A book charting the complex and sometimes under-the-radar world of single and multi-family offices has been issued that is aimed not just at SFOs and MFOs but at wealthy individuals and investment firms.

The Family Office Book, by Richard C Wilson, whose team at the GTC Institute operates the 40,000-member Family Offices Group association, sets out to explore issues such as defining what family offices do, their scope, and the challenges facing the industry. The work contains a series of interviews and Q&A sessions with industry figures, with web-links to longer articles that readers can find on the internet.

In 311 pages, the book explores the history of the family office industry (on some definitions, it is thousands of years old); what sort of services these institutions offer; business models; how an ultra high net worth person or persons should select an office; marketing, investments and manager selection.

There are, according to Wilson, more than 10,000 family offices worldwide and he predicts that number will double by 2020. “Our market research and interviews have uncovered that we are just 10 years into a 30-year surge of growth in the family office space,” he writes.

The Family Office Book – Investing Capital for the Ultra-Affluent is published by John Wiley & Sons (ISBN: 976 1118 18536 0).

Editor's note: This book is an extremely valuable resource and the web-links listed in the work are well worth exploring.