Morgan Stanley and Botoff survey finds family members hold 12% of family-office executive roles

Most of the family-office executive suite is hired from the outside. A 2023 survey of more than 400 U.S. single family offices by Morgan Stanley Private Wealth Management and Botoff Consulting, whose findings FO Pro, The Family Office Professional, reported, found family members holding 12% of executive roles and 21% of CEO seats.

The corner office is the seat families most often occupy themselves: CEO is the most common executive role for a family member to fill, CFO the least at just 2%, a gap the report attributed to the specialized expertise the finance role requires. Family members made up 12% of CIOs and 10% of COOs.

Family-member executives are most common in the smallest offices, where the budget for an outside hire runs thinnest; across CEO, CFO, CIO, and COO roles, the family-member share was highest at offices managing less than $500 million, the survey found, though the report itself does not draw that conclusion.

The survey also priced the difference: family members in executive roles were paid, on average, 63% of what non-family members received, and the report offers no explanation of the gap.

In a sub-$500 million office, the owner and the employee can be the same household, so a family member's pay is set inside the family rather than against an external market; read that way, the 63% figure reflects a family's own valuation of the work as much as a market wage, and says little about whether the arrangement functions. Governance is where the arrangement gets tested: an executive who is also a beneficiary may sit on the same side of the table as the owners, a reporting line no outside hire has to manage, and the survey does not measure whether that makes the seat easier or harder to hold.

For councils weighing succession, the concentration in small offices raises a question the headcount cannot answer: whether a family-member CEO is a permanent appointment or a stopgap while the office matures. The report tracks who holds the seat, not what happens to it next.

Family members reach the family's capital by another route as well: FOD has covered Heather Millstone and her sister Jessica backing women's sports media as principals, writing their own checks rather than drawing a salary from a family office. The survey counts the ones who took a title and a paycheck instead.

CFO is the seat families fill least, at just 2%, and at a single family office it is the seat where a weak appointment is hardest to absorb — which makes the report's explanation of specialized expertise read as much like a warning as a rationale. Whether families simply stop trying as offices grow past $500 million, or keep filling the chair anyway, is what the next edition of the survey would show.