Resources
Practical Tools for Families and Their Advisors
The Canadian Family Office Advantage provides the framework. These resources help bring it to life — for families asking whether a family office is right for them, and for the advisors who serve them.
Family Office Fit Assessment
A confidential self-assessment to clarify whether a family office is right for your family's stage of complexity, drawn from the diagnostic questions in The Book.
Family Mission Statement
A guided framework for articulating your family's values, purpose, and unity, adapted from the Supporting Services leg of the Three-Legged Stool.
Legacy Conversation Questions
Thoughtful prompts to open conversations about wealth, stewardship, and next-generation preparedness across your family.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a family office?
A family office manages and coordinates a family's wealth and lifestyle affairs across generations while helping to grow and preserve their wealth, identity, values, and unity. A true family office requires all three: core advisory services (the technical engine), supporting services (the family support engine), and coordination and integration (the one-point-of-contact hub). Remove one, and what remains is an advisory model, not a true family office.
How is a family office different from wealth management?
Wealth management is typically one leg of the stool — investment strategy. A family office coordinates that leg with family governance, legacy planning, and the accountability layer that ties every advisor's work together, so no single professional is quarterbacking the family's entire picture alone.
When does a family need a family office?
A family office is not a reward for reaching a certain level of wealth — it's a response to complexity. As the family grows more complex (more generations, relationships, and differing levels of preparedness) and the wealth grows more complex (businesses, trusts, real estate, cross-border interests), the case for coordinated, integrated advice grows with it.
Is there a defined standard for what counts as a family office in Canada?
Not yet. There is no universally regulated Canadian standard for what an organization must provide to call itself a family office, which is part of why The Canadian Family Office Advantage was written — to give Canadian families a Canadian reference point, not a borrowed U.S. one.
What is the Three-Legged Stool framework?
Marvin J. Schmidt's framework for what a true family office requires: Core Advisory Services, Supporting Services, and Coordination & Integration, operating as one. It's explored in full in The Book and in Marvin's speaking engagements.
Does a family office replace a family's own responsibility for stewardship?
No. A family office can educate, guide, equip, coordinate, and support — but it cannot assume a family's ultimate responsibility for stewarding its own wealth, values, and legacy across generations. The family always owns the whole picture.
What does "Be the 10%" mean?
It's the challenge at the centre of the book: most families don't successfully steward wealth, wisdom, values, and responsibility across generations. Becoming one of the few that do is a challenge and an aspiration — never a guarantee tied to any single advisor or firm.