Principal Dependency Score
A measured baseline of how much of the office runs through you personally, tracked over the engagement. The goal is to drive this number down. Most principals start between 8 and 9. We're aiming for 3 or lower.
Operational infrastructure for single family offices
Most principals didn't expect the family office to become another job.
We install the operating system that runs the office without you in the middle of every decision.
Schedule a private conversationIn practice
One principal went from being pulled into nearly every decision to fewer than half of them.
The result
9.45.6
Principal Dependency Score, in ninety days
The score measures how much of the office runs through the principal personally, from 0 to 10. Lower is better. At 9.4, nearly every decision reached him. At 5.6, fewer than half do. The target is 3 or lower, and the work continues.
Take the Principal Dependency Assessment1principal
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The situation
A Dependency Score of 9.4. Calls from more than ten people before midday. Projects with no tracking and no finish line. Things fell through the cracks, dragged on, or got solved twice, because nothing was written down and no one owned the outcome.
What we built
01
Office Blueprint
Vision, values, and how the office actually runs, written down for the first time.
02
Team design
Reporting lines and roles restructured, so every outcome has an owner.
03
Planning and meeting cadence
Structured alignment on a calendar, instead of in the hallway.
04
Centralised work management
One system for everything in motion. Every project has an owner and a date.
05
Reporting and dashboards
Real-time visibility on what the principal actually cares about, and nothing else.
06
Escalation layer
Clear thresholds for what rises to the principal and what doesn't.
Six ways the missing operating layer shows up in a family office.
Most principals recognise at least four.
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Principal dependency. Decisions that shouldn't reach you still do. Nothing moves without your sign-off.
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Constant interruption. The estate manager, the assistant, the CPA, the pilot. All before noon.
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Nothing gets tracked. Projects drag. Things fall through. The same problem gets solved twice.
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Trust without structure. Long-tenured staff, implicit expectations, no documented process.
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Invisible risk. You don't know what you don't know. Until something breaks.
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No continuity plan. If your estate manager left tomorrow, what actually holds?
Sound familiar?
You had this handled once.
For years you had people who knew how you worked. They knew the vendors, the history, what you'd want before you asked. It worked because they were right down the hall.
Then one of two things happened. You sold, and the people who carried all of it left with the company. Or the office kept growing, another property, another entity, and the same handful of people kept absorbing it, until they couldn't.
Now there are three homes instead of one. A fleet instead of a car. Entities, properties, staff, philanthropic initiatives. And the operating layer that used to absorb all of it is either gone, or still there and stretched past what it can hold.
Nobody warns you about either version. You're not disorganized. You're rebuilding something from scratch that took years to build the first time, or you're asking one person to do a job that's sized for a team. It's too much.
A family office isn't a typical business, but it requires the same rigor.
That's what we fix.
Schedule a private conversationWhat we bring
We built these tools running companies.
Now we install them inside your office.
The SFO Blueprint
A written map of the entire operation. Entities, people, vendors, recurring obligations, decision rights. The document that outlasts anyone's memory of how things work.
People Intelligence Platform
Role design built on how people actually think and work, not just what a job title says. The right person in the right seat, for reasons you can point to.
SFO Operating System
Cadence, work management, reporting, and escalation, installed and running. Every project has an owner. Every commitment has a date.
How we work
Three moves, in order.
The first tells us what is true, the second builds what is missing, the third keeps it that way.
01
Diagnose
We map how the office actually runs today. Who decides what, where work stalls, what depends entirely on you. You get a written assessment and a Principal Dependency Score.
02
Install
We build the operating system. Roles, cadence, work management, reporting, escalation paths. Not a document that sits in a drawer. A system your people use every week.
03
Sustain
Most principals keep us on retainer after the system is built: a structured check-in each quarter that reviews how the office is running, adjusts what it has outgrown, and surfaces issues early, so the office keeps running without the principal as the backstop.
