About
Circle 26 is the operating standard for Lean Family Offices: the standard, the method, and the peer circle for the people who run complex family wealth without an institution behind them.
Why we exist
A family can have excellent investment managers, lawyers, accountants, trustees and bankers and still have nobody accountable for the whole.
As entities, jurisdictions, private investments, obligations and family decisions accumulate, the missing work is often coordination: who holds the complete picture, who owns follow-through, what requires the Principal, and what happens when the person holding it together is unavailable.
In many families, the Principal or one trusted person quietly becomes that operating layer. They become the memory, the routing logic and the connection between specialist mandates.
Circle 26 exists to make that work visible, systematic and transferable.
Our mission
We set the standard for how complex family wealth is governed, recorded and coordinated, and we equip the people who do that work with the method, tools and professional community to do it well.
Our principles
The convictions the work is built on.
We take no fee, rebate or commission from any provider we organise. We do not manage assets, take custody or sell products. Nothing we recommend is steered by what we would earn, because we earn nothing from those decisions. Independence declared is a claim. Independence built into the revenue model is a fact.
The family's operating record, client-specific documents and core operating infrastructure should remain under family control. Providers can change. The office should not disappear with them. The family should be able to change a bank, adviser, platform or service provider without losing the institutional memory that makes the whole system intelligible.
Every family office runs on knowledge. The question is whether that knowledge exists anywhere other than one person's memory. Capable people can hold complex structures together personally for years. The risk appears when the office cannot continue without them. Writing it down is not bureaucracy. It is the difference between an office and a dependency.
Specialist mandates have edges. Tax owns tax. Legal owns legal. Investment owns investment. The work between them still needs an owner. Every recurring process should have one accountable person from trigger to completion, and the family should always know who is accountable for the whole.
Every governance document should carry a review date. A charter, an authority framework, a succession plan and an operating procedure all change as the family's situation changes. The system should be treated as living, not finished.
Success is measured by how well the family's own people can run the office, not by how dependent they remain on Circle 26. We would rather increase the family's capability than make ourselves indispensable.
Nothing is scoped, priced or built before the office has been understood. Complexity, existing capability and genuine gaps should determine what is needed. Diagnosis comes before prescription.
Better tools do not fix unclear authority, fragmented records or undefined workflows. Get the operating structure right first: clear rules, a reliable record, defined ownership and repeatable procedures. Then automation, analysis and technology can improve something that already makes sense.
Independence
We don't manage your assets.
We don't take custody.
We don't sell products.
We don't advise on tax or law.
We don't charge based on your assets.
We take no fee, rebate or commission from any provider we organise. Ever.
We earn nothing from any decision made inside the systems we build.
You cannot own your own infrastructure through a firm that is also trying to own your assets.
The name
The circle is the complete picture, everything a family has, resolved into one, and a line with no end, because we build for continuity.
The 26 is the alphabet: twenty-six letters, a finite system for turning thought into a durable record. A finite structure, infinitely expressive.
That is what we build for families, and why the name was never just a name.
The team
Senior practitioners, decades of institutional experience, one purpose. Every engagement is led by the people on this page.
Founder of Circle 26 and creator of the Lean Family Office Blueprint. He believes the Principal should own the system, not be the system.
Growth, operations and execution across communications, partnerships, process design and technology implementation.
Co-founder of Inflection Point Intelligence and creator of The Henley Family Office Programme, built with Henley Business School.
Fifteen years turning complex technology into working systems. Co-founded and led a family office technology platform from zero to market.
Questions
Membership fees, the Wealth Clarity Session, and a small number of fixed-fee implementation engagements. That's the complete list. No basis points, no referral income, no product margin, no data monetisation.
No. We don't manage assets, take custody, sell products, or charge on assets. We set the standard for how Lean Family Offices are run and equip the people who run them. Your advisers stay yours.
No, and that's the point. We keep the standard; your people run the office. Where a family wants it built rather than learned, we do that too, and hand it over.
Many families who work with us do. What we add is the standard, the method, and the senior experience of having built this before, then your people run it, better equipped than they were.
Take the free assessment and see how your office stands today: where you're strong, where the gaps are, and whether a system like this is right for your family.
Take the assessment