
Once the purpose is established, the structure follows. A well-governed single-family office typically operates with at least two distinct governance bodies: a board or oversight committee responsible for the family office as an organisation, and an investment committee responsible for the investment function. Where family complexity warrants it, a family council sits alongside both.
What matters more than the existence of these bodies is the clarity of decision rights within them. Who approves what? At what threshold? What can be executed without the principal’s sign-off, and what cannot? Without this, governance bodies become reporting forums rather than oversight mechanisms.
A delegated authority framework — a matrix that defines approval levels across spending, hiring, investment, and contractual commitments — is the practical tool that makes this work. In the TABLE case, such a framework would likely have surfaced the cost drift years earlier. Approval thresholds are not bureaucracy. They are the first line of visibility.
The controls that make oversight real
The third layer is the operating backbone — the practices and protocols that give governance its teeth day to day.
Structured quarterly reporting is non-negotiable: budget versus actual, with explanations for material variances; headcount and cost trends; investment performance against the policy. This does not require an elaborate system. It requires consistency. The principal should be able to form a clear picture of what is happening in the office without having to ask.
Dual authorisation on payments, separation between the person who approves and the person who executes, and defined access rights across operational systems — these are the checks-and-balances most early-stage family offices defer, and that most mature family offices name as foundational when they look back. Campden Wealth’s 2025 Family Office Operational Excellence Report notes that two-thirds of family offices still lack a formal conflict resolution mechanism, and nearly half operate without a documented succession plan or family constitution. The governance intent is often present. The implementation is not.
The most underrated element is independent oversight: an external advisor, a non-executive board member, or a trusted peer — someone whose job is the truth rather than the relationship. Investment governance belongs here too: a clear Investment Policy Statement, a defined process for manager selection and monitoring, and an investment committee that meets with a formal agenda and recorded decisions.
Governance as infrastructure, not constraint
Governance is not a mechanism of distrust. It is the infrastructure that allows trust to function safely over time — that gives the people running the office a framework to operate within, and gives the family confidence that oversight is working even when they are not in the room.
You would not run any other business with one trusted hire, a single annual review, and no approval framework. The family office is a business. The wealth it protects deserves the same rigour as the enterprise that created it.
If you are working through the governance layer of your family office and want to think it through together, reach out anytime.