Roughly one day every ninety days with your people, briefly with you.
Fee-for-service.
No AUM. No referral fees.
We don't manage assets, take commissions, or hold any financial interest in your investment decisions. Your advisors stay exactly where they are.
Between $200M and $2B is typically where complexity outgrows informal management, but it's more about the symptoms, not the number. Multiple properties instead of one. A fleet instead of a car. A team that reports to you personally instead of to a process. An entity structure nobody else can explain. That's the gap we fill.
What principals say
Family office principal
Scott has the uncanny ability to take large, complex challenges and distill them down to bite-size actionable steps, all while getting buy-in from all levels of the team. The frameworks and systems he's put in place have had immense and immediate value.
Family office principal
It is all about the people, but how do you actually get the right people in the right roles, doing things that give them energy that move your business forward? I've not seen anybody else as good as Scott at making that happen.
Family office principal
Scott was able to come in and quickly make a big impact and plot a path forward. He has an excellent sense of accountability and is very results-oriented.
Questions principals ask.
What exactly do you do?
We build and run the operational infrastructure of a single family office. We map how the office actually works, find where the principal has become the bottleneck, and install the systems and structures that let the office run without you as the backstop.
Not advice from the outside. The systems themselves, built and working.
How is this different from hiring a full-time COO?
A full-time COO in a family office your size runs $500K to $1M or more in total compensation, plus recruiting, onboarding, and the risk of getting the hire wrong. Most offices in this range don't need that person full-time. They need the operating system built, and someone senior enough to build it, without adding permanent overhead.
Some offices already have a COO and still bring us in, usually because the operational infrastructure was never built and nobody has had the room to build it.
How do I know if the timing is right?
If you're the final decision point on things that shouldn't need you, the timing is right. If one person leaving would create a crisis, the timing is right. If the office takes more of your attention than it should, the timing is right.
The first conversation is private and costs you nothing.
How many clients do you work with at a time?
Five at most. The first ninety days of an engagement are intensive, and there's no version of this that works if we're spread across a dozen offices.
The number is a deliberate constraint, not a stage we're trying to grow out of.
What does an engagement actually look like?
It starts with a paid diagnostic. We map how the office operates today, where the risk lives, and what's holding together by willpower instead of structure. Then we install what's missing.
Most principals then keep us on retainer: a structured check-in each quarter that keeps the systems performing and surfaces issues early. Everything is fee-for-service.
What if I don't need constant operational support?
Then the retainer is the right shape. A structured check-in each quarter reviews how the systems are performing, adjusts what the office has outgrown, and catches problems early, without adding a standing presence you don't need.
Do you manage investments or touch my assets?
No. We don't manage assets, charge fees on assets, or hold any financial interest in your investment decisions.
The one adjacent thing we do is operational due diligence on a private company you're considering, through an operator's lens rather than a financial one.
Do you work with my advisors?
Yes, wherever it's useful. Your attorneys, CPAs and wealth advisors each own their lane. Our job is to make sure the lanes connect and nothing falls through the gaps between them.
Who refers clients to you?
Estate attorneys, CPAs and wealth advisors who are already inside the family office. They refer because we don't compete with them.
Can you evaluate a private company before I invest, or after?
Yes. We assess the operation the way an operator would: leadership structure, who everything depends on, how mature the systems are. It's a different lens from the financial analysis, and it tends to find different things.
Do you accept referral fees?
No. Our clients arrive with world-class advisors already in place, and we want our judgment about them to stay clean. We don't pay referral fees either.
Do you sign an NDA?
Yes. Every engagement begins with a mutual NDA. What happens inside a family office stays there. When we share outcomes from past engagements, we do so with explicit permission and without attribution.
Where to begin
When you're ready, the next step is to talk privately.
Schedule a private conversationOr ask your advisor to introduce you directly.
What happens on the call
- You share where things stand.
- I walk you through how we work.
- We both know quickly whether there's a fit.