When a household formalises into a family office, the question is rarely whether to hire — it is in what order. Get the sequence right and each hire makes the next one easier. Get it wrong and you end up with senior people stepping on each other, or a brilliant individual set up to fail because the structure beneath them does not exist yet.
Here is the order we most often recommend, and why.
1. The anchor: a senior Personal or Executive Assistant
Almost every successful family office starts here. Before you build a structure, you need to buy back the principal's time and create a single, trusted point of coordination. A senior Executive Assistant — private-side, not corporate — handles diary, correspondence, gatekeeping and the first layer of project work. They become the institutional memory everything else is built on.
Mistake to avoid: hiring a corporate EA for a private role. The skills look similar; the judgement required is not.
2. The household lead: House Manager
With the principal's time protected, the next gap is usually the running of the principal residence — staff, standards, maintenance, entertaining. A House Manager takes ownership of the home so it runs without the principal's involvement. Where there are multiple residences, this may be an Estate Manager instead.
Mistake to avoid: asking the EA to also run the house. They are different jobs, and doing both means doing neither well.
3. The operator: Chief of Staff or Family Office Manager
Once you have more than one residence, a growing team, or significant projects in flight, you need someone to run the operation rather than any single part of it. For most families this is a Chief of Staff; for those whose complexity is primarily financial and administrative, a Family Office Manager may fit better. This is the hire that makes the family office an organisation rather than a collection of staff.
Mistake to avoid: hiring a Chief of Staff first, before there is anything to lead. The role needs a team and a remit to be effective.
4. The specialist: by need
The fourth hire is dictated by your life, not a template. It might be:
- A Travelling PA if you move constantly across jurisdictions.
- A Private Chef if entertaining and dietary management are central.
- A Nanny or Governess for the children's needs.
- Close Protection where security requires it.
Mistake to avoid: filling a specialist role to a generic spec. The value is in the fit.
5. The succession layer
The fifth hire is the one principals forget: depth. A second EA, a deputy House Manager, a junior to the Chief of Staff. The first four hires create single points of failure; the fifth begins to remove them. A family office that cannot survive one person's holiday is not yet an office.
The principle underneath all five
Hire for the operation you are building, not the one you have today — but only one step ahead. Most of the expensive mistakes we see come from hiring too senior too soon (a Chief of Staff with no team) or too junior too late (a single overwhelmed PA holding together a life that has long outgrown them).
Every one of these roles is one we place, vetted in person and referenced against original sources. If you are mapping your first hires, talk to us — or read our family office staffing overview and salary guide first.