Why Your Billion-Dollar Family Office Still Runs on Spreadsheets
I've spent nearly three decades watching ultra-high-net-worth families struggle with a problem that shouldn't exist. Families managing over a billion dollars in assets still consolidate their net worth in Excel. This isn't a technology problem. The software exists. I've seen every platform on the market, implemented dozens of systems, and helped families migrate from one solution to another more times than I can count. The real issue is that families don't own their data. The Control Problem Nobody Talks About When I ran a multifamily office for 20 years, I saw the same pattern repeat. A family would work with us for years, building up historical performance data, tax records, and entity structures in our systems. Then something would change—maybe they weren't happy with investment performance, or they wanted to work with a specialist we didn't have in-house. They faced an all-or-nothing decision. Leave and lose everything—all that historical data, all that ...