When a family office decides it needs a Chief Operating Officer, the first instinct is usually to look for someone who has done the job at a bank, an asset manager or a listed company. The CV looks right. The title matches. The interviews go well. Eighteen months later, the hire has either left or been quietly sidelined.
This is not because the candidate was weak. It is because the role was described in corporate language when the reality is something else entirely.
The title is the same. The job is not.
A corporate COO runs a machine that already exists. There are departments, budgets, reporting lines, committees and a board that meets on a calendar. Their job is to make that machine run better, faster and at lower cost.
A family office COO often has to build the machine first, and do it around people who did not ask for one. The principal may be used to making decisions by phone. Family members may have direct relationships with advisers that bypass the office completely. Investment, administration, philanthropy, property and household matters can all land on the same desk in the same week.
In practice, the role usually sits somewhere between chief of staff, head of finance and operations, and trusted adviser. That is a very different brief from "run operations".
What usually goes wrong
- Process before trust. Corporate operators arrive with frameworks, policies and reporting packs. In a family office, those land well only after the principal trusts the person introducing them. Push too early and the office routes around you.
- Scale mismatch. Someone used to leading a team of forty can struggle when the team is four and they are expected to do the work themselves.
- Unclear decision rights. The brief says "COO", but nobody has agreed what the COO can decide without asking. Every boundary gets tested in the first six months.
- Discretion is assumed, not assessed. Everyone says they are discreet. Very few searches actually test how a candidate handles sensitive family information.
What to look for instead
The strongest family office operators we meet tend to share a few traits that rarely appear on a CV:
- They are comfortable with ambiguity and do not need a fixed organisation chart to be effective.
- They can work directly with a principal, and with the next generation, without becoming political.
- They have built something from a low base before, whether a function, a team or a business, rather than only inheriting one.
- They are hands-on. They will draft the policy, chase the custodian and fix the reporting themselves.
- They understand that their authority comes from the family's trust, not from the title.
These people often come from adjacent backgrounds: a multi-family office, a private bank's wealth planning team, a founder-led business, or a senior operating role at a smaller fund. A purely corporate career is not a disqualification, but it should prompt more questions, not fewer.
Write the brief before you write the job spec
Before any search starts, it is worth answering three questions honestly:
- What will this person own outright, and what will still go through the principal?
- Who in the family will they work with day to day, and does that person support the hire?
- What does a successful first year look like, in plain terms?
If those answers are clear, the title matters far less. If they are not, no title will fix it.
A family office does not need a corporate COO. It needs an operator who fits the family, the stage of the office and the way decisions are really made. That is a harder search, and a much better hire.